Tech Tales and Pricing Trends

👋 Hey all, this is Alex, coming to you from the very Sunny California, as I'm in SF again, while there is a complete snow storm back home in Denver (brrr).

I flew here for the Hackathon I kept telling you about, and it was glorious, we had over 400 registered, over 200 approved hackers, 21 teams submitted incredible projects 👏 You can follow some of these here

I then decided to stick around and record the show from SF, and finally pulled the plug and asked for some budget, and I present, the first ThursdAI, recorded from the newly minted W&B Podcast studio at our office in SF 🎉

This isn't the only first, today also, for the first time, all of the regular co-hosts of ThursdAI, met on video for the first time, after over a year of hanging out weekly, we've finally made the switch to video, and you know what? Given how good AI podcasts are getting, we may have to stick around with this video thing! We played one such clip from a new model called hertz-dev, which is a <10B model for full duplex audio.

Given that today's episode is a video podcast, I would love for you to see it, so here's the timestamps for the chapters, which will be followed by the TL;DR and show notes in raw format. I would love to hear from folks who read the longer form style newsletters, do you miss them? Should I bring them back? Please leave me a comment 🙏 (I may send you a survey)

This was a generally slow week (for AI!! not for... ehrm other stuff) and it was a fun podcast! Leave me a comment about what you think about this new format.

Chapter Timestamps

00:00 Introduction and Agenda Overview

00:15 Open Source LLMs: Small Models

01:25 Open Source LLMs: Large Models

02:22 Big Companies and LLM Announcements

04:47 Hackathon Recap and Community Highlights

18:46 Technical Deep Dive: HertzDev and FishSpeech

33:11 Human in the Loop: AI Agents

36:24 Augmented Reality Lab Assistant

36:53 Hackathon Highlights and Community Vibes

37:17 Chef Puppet and Meta Ray Bans Raffle

37:46 Introducing Fester the Skeleton

38:37 Fester's Performance and Community Reactions

39:35 Technical Insights and Project Details

42:42 Big Companies API Updates

43:17 Haiku 3.5: Performance and Pricing

43:44 Comparing Haiku and Sonnet Models

51:32 XAI Grok: New Features and Pricing

57:23 OpenAI's O1 Model: Leaks and Expectations

01:08:42 Transformer ASIC: The Future of AI Hardware

01:13:18 The Future of Training and Inference Chips

01:13:52 Oasis Demo and Etched AI Controversy

01:14:37 Nisten's Skepticism on Etched AI

01:19:15 Human Layer Introduction with Dex

01:19:24 Building and Managing AI Agents

01:20:54 Challenges and Innovations in AI Agent Development

01:21:28 Human Layer's Vision and Future

01:36:34 Recap and Closing Remarks

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Show Notes and Links:

* Interview

* Dexter Horthy (X) from HumanLayer

* Open Source LLMs

* SmolLM2: the new, best, and open 1B-parameter language mode (X)

* Meta released MobileLLM (125M, 350M, 600M, 1B) (HF)

* Tencent Hunyuan Large - 389B X 52B (Active) MoE (X, HF, Paper)

* Big CO LLMs + APIs

* OpenAI buys and opens chat.com

* Anthropic releases Claude Haiku 3.5 via API (X, Blog)

* OpenAI drops o1 full - and pulls it back (but not before it got Jailbroken)

* X.ai now offers $25/mo free of Grok API credits (X, Platform)

* Etched announces Sonu - first Transformer ASIC - 500K tok/s (etched)

* PPXL is not valued at 9B lol

* This weeks Buzz

* Recap of SF Hackathon w/ AI Tinkerers (X)

* Fester the Halloween Toy aka Project Halloweave videos from trick or treating (X, Writeup)

* Voice & Audio

* Hertz-dev - 8.5B conversation audio gen (X, Blog )

* Fish Agent v0.1 3B - Speech to Speech model (HF, Demo)

* AI Art & Diffusion & 3D

* FLUX 1.1 [pro] is how HD - 4x resolution (X, blog)

Full Transcription for convenience below:

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