AI: Weekly Summary

…week ending January 19, 2024

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

1. Samsung kicks off AI Smartphones with ‘Galaxy AI’: Samsung’s annual upgrade event for its Galaxy line of S24 smartphones had AI as its core theme. The focus was far more on AI capabilities via software, than the hardware. Particularly in partnership with Google. And the media took note. Continues theme of AI hardware and software being rolled out on local devices in 2024. Some of the AI features won’t be available until the end of 2025, so lots of work is in progress. My deeper take here.

   

2. AI in the air at Davos World Economic Forum: The WEF 2024 Davos confab of the world’s who’s who kicked off in Switzerland this week with over 2800 attendees from 120 countries. And of course AI was a core topic of discussion as it was last year. The Washington Post highlights how this year the focus was on AI fears. The WSJ discussed Davos, AI and the ebullient AI tailwind in the public markets. The broader discussion of course also covered business adoption of AI. Of note was also Bloomberg’s interviews with Sam Altman and Satya Nadella. Axios also had AI takes from Google’s Demis Hassabis at Davos.

   

3. Meta and Zuckerberg back Open Source AI for Llama 3 and beyond: Mark Zuckerberg weighed in officially on Meta continuing to focus on open source AI, both for Llama 2 and its eventual path to AGI. Of course with the requisite focus on AI safety. Also highlighted the company’s position as one of the top customers of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs, with more than 340,000 of their H100s and over 600,000 in AI ‘Compute equivalents’, this year. Also confirmed the company’s path to Llama 3, with competitors rolling out Google Ultra later this quarter, and OpenAI/Microsoft working on models beyond GPT 4. Meta also rolled out a Zuck video on social media. Also of note is Meta’s AI reorg which moves its AI research team, FAIR to Meta’s product organization. 

   

4. Microsoft rolls out mass Copilot AI pricing: Microsoft announced its wider rollout of AI Copilot across Microsoft services, with mainstream pricing at $20/month. There are additional tiers across Microsoft products. It will be notable to see customer and media reactions to the Copilot offerings and pricing, especially in contrast with partner OpenAI’s ChatGPT plus. That is also of course at $20/month. And see how Google rolls out Gemini Pro and Ultra across its productivity offerings. My take on this here with further links.

   

5. AI conquers symbolic Math with AlphaGeometry: The NYTimes covered a New AI paper on ‘Alpha Geometry’ beating the global Math Olympics. Notable was the researchers’ use of both symbolic and probability driven AI techniques to achieve its results. It’s a topic I’ve covered more here. Of course the researchers have a relationship with Google and Deepmind, given the latter’s previous experience with AlphaGo and other endeavors of AI surpassing humans on math driven games and tasks.

Other AI Readings for weekend:

1. Amazon Alexa gets some AI capabilities, part of a trend with Apple, Google and others racing hard to do the same with their ‘smart voice assistant’ offerings. 

   

2. Making AI forget harder than it looks, as new AI research highlights. It’s a gnarly and time sensitive issue given the ongoing issues around how the AI industry uses data and content copyrights, as I discuss here. 

   

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)