AI: Weekly Summary

…week ending February 9, 2024

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

FRIDAY WEEK OF FEBRUARY 9, 2024

1. Google Gemini Advanced/Ultra out: As expected, Google rolled out its Gemini Ultra for the broader market under ‘Gemini Advanced’ brand name. It’s also priced at $20/month, comparable to similar offerings by Microsoft with Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus, both powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 and soon GPT-5 LLM AIs. Lots of reviews and benchmarks to come on the three services and their capabilities, but the early read seems to be that they’re all relatively similar in their multimodal AI capabilities. Also, they all seem to need meaningful improvements on increasing their accuracy, reliability, and propensity to ‘hallucinate’. Early days, but now the three top AI companies are all searching for the next big AI consumer product/service after ChatGPT.

   

2. Google YouTube AI-augmented “Creator Economy’” roadmap for 2024: YouTube CEO Neal Mohan put out an updated YouTube plan for 2024, highlighting its opportunities with the organic, global ‘Creator Economy’, that’s projected to grow to almost half a trillion by Goldman Sachs by 2027. Lots of detail here of interest from the broader AI perspective, especially since YouTube content is also a unique asset for Google to grow its Data feeds into its next-gen LLM AIs like Gemini, discussed above. Rivals like Meta, Bytedance’s TikTok, and of course OpenAI/Microsoft will need to figure out their strategies for organic, ‘Creator’ driven video content to take their AIs to the next level. 

   

3. OpenAI’s Sam Altman mulling AI Chip raises as big as $5-7 Trillion: New WSJ reports on OpenAI’s Sam Altman now talking about AI Chip efforts that could potentially raise up to $7 trillion in coming years. For context, the telecom companies in the nineties raised and expended almost a trillion dollars in fiber backbone capacity to power the first Internet boom. Over 98% of that capacity went under utilized after 2002, taking a decade for applications and services to catch up. An example of scaled services back then that finally started to soak up that backbone bandwidth, include Netflix transitioning from DVDs to Streaming, and eventually using up almost half the internet backbone over a decade. And of course the general transition of the internet from dial-up internet access (narrowband of AOL era), to the broadband wired and wireless connections for the internet and mobile in the 2000s. AI infrastructure builds and utilization may see smaller or similar gaps in timing, both in the training and inference of models large and small, Unknown for now in a ‘Build and they will come” environment. Separately, Reuters reported Nvidia’s plans to focus on new custom chips for AI and other applications, focusing on the cloud/data center market for custom chips of over $30 billion. Again, general signs of a global enthusiasm for AI chip infrastructure and fabs.

   

4. OpenAI new efforts on AI ‘Smart Agents’: OpenAI has long had its eyes on AI ‘Smart Agents’, along with of course like Meta, Character.ai, Inflection and many others . The latest from the Information outlines a redoubled effort to create a smart agent product as impactful as ChatGPT over a year ago. This follows reports of Google Deepmind AI researchers leaving to start companies also focused on this opportunity to develop agents. Sam Altman continues to talk about “supersmart personal assistants for work”, leveraging productivity software assets from its partner Microsoft and others. Of course, Microsoft itself is also focused on this opportunity with its new AI Copilot brand of properties, which saw a streamlined revamp this week as well. Separately, there were updated reports in the FT on OpenAI’s revenue ramps to $2 Billion in 2024, then doubling that number in 2025. 

   

5. Disney’s Gaming and Sports moves: Disney CEO Bob Iger is making a series of rapid decisions on various technology and AI fronts. Examples include his early, close and deep partnership with Apple. They’ve been a prime content development partner for the Vision Pro ‘Spatial Computing’ platform, especially in providing the rich library of 3D video content. Apple continues to focus on AI with many bottom up AI/ML innovations that are particularly evident in the Vision Pro. This week saw Disney taking a 9% stake in ‘Fortnite’ developer Epic Games, with plans to leverage its IP across Disney properties and assets. Finally, Disney made big moves on the Sports front, creating a new consortia leveraging ESPN with Sports content and assets from Fox and Discovery. All moves are also targeted at the aforementioned ‘Creator Economy’ growth talked about by Goldman Sachs in its long term projected market of almost $500 million by 2027.

   

Other AI Readings for weekend:

1. A16z rolls outs its consumer AI roadmap. New effort focused on the ‘Abundance’ ahead in AI augmented content and services. ‘Scarcity’ to ‘Abundance’ and its AI implications, is a rich topic that’s been a long-time focus on my end.

   

2. Did a piece this week on both public and private markets seemingly ‘Priced for Perfection’ for now, driven by AI enthusiasm. Lots of ‘Big and Small AI’ driven secular tech growth ahead, but financial market volatility is generally a given.

   

3. Big Wired profile on Google’s Sundar Pichai, and his focus on AI Augmented Search with Gemini and beyond.

   

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)