AI: Weekly Summary

...week ending November 17, 2023

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

Here are some highlights from this week:

1. Leadership changes at OpenAI: OpenAI announced late Friday that founder/CEO Sam Altman will be stepping down as CEO and leave the board of directors, while chief technology officer Mira Murati will assume responsibilities as interim CEO. Also notable that COO Greg Brockman is also quitting the company. Key quote: “The board no longer has confidence in Sam Altman’s ability to continue leading OpenAI”. OpenAI’s board of directors consists of OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, independent directors Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology’s Helen Toner. Lots to unpack here over weekend.

2. Microsoft Developer conference Ignite all in on AI CoPilot: CEO Satya Nadella honed in on CoPilot as the new AI brand for Microsoft going forward at its Ignite Developer conference, with an a wide range of AI data center services for business customers, along with joint hardware initiatives with Nvidia founder/CEO Jensen Huang on stage with Satya for the keynote. This while Microsoft announced its own AI chips Maia and Cobalt, that are ramping up for its Azure data centers over the next couple of years. Lot more detail here if of interest. 

3. US and China ‘threaded the needle’ at APEC in SF: The two super powers did their best to keep up appearances of cooperation at the Asia Pacific conference (APEC), while continuing to ramp up competition. US business and tech leaders feted Xi, with notable absences by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and some others. Tim Cook and Elon Musk were there. My deeper dive on the APEC  week here.

4. Google Gemini delayed: Looks like Google’s next gen LLM AI model Gemini may slip into next year. Timing now looks like the first quarter of 2024. This likely will be an area of key focus by investors and the media now for the coming months. Especially as OpenAI and Microsoft ramp up its enterprise offerings at least with ‘GPTs’ and ‘CoPilots’ for all. Google continues to make headway slowly integrating Bard AI features into its Search offerings. But that may not be enough for investors for now.

5. OpenAI GPT 5 and Nvidia H200 on the horizon: OpenAI’s Sam Altman confirmed GPT 5 is on the horizon for the company, without committing to a specific timeline. This builds on the announcements at the company’s DevDay with GPT-4 Turbo and GPTs for all. The discussion was supplemented with ongoing infrastructure commitments from Microsoft in rolling out the GPU infrastructure needed for OpenAI’s singular focus on ‘SuperIntelligence’ sooner than later. This was in conjunction with Nvidia announcing its plans to roll out its next generation H200 GPU chips in high volumes next year. Deeper dive here.

Other AI Readings for weekend:

1. Google Deepmind  rolled out ‘Lyria’ in conjunction with YouTube, as a music generation AI model for creators. Should help YouTube Shorts compete more aggressively with TikTok, Meta Reels and others. 

2. Meta fielded its own Emu Video and Emu edit, their latest generative AI research milestones on the video tools front.

Thanks for joining this Saturday with your beverage of choice. 

For your Sunday tomorrow, this week’s ‘The Bigger Picture’  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).