AI: Weekly Summary. RTZ #479

Sep 14, 2024

OpenAI’s ‘Reasoning’ Open-o1 Preview/Mini & Funding plans: OpenAI released preview and ‘Mini’ versions of its long-awaited ‘Level 2’ to AGI ‘Reasoning’ AI technology previously dubbed ‘Strawberry’ and Q*. It’s now officially OpenAI-o1, and comes in both a ‘Preview’ and ‘Mini’ versions, the latter being cheaper and faster to run. Initial reactions are generally positive by developers and media. But note that this is not a mainstream product version, and by the company’s guidance, is a way-stop towards its next generation LLM AI models to come with better reasoning and agentic capabilities. Separately, OpenAI seems to be on track to raise $7 billion or more at a $150 billion plus valuation from both financial and sovereign mideast investors. More here on the ‘Strawberry’ context.

Apple’s new ‘Apple Intelligence’ driven Fall products: Apple’s Fall launch of new iPhone 16s, Apple Watch 10, and AirPods 4/Pro 2 were launched with a focus on ‘Apple Intelligence’ features to take advantage of the AI chips and memory in the new devices. While the devices initially will not have many of the top AI features at launch, they’re expected to be rolled out across various apps later this year and into 2025. With this launch, Apple is now in the same position as Google with Samsung and other Android OEMs, to offer next generation smartphones and wearables that are AI optimized with both hardware and software for the coming generation of AI apps and services. It’s a distinct race between two AI optimized platforms for mainstream users with billions of AI reasoning agents per user. More here.

AI Industry Price Discovery Efforts: OpenAI is reportedly in the process of determining the prices for its next generation AI products. Enterprise versions of these services could be priced from $200 to $2000 per user/month, and the company is in the process of figuring out optimal pricing. These efforts are consistent with other companies like Microsoft also figuring out ‘product-market-fit’ for Copilot with businesses, along with the right pricing. We are in the early days of these AI products and services, while the underlying innovation is also continuing at an exponential rate. Expect price discovery efforts to continue, while investors look for business clarity vs AI capex spending. More here.

Apple’s AI driven Health & FItness strategy: Of note in Apple’s Fall product announcements, is its multi-year focus on making its devices the central hub for Health and Fitness for its multi-billion mainstream users. The new Airpod Pro 2 got approval by the FDA to be used as over the counter Hearing Aids, with its built-in AI optimized ‘hearing test’ software. It focuses on a large market in the tens of millions. Meanwhile the new Apple Watch software will have the ability to help users with Sleep Apnea, another mainstream ailment affecting millions. It’s an ongoing example of Apple’s relentless focus on Scaling its platforms and AI technologies, in combination with its unique reputation for Privacy of user data and habits. More here.

Meta, Elon focused on 100,000 AI GPU ‘Table Stakes’ data centers: Meta is well underway on its plans for a 100,000 AI GPU data center super clusters, following similar moves by Elon Musk on its xAK/Grok investments. This trend is what I call an ‘AI Tables Stakes’ next move, with the immediate beneficiary of course being Nvidia. It’s a challenging allocation problem for founder/CEO Jensen Huang. And it’s the beginning of additional builds of AI data centers with hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of AI GPUs chips in super clusters. That will of course also mean commensurate investments in Power, Cooling and other ‘AI Table Stakes ‘ investments. And also efforts by each company to compete on specific AI voice, multimodality, context sizes, memory and other features. We are at the beginning of the ‘AI Table Stake’ antes. More here and here.

AI: Reset to Zero