Tech Pause and Innovations in AI

Our 196th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's* big AI news!
*and sometimes last last week's 
Recorded on 01/10/2024

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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:

- Nvidia announced a $3,000 personal AI supercomputer called Digits, featuring the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, aiming to lower the barrier for developers working on large models. 
- The U.S. Department of Justice finalizes a rule restricting the transmission of specific data types to countries of concern, including China and Russia, under executive order 14117.
- Meta allegedly trained Llama on pirated content from LibGen, with internal concerns about the legality confirmed through court filings. 
- Microsoft paused construction on a section of a large data center project in Wisconsin to reassess based on new technological changes.

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Timestamps + Links:

• (00:00:00) Intro / Banter
• (00:04:52) Sponsor Break
• Tools & Apps
  • (00:05:55) Nvidia announces $3,000 personal AI supercomputer called Digits
  • (00:10:23) Meta removes AI character accounts after users criticize them as ‘creepy and unnecessary’
• Applications & Business
  • (00:16:16) NVIDIA Is Reportedly Focused Towards “Custom Chip” Manufacturing, Recruiting Top Taiwanese Talent
  • (00:21:54) AI start-up Anthropic closes in on $60bn valuation
  • (00:25:38) Why OpenAI is Taking So Long to Launch Agents
  • (00:30:08) TSMC Set to Expand CoWoS Capacity to Record 75,000 Wafers in 2025, Doubling 2024 Output
  • (00:33:10) Microsoft 'pauses construction' on part of data center site in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin
  • (00:37:23) Google folds more AI teams into DeepMind to ‘accelerate the research to developer pipeline’
• Projects & Open Source
  • (00:41:59) Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI
  • (00:48:21) Microsoft releases Phi-4 language model on Hugging Face
• Research & Advancements
  • (00:50:16) PRIME: Online Reinforcement Learning with Process Rewards
  • (00:58:29) ICLR: In-Context Learning of Representations
  • (01:07:38) Do NOT Think That Much for 2+3=? On the Overthinking of o1-Like LLMs
  • (01:11:44) METAGENE-1: Metagenomic Foundation Model for Pandemic Monitoring
  • (01:15:45) TransPixar: Advancing Text-to-Video Generation with Transparency
  • (01:18:03) The amount of compute used to train frontier models has been growing at a breakneck pace of over 4x per year since 2018, resulting in an overall scale-up of more than 10,000x! But what factors are enabling this rapid growth?
• Policy & Safety
  • (01:23:45) InfAlign: Inference-aware language model alignment
  • (01:28:44) Mark Zuckerberg gave Meta’s Llama team the OK to train on copyrighted works, filing claims
  • (01:33:19) Anthropic gives court authority to intervene if chatbot spits out song lyrics
  • (01:35:57) US government says companies are no longer allowed to send bulk data to these nations
  • (01:39:10) Trump announces $20B plan to build new data centers in the US