AI: Weekly Summary
...week ending August 18, 2023
Hope everyone is having a great Summer and staying cool.
Here’s this Saturday’s weekly AI summary here on ‘AI: Reset to Zero’. August continues on pace with AI events this week:
SEC head Gary Gensler warns on AI risks for the markets: Following last weekend’s White House endorsed ‘Red Team’ AI hackathon at the annual Vegas Hackers convention, this week saw multiple interviews by SEC head Gary Gensler on potential AI risks in the financial markets. A number of pieces here by Axios, Bloomberg and others. The concerns while on point, are likely a bit early since Wall Street is still figuring out potential market driven LLM AI Applications. But the SEC is now clear on the record vis a vis AI.
AI global hiring ramps up: Wall Street Journal and other reports this week on the rising salaries worldwide for AI programmers, as industries ramp up on AI products and services. Number of headline grabbing salaries ranging from $200,000 to $900,000 for higher end AI skills. ‘Prompt Engineering’ again features prominently in the current ‘ChatGPT moment’ phase. It’s a movie we’ve seen in other tech waves before like the ‘iPhone driven 2007 mobile internet’ and ‘cloud’ ramps. This time it spans industries as companies figure out AI augmentation ahead.
OpenAI’s first consumer facing acquisition: Notable as the company's first acquisition of note. In this case, it’s a NY AI design studio called Global Illumination. Team hails from Meta, Google and other tech companies. The move beefs up OpenAI’s capabilities on customer facing user interaction and experience, an area that is seeing increased focus on by Google in particular, along with many other big tech incumbents and well-funded startups.
Meta Code Llama next week: Multiple media reports on Meta launching an coder facing open-source Llama 2 based AI next week. Would go up against similar paid offerings like CoPilot for Github from Microsoft, along with products by Google, Replit and others. With this offering Meta builds on its open source efforts with Llama 2, and goes after the most prominent AI application for developers. It’s a smart tactical move to embed Llama and other Meta open source software tools in developer work habits, as they ramp up globally on AI products and services.
Google AI efforts pick up pace: Along those lines, several stories on Google’s upcoming Gemini Foundation LLM AI going up against OpenAI/Microsoft’s GPT 4/ChatGPT, Google tests of an AI Assistant focused on life advice, and continued improvements of its AI enhanced Search Experience now expanding to browsing via Chrome browsers. The last is notable since Chrome browsers have over 60% market share globally. Features are rolling out via their Search Labs over coming weeks. Emphasizes the rapid tempo ahead for AI enhanced Search services led by the Deepmind AI reorg a few months ago.
Attention Paper Authors’ AI startup: Week saw a good bit of media attention as two of the eight authors of Google’s seminal AI ‘Attention/Transformers’ 2017 paper, start an AI company in Tokyo called Sakana AI. Promising a different technical approach than traditional Foundation LLM AI models, inspired by aquatic examples from nature. Sakana translates to ‘Fish’ in Japanese. Focus seems on new AI basic research directions. All the eight authors of the famous AI paper have gone on to found well-funded AI startups like Adept, Character.ai, Essential, Cohere and others. Lot more here if topic of deeper interest.
In AI Papers of note,
MIT/Harvard AI Paper on ‘how a Transformer could be built using brain biological elements’.
Several Google AI Papers on LLM AI enhancements and Audiobook improvements.
Finally,
Did a writeup on AI Smart Agents & Companions balancing emotional and rational advice to users at scale. Leads into what Google is doing expanding its Search Experience to a wider range of life experiences.
Also a piece on how the current global hunt for AI Developer talent echoes Microsoft’s push for developers in the 1990s. And how it's bigger this time.
Thanks for joining this Saturday with your beverage of choice.
For your Sunday tomorrow, this week’s ‘AI In my View’ 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).