Welcome to the Saturday weekly AI summary here on ‘AI: Reset to Zero’. Here are this week’s AI highlights:
Apple Siri Voice and LLM AI news: Story on Apple boosting investments in conversation LLM AI capabilities around Siri and other apps. Google and Amazon are also working on similar LLM ai boosts for Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa and Echo. Feature also highlights other AI spending by Apple AI head ‘JG’ and other execs. In other Apple News of course we had the unexpected China government employee bans on the iphone. More in my write up here.
OpenAI and Meta Developer Conferences: For OpenAI, November 6 in San Francisco will mark the first Developer conference in a single day event. Sam Altman toned down expectations for GPT5 , but promised other news of note. Meta has their event Connect in a two day event in SF Sep 27-28. Expecting AI Smart Agents and more from Meta.
MidJourney origin feature story in The Information: Catalogs Midjourney’s David Holz building startup without VC funds. Recognizes MJ $200m revenues with 40 employees. We have seen this movie before. Examples include Craig Newmark with Craig’s List in the 1990s and WhatsApp in the early 2009-2014 period going from zero to $19 billion Facebook acquisition. More here in my write up.
Anthropic Claude 2 now offers premium subscriptions: Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus, Anthropic Claude Pro will cost $20/month. Offers priority access to Claude 2 with other operational perks and features for users with heftier demands. Other LLM AI offerings from Microsoft, Inflection, Quora et al on similar paths. Expecting another half a dozen plus Foundation LLM AI offerings in coming months.
‘GitHub for AI’ Hugging Face enters Hosting and offers the largest open source LLM AI model: Huggingface now offering training cluster as a service. This is now in addition to their distribution partnerships with Amazon AWS et al. Customers can now train LLM AIs directly on HF infrastructure. Options include Nvidia A100/H100 GPUs or Google Tensorflow TPUs. Interactive configurator makes it feel like ordering a PC online. It’s just that prices start in the hundreds of thousands and go up to tens of millions. OTHER HF item of note: Their hub now offers the Falcon 180 Billion parameter LLM AI open source, already chart topping in earlier configurations, and now the largest open source model available to date.
Other AI Research and Events:
Time AI 100 list out first time: Time magazine has new list of 100 influential people in AI. Feature describes leaders in various categories like founders/CEOs of top AI firms, policy shapers, artists and researchers. Of course Google and OpenAI heads Demis Hassabis and Sam Altman take the front and center spots on the cover. Expect similar lists from other publications. We saw similar lists in past tech waves.
Google Researchers published notable results on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF) result parity. So human feedback equals AI feedback, with new efficiency implications. Learning Loops, especially for Inference, are critical in making LLM AI work, so this is a step in the right direction.
OpenAI publishes study that establishes current AI writing detectors don't work yet. Back to the drawing board for schools and universities.
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).