AI Advancements and Challenges

Our 197th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 01/17/2024

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Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and guest-hosted by the folks from Latent Space

Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.

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:

 - Google and Mistral sign deals with AP and AFP, respectively, to deliver up-to-date news through their AI platforms.
 - ChatGPT introduces a tasks feature for reminders and to-dos, positioning itself more as a personal assistant.
 - Synthesia raises $180 million to enhance its AI video platform for generating videos of human avatars.
 - New U.S. guidelines restrict exporting AI chips to various countries, impacting Nvidia and other tech firms.

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Timestamps + Links:

• (00:00:00) Intro / Banter
• (00:04:29) News Preview
• (00:05:09) Response to listener comments
• (00:05:58) Sponsor Break
• Tools & Apps
  • (00:07:01) Google is making AI in Gmail and Docs free — but raising the price of Workspace
  • (00:07:52) Microsoft relaunches Copilot for business with free AI chat and pay-as-you-go agents
  • (00:12:36) Google signs deal with AP to deliver up-to-date news through its Gemini AI chatbot
  • (00:18:08) Mistral signs deal with AFP to offer up-to-date answers in Le Chat
  • (00:18:45) ChatGPT can now handle reminders and to-dos
• Applications & Business
  • (00:22:53) Palmer Luckey’s AI Defense Company Anduril Is Building a $1 Billion Plant in Ohio
  • (00:28:36) OpenAI is bankrolling Axios’ expansion into four new markets
  • (00:29:39) AI researcher François Chollet founds a new AI lab focused on AGI
  • (00:32:18) Nvidia-backed AI video platform Synthesia doubles valuation to $2.1 billion
  • (00:34:46) Anysphere Raises $105M in Series B
  • (00:40:14) Harvey Valuation of 3 Billion
• Projects & Open Source
  • (00:46:12) MiniMax-01: Scaling Foundation Models with Lightning Attention
  • (00:51:16) MinMo: A Multimodal Large Language Model with Approximately 8B Parameters for Seamless Voice Interaction
  • (00:53:01) HALoGEN: Fantastic LLM Hallucinations and Where to Find Them
• Research & Advancements
  • (00:57:03) Titans: Learning to Memorize at Test Time
  • (01:04:38) Transformer2: Self-adaptive LLMs
  • (01:08:15) Inference-Time Scaling for Diffusion Models beyond Scaling Denoising Steps
• Policy & Safety
  • (01:11:23) Biden administration proposes sweeping new restrictions on exporting AI chips
  • (01:13:56) Biden orders Energy, Defense departments to lease sites for AI data centers, clean energy generation
  • (01:15:00) OpenAI presents its preferred version of AI regulation in a new ‘blueprint’
  • (01:16:15) More teens report using ChatGPT for schoolwork, despite the tech’s faults
• Synthetic Media & Art
  • (01:17:55) In AI copyright case, Zuckerberg turns to YouTube for his defense
• (01:19:53) Outro