AI: Weekly Summary

…week ending February 16, 2024

Welcome to the Saturday weekly AI summary here on ‘AI: Reset to Zero’. 

1. OpenAI ramping up in AI augmented Search: The Information reports that OpenAI is adding Search to its AI product and service ambitions. This of course supplements Microsoft’s ongoing efforts with Copilot augmented Bing Search, and other efforts by companies ranging from Perplexity to others. A crowded dance floor, as I outline here. Separately, OpenAI also launched an effort to improve Memory of user interactions, a critical feature for AI services going forward. Google is also continuing an aggressive pace on Gemini improvements with more multimodality upgrades this week. Also, they upgraded Gemini Pro with 10 million tokens, which brings it up to par with GPT-4 in some applications. All running hard.

   

2. OpenAI’s $7 trillion AI Chip & Infrastructure Ambitions: After WSJ’s story of Sam Altman’s ambitions on chips related infrastructure potentially scaling $7 trillion, the Information clarified that this also includes Power and other Datacenter infrastructure. Even with those adjustments, these numbers far surpass previous Tech Wave infrastructure investments, including the trillion dollars laid out for internet fiber infrastructure by the Telecom industry in the nineties. Bloomberg reports late Friday that Softbank’s Masayoshi San has a $100 billion financing plan for the chip venture. My broader context here and here.

   

3. Nvidia pushes on in local, ‘Small AI”: Nvidia announced support for Chat on local PCs with Nvidia RTX Graphics cards. This continues the industry’s push on what I’ve been calling ‘Small AI’ on local devices. It’s notable that Nvidia pushing these initiatives while the PC and smartphone companies continue to focus on bringing to market new AI services that leverage local processing. 

   

4. Nvidia passes Alphabet/Google and Amazon to become third most valuable company: Nvidia continues to lead the performance of the ‘Magnificent 7’, surpassing the market caps of Google and Amazon to take third place. This is of course the anticipated quarterly by the company on February 21st. 

   

5. Microsoft Copilot gets mixed reception: WSJ highlights early adopters of Microsoft’s Copilot debating the incremental costs. It’s early days for all the major players including Google, OpenAI and of course Microsoft, who are now all charging $20 per user and above for AI augmentations across their productivity applications and services. Believe it’ll be at least a year before the markets can determine how the long-term sustainable adoption of these services is really faring. More context here.

   

Other AI Readings for weekend:

1. OpenAI adds Sora, a text-to-video model, adding to Google Lumiere, Runway, Pika Labs, and other efforts

2. TikTok joins the Apple Vision Pro native App frey, ahead of Netflix, Google YouTube, Spotify and others still on sidelines.

Thanks for joining this Saturday with your beverage of choice. 

Up next, the Sunday ‘The Bigger Picture’ tomorrow. Stay tuned. 

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)