AI: Weekly Summary

...week ending September 15, 2023

Welcome to the Saturday weekly AI summary here on ‘AI: Reset to Zero’. Here are this week’s AI highlights:

1. Google Gemini and Meta LLM AI rumblings: Drumroll continues beating around imminent Foundation LLM AI offerings from Google with Gemini soon, and Meta’s next potentially open sourced Llama 2 follow up LLM, both of which would go head to head with OpenAI’s GPT4. Have a deeper dive on this wave of Foundation LLM models coming in the coming months.

2. Regulatory front activities on AI, Google and Meta: Busy week on the regulatory front, with Senator Chuck Schumer continuing hearings on the best course of actions on the AI front. An AI Who’s Who was in DC mid-week for a day of close-door discussions on the risks around AI and what to do about them. Separately, the week saw the Google DOJ antitrust Trial kick off, along with follow up regulator activity in Europe on Meta’s targeted advertising across its properties. 

3. Arm opens IPO window: Arm saw a successful debut of its IPO on Thursday, with the new shares up 25%, after giving some back by Friday. The AI boost for the chip sector was helpful for investor enthusiasm by most accounts. The proceeds from the offering go to Softbank, which sold about only a small part of its holdings. The news is positive news for other listings from instacart, Klaviyo and others, which are expected out next.

4. Apple iPhone Day had AI in ML form: Besides launching a new line of iPhone 15 models with USB-C connectors, and an updated family of Apple Series 9 and Ultra 2 Watches, Apple had a lot of AI updates under “Machine Learning” in its demos. One example was Siri running local Transformer models on Apple Watch’s local GPUs without connecting to the internet. And a lot of ML applications around the improved cameras and related computational photography tickets, like ‘Portrait’ images after the photos are taken. Also, the high-end iPhone 15 Pros also now take ‘spatial videos’ that can be played back on the new Vision Pro headsets next year. Apple continues to gear up on AI applications across its operating systems and platforms. More reading and links in this writeup here.

5. Nvidia continues AI investments: Nvidia continues to take advantage of its strong performing stock and balance sheets on additional Ai driven investments. The Information highlighted that the company has inked “roughly 20 deals this year”. The latest being in Databricks’ $500 million funding at a $43 billion valuation. Nvidia also continues to aggressively leverage its GPUs and DGX data center products across the big ‘CSPs’ (Cloud Service Providers) like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud and others. More in this writeup here.

Other AI Research and Announcements:

1. Stability AI launched a music generation LLM tool, Stable Audio, with a paid subscription model. The product has a range of competitors, which all collectively are navigating the copyright and content payment issues ahead for the industry. Some good examples in the linked TechCrunch story of what the model can generate.

2. Progress by researchers from MIT and Microsoft on reducing hallucinations in LLMs with DoLa, an AI decoding strategy. It’s ‘good to see’ news for the industry.

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)