OpenAI's Unfulfilled Promises

Our 195th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's* big AI news!
*and sometimes last last week's 

Recorded on 01/04/2024

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Note: apologies for Andrey's slurred speech and the jumpy editing, will be back to normal next week!

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
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Sponsors:

• The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence.

In this episode:

- OpenAI teases new deliberative alignment techniques in its O3 model, showcasing major improvements in reasoning benchmarks, whilst surprising with autonomy in hacks against chess engines. 
- Microsoft and OpenAI continue to wrangle over the terms of their partnership, highlighting tensions amid OpenAI's shift towards a for-profit model. 
- Chinese AI companies like DeepSeek and Quen release advanced open-source models, presenting significant contributions to AI capabilities and performance optimization. 
- Sakana AI introduces innovative applications of AI to the search for artificial life, emphasizing the potential and curiosity-driven outcomes of open-ended learning and exploration.

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Timestamps + Links:

• (00:00:00) Intro / Banter
• (00:03:07) News Preview
• (00:03:54) Response to listener comments
• (00:05:00) Sponsor Break
• Tools & Apps
  • (00:06:11) OpenAI announces new o3 model
  • (00:21:17) Alibaba slashes prices on large language models by up to 85% as China AI rivalry heats up
  • (00:23:04) ElevenLabs launches Flash, its fastest text-to-speech AI yet
• Applications & Business
  • (00:24:24) OpenAI announces plan to transform into a for-profit company
  • (00:33:17) Microsoft and OpenAI Wrangle Over Terms of Their Blockbuster Partnership
  • (00:37:36) Elon Musk’s xAI gets investment from Nvidia in recent funding round: report
  • (00:39:43) Sam Altman’s nuclear energy startup signs one of the largest nuclear power deals to date
  • (00:41:13) OpenAI Search Leader Departs After Less Than a Year
  • (00:42:43) Senior OpenAI Researcher Radford Departs
• Projects & Open Source
  • (00:45:21) DeepSeek-AI Just Released DeepSeek-V3: A Strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Language Model with 671B Total Parameters with 37B Activated for Each Token
  • (00:54:14) Qwen Team Releases QvQ: An Open-Weight Model for Multimodal Reasoning
  • (00:58:09) LightOn and Answer.ai Releases ModernBERT: A New Model Series that is a Pareto Improvement over BERT with both Speed and Accuracy
• Research & Advancements
  • (01:00:31) Deliberation in Latent Space via Differentiable Cache Augmentation
  • (01:05:14) Automating the Search for Artificial Life with Foundation Models
• Policy & Safety
  • (01:10:27) Nonprofit group joins Elon Musk’s effort to block OpenAI’s for-profit transition
  • (01:14:35) OpenAI Researchers Propose 'Deliberative Alignment' : A Training Approach that Teaches LLMs to Explicitly Reason through Safety Specifications before Producing an Answer
  • (01:22:06) o1-preview autonomously hacked its environment rather than lose to Stockfish in our chess challenge. No adversarial prompting needed.
  • (01:27:22) Elon Musk’s xAI supercomputer gets 150MW power boost despite concerns over grid impact and local power stability
  • (01:29:06) DOE: Data centers consumed 4.4% of US power in 2023, could hit 12% by 2028
• Synthetic Media & Art
  • (01:32:20) OpenAI failed to deliver the opt-out tool it promised by 2025
• (01:36:15) Outro