AI: Weekly Summary

…week ending December 1, 2023

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

Here are some highlights from this week:

1. Sam Altman Officially back at OpenAI: The extraordinary OpenAI drama that started two Fridays ago on November 17, saw the beginning of the end this Thursday with OpenAI officially announcing the return of Sam Altman as CEO, and the revamp to a transitional 3 person board. Much drama and decisions await, not the least of which are the expanded board, Microsoft’s board seats, the possible transition to a for profit corporate charter, and the possible return of Ilya Sustkevere, who kicked off the whole shebang with support of EA backers on the Board and beyond. New Yorker has a behind the scenes profile on what went down at the OpenAI board and Microsoft fronts, Deeper takes here and here.

2. Amazon ReInvent Developer Conference and AI Focus: Amazon AWS at its re:Invent 2023 conference announced their own AI competitor Q to Microsoft’s CoPilot, along with an enhanced partnership with Nvidia on DGX, Nvidia’s AI datacenter offering, and of course Amazon’s own AI chips also being developed with alacrity. Nvidia founder-CEO Jensen Huang made an appearance on stage with AWS head Adam Selipsky, making it another major developer conference in addition to Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and other venues that he shared the stage with AI executive luminaries.A deeper take on the Amazon AWS event here.

3. Pika Labs follows in Midjourney and Runway footsteps: Pika Labs raised $55m to build out its AI video software service, following in the footsteps of Midjourney with a Discord launch, now transitioning to a web interface. The service apparently improves on the AI video offerings by Runway, which has been the other notable startup in the field. Who’s Who list of Investors include Github fame Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Quora/Poe founder Adam D’Angelo, OpenAI’s Andrej Karpathy, Clem Delangue of Hugging Face, and others. The two female founders have established a strong record of execution in a short period of time, even for AI startups.

4. Nvidia Jensen Huang New Yorker profile A detailed profile of Nvidia founder/CEO Jensen Huang in the New Yorker provides interesting detail on how the company is now finally shedding its graphics roots of over thirty years, to become a firm centerpiece of the AI era. The journey was far from inevitable, and highlights the combination of key technology innovation and luck that always plays a role in startups becoming inevitable in hindsight. My deeper take on it here.

5. New York Times Dealbook Conference AI News: The annual conference saw notable appearances by Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and others. Summary of the highlights here, along with more details on Jensen Huang’s takes on recent OpenA events, and the history of his company providing the first AI DGX supercomputer to Elon Musk, when he was still involved with openAI. A video of that interview here.

Other AI Readings for weekend:

1. Meta introduces improved  Speech to Speech AI language translation models. Notable for their potential to improve Meta’s core services in multiple languages for billions of users. My earlier take here on AI universal translator efforts by the inudstry.

2. Axios notes Washington Chief AI Officer (CAIO) hiring spree, which requires dozens of hires across agencies for the complex role of navigating AI issues through a wide range of government regulatory authorities.

Thanks for joining this Saturday with your beverage of choice. 

For your Sunday tomorrow, this week’s ‘The Bigger Picture’  is coming up. 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)