Innovations in AI: Google and Meta's Competitive Edge

Our 173rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

With hosts Andrey Kurenkov (https://twitter.com/andrey_kurenkov) and Jeremie Harris (https://twitter.com/jeremiecharris)

See full episode notes here.

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In this episode of Last Week in AI, we explore the latest advancements and debates in the AI field, including Google's release of Gemini 1.5, Meta's upcoming LLaMA 3, and Runway's Gen 3 Alpha video model. We discuss emerging AI features, legal disputes over data usage, and China's competition in AI. The conversation spans innovative research developments, cost considerations of AI architectures, and policy changes like the U.S. Supreme Court striking down Chevron deference. We also cover U.S. export controls on AI chips to China, workforce development in the semiconductor industry, and Bridgewater's new AI-driven financial fund, evaluating the broader financial and regulatory impacts of AI technologies.  

Timestamps + links:

• (00:00:00) Intro / Banter
• Tools & Apps
  • (00:03:24) Google opens up Gemini 1.5 Flash, Pro with 2M tokens to the public
  • (00:08:47) Meta is about to launch its biggest Llama model yet — here’s why it’s a big deal
  • (00:12:38) Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha AI video model now available – but there’s a catch
  • (00:16:28) This is Google AI, and it's coming to the Pixel 9
  • (00:17:30) AI Firm ElevenLabs Sets Audio Reader Pact With Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds and Laurence Olivier Estates
  • (00:20:06) Perplexity’s ‘Pro Search’ AI upgrade makes it better at math and research
  • (00:23:12) Gemini’s data-analyzing abilities aren’t as good as Google claims
• Applications & Business
  • (00:26:38) Quora’s Chatbot Platform Poe Allows Users to Download Paywalled Articles on Demand
  • (00:32:04) Huawei and Wuhan Xinxin to develop high-bandwidth memory chips amid US restrictions
  • (00:34:57) Alibaba’s large language model tops global ranking of AI developer platform Hugging Face
  • (00:39:01) Here comes a Meta Ray-Bans challenger with ChatGPT-4o and a camera
  • (00:43:35) Apple’s Phil Schiller is reportedly joining OpenAI’s board
  • (00:47:26) AI Video Startup Runway Looking to Raise $450 Million
• Projects & Open Source
  • (00:48:10) Kyutai Open Sources Moshi: A Real-Time Native Multimodal Foundation AI Model that can Listen and Speak
  • (00:50:44) MMEvalPro: Calibrating Multimodal Benchmarks Towards Trustworthy and Efficient Evaluation
  • (00:53:47) Anthropic Pushes for Third-Party AI Model Evaluations
  • (00:57:29) Mozilla Llamafile, Builders Projects Shine at AI Engineers World's Fair
• Research & Advancements
  • (00:59:26) Researchers upend AI status quo by eliminating matrix multiplication in LLMs
  • (01:05:55) AI Agents That Matter
  • (01:12:09) WARP: On the Benefits of Weight Averaged Rewarded Policies
  • (01:17:20) Scaling Synthetic Data Creation with 1,000,000,000 Personas
  • (01:24:16) Found in the Middle: Calibrating Positional Attention Bias Improves Long Context Utilization
• Policy & Safety
  • (01:26:32) With Chevron’s demise, AI regulation seems dead in the water
  • (01:33:40) Nvidia to make $12bn from AI chips in China this year despite US controls
  • (01:37:52) Uncle Sam relies on manual processes to oversee restrictions on Huawei, other Chinese tech players
  • (01:40:57) U.S. government addresses critical workforce shortages for the semiconductor industry with new program
  • (01:42:42) Bridgewater starts $2 billion fund that uses machine learning for decision-making and will include models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity
• (01:47:57) Outro