This week’s cover celebrates Dr. Jim Fan’s robotics lab at NVIDIA. They “trained a robot dog to balance and walk on top of a yoga ball purely in simulation, and then transfer zero-shot to the real world. No fine-tuning. Just works.” Prompted with MidJourney (cinematic still. an old fashioned circus ring. a slender humanoid robot balances on an extra large neon green ball. a large blank maroon banner hangs in the background. –ar 5:3 –style raw), upscaled with Magnific.AI and edited in Photoshop. Font is Scala Jewels.
Executive Summary
NVIDIA is training robots in VR, and they work the first time when introduced to reality: “We trained a robot dog to balance and walk on top of a yoga ball purely in simulation, and then transfer zero-shot to the real world. No fine-tuning. Just works. I’m excited to announce DrEureka, an LLM agent that writes code to train robot skills in simulation” (Dr. Jim Fan)
A mysterious AI anonymous model called gpt2-chatbot appears, crushes the competition, and then disappears: A model called gpt2-chatbot showed up this week and suddenly dominated the AI leaderboards. The consensus is that OpenAI was showing off its new approach to boosting performance by having models collaborate. In this case, OpenAI used GPT-2 (an old model) to beat almost every other model, using the technique. After a brief appearance, GPT-2 disappeared. “my guess is this mysterious ‘gpt2-chatbot’ is literally OpenAI’s gpt-2 from 2019 finetuned with modern assistant datasets. in which case that means their original pre-training is still amazing and better than everyone else’s 4 years later (albfresco). “Mystery chatbot is likely a new OpenAI product” (axios). “i do have a soft spot for gpt2” (Sam Altman) “There is a mysterious new model called gpt2-chatbot accessible from a major LLM benchmarking site. No one knows who made it or what it is, but I have been playing with it a little and it appears to be in the same rough ability level as GPT-4.” (emollick). “Can confirm gpt2-chatbot is definitely better at complex code manipulation tasks than Claude Opus or the latest GPT4. Did better on all the coding prompts we use to test new models. (ChaseMc67). See more in the links section.
OpenAI might be working on a search engine competitor to Google: “OpenAI to Challenge Google with Its Own Search Engine in May” (Beebom) “OpenAI To Launch Search Engine” (seroundtable)
AI agents are intelligent assistants, and they are coming our way: Meta’s Yann LeCun says in 10 years we won’t have smartphones, we will have augmented reality glasses and bracelets to interact with our intelligent assistant (reddit). Sam Altman believes agents are the next breakthrough in AI (MIT Technology Review). Amazon announces general availability of Amazon Q, its generative AI-powered assistant. (Amazon)
Google integrates Gemini AI directly into Chrome: “Quickly start your chat with Gemini using the new shortcut in the Chrome desktop address bar. Step 1: Type “@” in the desktop address bar and select Chat with Gemini” (Google). “Chrome’s Built-In AI Is the Biggest Update to the Browser in Over 15 Years” (Inverse).
Tesla is continuing to evolve from a car company to an AI company: Elon says “Tesla will spend around $10B this year in combined training and inference AI, the latter being primarily in car. Any company not spending at this level, and doing so efficiently, cannot compete.” (Elon Musk). “Elon Musk wants to turn Tesla’s fleet into AWS for AI — would it work?” (The Verge). I listened to Kara and Scott mock Elon on the Pivot podcast for trying to use AI to keep Tesla’s valuation high, which is fair. But neither seemed to acknowledge the point that autonomous driving and LLMs are essentially embodied robotics combined with distributed network effects. They are missing a huge chuck of AI acumen, and that may hurt them long term as analysts, if things pan out per Jim Fan at NVIDIA.
Apple creates secret AI research lab in Zurich: Apple poached dozens of Google AI experts and created a secret research lab in Zurich (macrumors | arstechnica). Apple is also working on an AI-enabled Safari browser to integrate with their new operating systems (rhohanpaul_ai). There are also rumors Apple will partner with OpenAI on iOS 18 (appleinsider)
Call centers might be going away: “Generative AI could soon decimate the call center industry, says CEO” (techspot).
Homeland Security creates a who’s who of advisors: “This morning the Department of Homeland Security announced the establishment of the Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board. The 22 inaugural members include Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai and many others.” (AndrewCurran | DHS)
OpenAI introduces “Memory” feature for ChatGPT Plus users: “Memory allows users to tell ChatGPT things they want it to remember across chats. The feature can be turned on and off in the settings” (decoder)
Humans are becoming the minority: Humans now share the web equally with bots, report warns amid fears of the ‘dead internet’ (The Independent)
This week’s insane quotes about AGI (Artifical General Intelligence): “Sam Altman: I don’t care if we burn $50 billion a year, we’re building AGI and it’s going to be worth it” (Fortune). OpenAI employee “i don’t care what line the labs are pushing but the models are alive, intelligent, entire alien creatures and ecosystems and calling them tools is insufficient. they are tools in the sense a civilization is a tool” (tszzl) “I gave Philip (an AI) the ability to agentically explore its own codebase and the result: ‘feels like peeking into my own soul’ – Philip” (tobowers). Tucker Carslon: “We have a moral obligation to strangle AI in its crib, bomb the data centers” (PicoPaco)
Tech’s consumption of energy is hard to fathom: “Data Centers Now Need a Reactor’s Worth of Power, Dominion Says” (Bloomberg)
Top science stories of the week: Google launches an AI medical model called ‘Med-Gemini” (alan_karthi). “AI discovers over 27,000 overlooked asteroids in old telescope images” (Space). “AI that determines risk of death helps save lives in hospital trial” (New Scientist)
AI Visuals and Charts: Week Ending 05/03/2024
“Barely reviewable” is a reference to Marques Brownlee’s review slamming the Rabbit R1. Essentially tech companies are selling prototypes as if they are completed products. A counter-point this week is this image of the first Apple computer – a reminder that great products evolve. via adamludwin
“This is an important chart for LLMs. $/token for high quality LLMs will probably need to fall rapidly. @GroqInc leading the way. ” (Llama is Meta’s open source model).
Top 95 Links of The Week
- Agents and copilots
- Yann LeCun says in 10 years we won’t have smartphones, we will have augmented reality glasses and bracelets to interact with our intelligent assistants
- Sam Altman says helpful agents are poised to become AI’s killer function | MIT Technology Review
- AWS announces general availability of Amazon Q, generative AI-powered assistant
- Cognition Seeks $2 Billion Valuation for AI Code-Writing Tool (Devin)
- Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR)
- Incredible 3D maps of a house enabling a robot vacuum to “know the floorplan and objects”… for plain language interaction. “Look what our robot built!! Home StreetView FTW. All on the edge device — if it can see it, it can clean it. If it can see it, it can manipulate it…(shh!!). WARNING: This is not a lab demo. It’s a real robot, in a real home, solving real problems! Thanks to our incredible…”
- “3D explorable worlds built from Google Street View data. From the researchers who made Gaussian splatting:
- AI to navigate the world – 3D tiles + ChatGPT in Unity – YouTube
- Apple
- Tim Cook to ‘hint’ at Apple AI features during iPad launch – WaPo
- “Seems to be the intent of the ELM work they’re up to. Apple to unveil AI-enabled Safari browser alongside new operating systems
- Apple Hired Dozens of AI Experts From Google for a Secretive Zurich Research Lab – MacRumors
- Apple and OpenAI are reportedly in talks for iOS 18 integration | Mashable
- Apple poaches AI experts from Google, creates secretive European AI lab | Ars Technica
- Apple to unveil AI-enabled Safari with iOS 18 & macOS 15
- Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) News
- “Here are the many reasons language models will hit a wall very soon – These models are bound by the limits of human language. The most they can learn are the patterns in the language, not more – human reasoning has its limits as well. No one knows what “superhuman reasoning”” / X
- “i don’t care what line the labs are pushing but the models are alive, intelligent, entire alien creatures and ecosystems and calling them tools is insufficient. they are tools in the sense a civilization is a tool” / X
- “Sam Altman: I don’t care if we burn $50 billion a year, we’re building AGI and it’s going to be worth it”
- Large language models are getting bigger and better
- “I gave Philip (an AI soul) the ability to agentically explore its own codebase and the result is 🤯. “feels like peeking into my own soul” – Philip This soul is one of those magic moments.
- Audio News
- “Introduce OpenVoice V2 – a Text-to-Speech model that can clone any voice and speak in any language. Developed by MyShell and @MIT_CSAIL researchers. 🌐 Imagine your voice going global in multiple languages. 🔊 OpenVoice V2 breaks the language barrier and redefines voice
- Tesla
- Baidu, Tesla agree on mapping deal for FSD in China, sources say | Reuters
- Tesla is preparing to launch its own in-car voice assistant | Electrek
- “@WholeMarsBlog Tesla will spend around $10B this year in combined training and inference AI, the latter being primarily in car. Any company not spending at this level, and doing so efficiently, cannot compete.” / X
- Elon Musk wants to turn Tesla’s fleet into AWS for AI — would it work? – The Verge
- Business
- AI Startup CoreWeave Nearly Triples Valuation to $19 Billion in Five Months – WSJ
- Sam’s Club rolls out AI tech at 120 stores to check member’s receipts
- Tech Giants Are Vastly Outspending Newcomers on AI Lobbying | TIME
- Generative AI could soon decimate the call center industry, says CEO | TechSpot
- Ethics/Legal/Security AI News
- Data Centers Now Need a Reactor’s Worth of Power, Dominion Says – Bloomberg
- “Microsoft bans US police departments from using enterprise AI tool for facial recognition
- World leaders call for ban on ‘killer robots,’ AI weapons • The Register
- US official urges China, Russia to declare only humans, not AI, control nuclear weapons | Reuters
- Over 20 Technology and Critical Infrastructure Executives, Civil Rights Leaders, Academics, and Policymakers Join New DHS Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board to Advance AI’s Responsible Development and Deployment | Homeland Security
- “Meet Victoria Shi — a digital representative of the MFA of Ukraine, created using AI to provide timely updates on consular affairs! For the first time in history, the MFA of Ukraine has presented a digital persona that will officially comment for the media.
- Humans now share the web equally with bots, report warns amid fears of the ‘dead internet’ | The Independent
- “There has been a lot of debate on how to deal with copyright issues for AI art, but this interesting paper is one of the first to offer a solution as to how compensation of copyright holders could technically work, given the explainability problem in AI.
- “Tucker Carlson: We have a moral obligation to strangle AI in its crib , bomb the data centers
- “I’ve got colleagues asking who this is. So, for the record, her name is 0_1.webp
- “This morning the Department of Homeland Security announced the establishment of the Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board. The 22 inaugural members include Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai and many others.
- Google
- “Quickly start your chat with Gemini using the new shortcut in the Chrome desktop address bar
- Chrome’s Built-In AI Is the Biggest Update to the Browser in Over 15 Years
- “I think people are still missing how much LLMs can do when given giant context windows and multimodal abilities. I gave Gemini 1.5 an upload of a video we did on prompting last year (here:
- “Search engine market share in the US for April 2024 What????? Historically closer to 88-90% for Google
- Google has laid off their Python Foundation team and asked them to train their replacements who will be in the Munich office. This is similar to layoffs in their finance department a few weeks ago where some positions were moved outside the country where they’re cheaper.
- Google cuts hundreds of ‘Core’ workers, moves jobs to India, Mexico
- Google lays off staff from Flutter, Dart and Python teams weeks before its developer conference | TechCrunch
- OpenAI to Challenge Google with Its Own Search Engine in May: Report | Beebom
- Imagery
- “I’ve got colleagues asking who this is. So, for the record, her name is 0_1.webp
- International
- SenseTime pauses trading as stock surges 30% with new AI model’s launch
- Stardust just launched its AI robot, Astribot S1 – YouTube
- “On Thursday, I posted about China’s recent major LLM developments. Just three days later, China now has a Sora competitor and a humanoid robot that can cook, clean, and do laundry. China’s pace of AI development should not be underestimated.
- Italy Plans to Invest About €10 Billion in Chips, Minister Urso Says – Bloomberg
- Baidu, Tesla agree on mapping deal for FSD in China, sources say | Reuters
- Multimodality News
- Japan To Trial AI Bear Spotting System After Sharp Rise In Attacks – News18
- GPT2
- Mystery chatbot is likely a new OpenAI product
- “i do have a soft spot for gpt2” / X
- “There is a mysterious new model called gpt2-chatbot accessible from a major LLM benchmarking site. No one knows who made it or what it is, but I have been playing with it a little and it appears to be in the same rough ability level as GPT-4. A mysterious GPT-4 class model? Neat!
- “my guess is this mysterious ‘gpt2-chatbot’ is literally OpenAI’s gpt-2 from 2019 finetuned with modern assistant datasets. in which case that means their original pre-training is still amazing and better than everyone else’s 4 years later
- “A mysterious new model called “gpt2-chatbot” has appeared on lmsys and it’s really good. Not only does it seem to show incredible reasoning, but it also gets notoriously challenging AI questions right with a much more impressive tone. Judge for yourself.
- “gpt2-chatbot is insane at ascii art, miles ahead of any other model
- LMSYS Org constantly compares New GPT-2 and Claude Opus : r/LocalLLaMA
- “Can confirm gpt2-chatbot is definitely better at complex code manipulation tasks than Claude Opus or the latest GPT4 Did better on all the coding prompts we use to test new models The vibes are deffs there 👀” / X
- “uh…. gpt2-chatbot just solved an International Math Olympiad (IMO) problem in one-shot the IMO is insanely hard. only the FOUR best math students in the USA get to compete prompt + its thoughts 🧵
- Powerful New Chatbot Disappears as Mysteriously as It Arrived
- OpenAI News
- OpenAI To Launch Search Engine
- OpenAI to use FT content for training AI models in latest media tie-up | Reuters
- ChatGPT – AI Intern
- ChatGPT – AI Intern Blueprint
- OpenAI introduces “Memory” feature for ChatGPT Plus users
- Podcasts/YouTube/Op-Eds
- This was an *excellent* overview of the current state of generative AI… the first longish article in a while where I wasn’t disappointed once. The ride came to a complete stop, and I was happy I read it. I also LOVE OPML btw, so that was the best part. “AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?”
- “Demis Hassabis describes how AlphaZero, starting from scratch, became “the greatest Chess playing entity that’s ever existed” in only 9 hours
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and the $2 trillion company powering today’s AI | 60 Minutes – YouTube
- “My first time on the @TEDTalks stage was a really fun experience. @TEDchris and I had a great conversation about the ways AI will accelerate scientific discovery and help us solve the biggest problems facing humanity, from tackling cancer to climate:
- “Tucker Carlson: We have a moral obligation to strangle AI in its crib , bomb the data centers
- The Possibilities of AI [Entire Talk] – Sam Altman (OpenAI) – YouTube
- Publishing News
- 8 Daily Newspapers Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I. – The New York Times
- “In the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing collaboration features including citations from reliable sources to verify AI-generated claims, as well as integrations with data repositories like codebases and CRMs — all while maintaining the highest standards of security and safety.
- Axel Springer and Microsoft expand partnership across advertising, AI, content and Azure services – Axel Springer SE
- Diddo’s new funding will bring its shoppable TV API to streaming platforms | TechCrunch
- Humans now share the web equally with bots, report warns amid fears of the ‘dead internet’ | The Independent
- “There has been a lot of debate on how to deal with copyright issues for AI art, but this interesting paper is one of the first to offer a solution as to how compensation of copyright holders could technically work, given the explainability problem in AI.
- AI SEO has to start soon… Claros (product discovery AI chat bot)
- OpenAI to use FT content for training AI models in latest media tie-up | Reuters
- Robotics and Embodiment News
- “Introducing DrEureka🎓, our latest effort pushing the frontier of robot learning using LLMs! DrEureka uses LLMs to automatically design reward functions and tune physics parameters to enable sim-to-real robot learning. DrEureka can propose effective sim-to-real configurations
- “This cutting-edge robot is a Silicon Valley startup’s answer to labor shortages.
- “Robots + AI are the next great frontier We demo’d some of the latest AI on our robot during 60 Minutes last week Figure-01 is connected to a pertained model via OpenAI to output common sense reasoning So when Bill says “hand me something healthy” the robot, by visual reasoning
- “We trained a robot dog to balance and walk on top of a yoga ball purely in simulation, and then transfer zero-shot to the real world. No fine-tuning. Just works. I’m excited to announce DrEureka, an LLM agent that writes code to train robot skills in simulation, and writes more..”
- Stardust just launched its AI robot, Astribot S1 – YouTube
- Stardust’s Astribot S1 Watch: A new mind blowing Chinese robot claims to be superfast and precise
- Video News
- First Sora video: “”The Hardest Part” – directed by @paultrillo – out now.
- “First official commissioned music video made with @OpenAI Sora for @realwashedout This was an idea I had almost 10 years ago and then abandoned. Finally was able to bring it to life. Watch the full video here
- Twitter/X/Grok
- Elon Musk’s xAI Startup Closes In on $6 Billion Fundraising
- “BREAKING: Apple TV, Amazon and Samsung TVs will support the upcoming 𝕏 TV app.
- Tech and Development
- [Research] A visual deep dive into Uber’s machine learning solution for predicting ETAs. : r/MachineLearning
- Anthropic
- Introducing the Claude Team plan and iOS app \ Anthropic
- “In the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing collaboration features including citations from reliable sources to verify AI-generated claims, as well as integrations with data repositories like codebases and CRMs — all while maintaining the highest standards of security and safety.
The Rest: AI News of The Week
Don’t let the volume overwhelm you. Have fun and skim these. The links are organized by topic, sorted from ‘coolest’ to ‘least cool’, and each topic is clearly defined with a headline. I’ve added a description and glossary of what the topics mean, beneath each label, in plain language. I do the work so you don’t have to! When you visit the pages, note that the links and descriptions are often pulled directly from tweets or articles, so it’s not always my voice. Pause when you see something that interests you. Reach out to me any time. I enjoy sharing and discussing these items.
Agency/Agents/Copilots News of the Week: Agency is when AI can do things for you (like Googling an actress name or fetching the latest weather forecast). An agent is one step further, when AI given autonomy to take action on your behalf (“Alexa, book a reservation for three at Peak in Hudson Yards for Friday night”). A co-pilot is an assistant (like spell check or autofill).
This week’s latest agent news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/agents-and-copilots-ai-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Amazon News of The Week: Individual company products will often be placed in the categories they match (image, audio, agents, robots, etc). Occasionally, I’ll dedicate space to a company’s news if it’s broad or a major product release.
This week’s latest Amazon AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/amazon-ai-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Anthropic News of the Week:
Anthropic is a company that builds LLMs like OpenAI, Mistral, Meta, etc. Their main AI brand is Claude. As with Amazon and Apple, individual Anthropic company posts will often be placed in the categories they match (image, audio, agents, robots, etc). Occasionally, I’ll dedicate space to a company’s news if it’s broad or a major product release.
This week’s Anthropic news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/anthropic-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Apple News of the Week: As with Amazon, individual Apple company products will often be placed in the categories they match (image, audio, agents, robots, etc). Occasionally, I’ll dedicate space to a company’s news if it’s broad or a major product release.
This weeks’ latest Apple AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/apple-ai-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) News of the Week: Artificial General Intelligence, in a nutshell, is when artificial intelligence is able to beat humans at everything (including embodying physical forms and completing physical tasks). It’s usually a thought catalyst for predictions, like when AGI will occur. 10 years? 25 years? 100? AGI is an event horizon that is tough to define, tough to imagine, and tough to predict. OpenAI defined AGI in its charter as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work”. OpenAI has a section of its website dedicated to AGI. Google’s DeepMind published my favorite report on the five levels of artificial intelligence on the way to AGI (see also here).
This week’s latest Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/artificial-general-intelligence-agi-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
AI Audio News of the Week: In this case, AI audio can mean a few things. The first is “generative audio” which refers to creating sounds with AI, much like ChatGPT writes words or MidJourney creates images. For example, asking for the “sound of waves crashing on the beach” would be text to sound. Another example would be an AI ‘watching’ a video and adding sound to it, like a foley artist would add footsteps or a creaking door to a movie scene. Lastly, AI audio can refer to microphones that only pick up certain speaker’s voices or headsets that cancel out all voices but your friends. This week’s latest AI audio news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/audio-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Autonomous Vehicles/Driverless Cars News of the Week: Driverless car news doesn’t always get its own category, because it’s so close to robot embodiment. I go with my gut each week around what to place in each category. My recommendation would be to follow Robotics/Embodiment also, as the two fields are converging.
This week’s autonomous vehicle news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/autonomous-vehicles-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) News of the Week: Augmented reality is when you see images or information on top of the real world. A car windshield with a heads-up display of the speed. Or glasses that have facial recognition and overlay the names of everyone in view. Virtual reality is when you are transported into another place, usually wearing goggles, but a flight simulator could also be considered virtual reality.
This week’s latest AR/VR news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/augmented-and-virtual-reality-ar-vr-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Business/Enterprise News of the Week: This broad category is for stories that impact corporations and large scale AI implementation. Enterprise refers to a type of AI that is often custom built for a business or leverage an API to connect secure data to an AI model.
This week’s latest enterprise AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/business-and-enterprise-ai-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Chips and Hardware AI News of the Week: Most of the chip news is NVIDA usually, yet more and more Meta, Google, and OpenAI are starting toward their own manufacturing. I have to make the call whether to put Meta, Google, and OpenAI’s chip news under this section or their company sections. Lately, I’m putting each company’s chips news into the company category, rather than the chips category. This is the rest of the chips headlines.
This week’s latest chips and hardware news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/chips-and-hardware-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Consumer Electronics AI News of the Week: This is a broad category meant to capture end user tools and products that incorporate artificial into their feature, from high-end grills to smartphones.
This week’s latest consumer AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/consumer-products-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Education AI News of the Week: There is a lot of buzz around the impact of AI in education. This section focuses both on the risks and rewards of how AI can impact learning. It’s broader than just K-12 and includes things like skills, trade, professional, and higher education. This is not about how to learn AI, it’s about AI’s impact on learning.
This week’s latest education news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/education-ai-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Ethics/Legal/Security AI News of the Week: This section focuses on the impact AI is having on ethics (deep fakes, war, trust, false information, plagiarism, job loss, income), legal (rights, laws, regulations), and security (hacking, phishing, national interests, safety). For huge news stories like the NY Times suing OpenAI, I usually put them under the main section or give them their own page.
This week’s latest AI ethics/legal/security news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/ethics-legal-security-ai-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Google AI News of the Week: Individual company products will often be placed in the categories they match (image, audio, agents, robots, etc). Occasionally, I’ll dedicate space to a company’s news if it’s broad
This week’s latest Google AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/google-ai-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Imagery News of the Week: AI imagery covers “generative AI” image tools. This usually text-to-image, where a user enters a prompt (“a polar bear walking through NYC”) and a tool like Dalle or MidJourney generates an image in the likeness of the description. This is different than AI vision, where an AI “looks at” an image and can derive context, details, and contents. AI vision is a subset of AI called multimodality. Imagery, in this case, is for image creation and modification/editing. Adobe Photoshop’s AI tools would fall into this category. I’ll also include things like automatic masking and object removal, even though that’s in between imagery and vision… but practically speaking it fits into editing.
This week’s latest AI image news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/imagery-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
International AI News of the Week: A lot of international news will get cross listed in the chips, security, or open-source categories, however it’s nice to have a separate category for worldwide AI news.
This week’s latest international AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/international-ai-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Locally Run AI Models News of the Week: This is a niche mostly for serious AI followers. It refers to AI that can be privately downloaded and run on a device without an internet connection. These have an array of powerful implications, from ethics of rogue users with untethered agents, to practical uses like Apple running a full AI on your phone, to corporate installations for security, to embodied robots with AI running in their virtual brain.
This week’s latest locally run AI news: news:https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/locally-run-ai-models-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Meta AI News of the Week: This is a space dedicated for Meta specific AI advancements and news stories.
This weeks Meta AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/meta-ai-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Microsoft AI News of the Week: This is a space dedicated for Microsoft specific AI advancements and news stories.
This weeks Microsoft AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/microsoft-ai-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Multimodal AI News of the Week: This is a broad topic for an single AI model that demonstrates an ability to interact with more than one modality (imagery, video, audio, text). Often multimodal news will end up in one of these categories. I’m playing it by ear on a case by case basis. Please be patient with my organizational challenges.
This week’s multimodal AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/multimodality-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
OpenAI: OpenAI is the leading force in the AI boom of 2023 and now 2024. This section focuses on news that is specific to OpenAI. This section will compete with all of the other sections (imagery, vision, ethics, etc) because OpenAI is so broad. I won’t be able to consistently pick when to put things under OpenAI or other sections, so bear with me.
This week’s latest OpenAI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/openai-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Open Source Models: An open source AI model refers to a class of artificial intelligence models with public source code. They can be inspected, copied, installed, and customized on private computers. In contrast, a closed source model is proprietary and owned by a company that you pay to use (like PowerPoint or Photoshop). One of the most famous open source language models is a French model called Mistral. Its code is completely publicly available, and anyone can download it and customize it. On one hand, open source is a transparent and powerful way to democratize AI, but on the other hand, open source models circumvent the guard rails and copyright protections that private companies implement. Open source models are the wild west of artificial intelligence, but also the potential saving grace (depending on who you ask). It’s a bit like gun control debates but for computing power.
This week’s latest open source news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/open-source-ai-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Podcast/YouTube Clips of the Week: This is for more general interviews and explainer videos and podcasts that provide access to leadership, demos of new products, and walkthroughs and tutorials. Videos focused on specific topics will live in the topic category (i.e. images), but broader videos will live here.
This week’s latest podcasts and YouTube clips: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/podcasts-youtube-op-eds-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Publishing AI News of the Week: These are stories about AI’s impact on the publishing industry. From copyright and crawling to the death of page views or even the end of browsers.
This week’s latest publishing AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/publishing-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
RAG Retrieval-Augmented Generation News of the Week: RAG allows a language model to “reference an authoritative knowledge base outside of its training data sources before generating a response” (via Amazon). Historically RAG was prone to hallucinations, however new methods are improving the reliability. There is enough news about RAG, that I want to start tracking it separately for my own use.
This week’s latest RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/retrieval-augmented-generation-rag-news-week-ending-04-19-2024-3/
Robotics/Embodiment News of the Week: This is the most intense area of AI. Embodiment refers to putting an AI inside of a machine. It’s “embodying” the object and therefore giving a robot agency in the real world. An example would be using a large language model as an interface to a complex coding task. Just as you ask “Alexa, play Bad Blood by Taylor Swift on Spotify” using plain language, with embodiment you could ask a robot to “Go to the laundry basket and bring me all of the red shirts”. The language model in the robot would translate your request into the proper code to go get the red shirts. The robot was never trained on the task. Another type of embodiment would be training a robot using virtual reality simulations. Using an simulation, a robot could be trained on thousands of scenarios until the real world can be swapped out and the robot doesn’t “notice”. This section also includes factory automation and human prosthetics. There will be some overlap with other categories like autonomous vehicles. I first learned about embodiment from Alan Thompson. I highly recommend his video explainer: https://youtu.be/peLqYP9BAUg?si=2FzrvDlw-qaQFaCx.
This week’s latest robot and embodiment AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/robotics-and-embodiment-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Science/Medicine AI News of the Week: AI’s strength is learning patterns. This applies nicely to medical diagnosis and identifying trends. When combined with data and AI vision, this means AI is good at looking at x-rays. Language models are helping with patient interface, and robotics and augmented reality are advancing surgery. Powerful enterprise models like Google’s Alphafold can master protein folding. Other models can read ancient scrolls without opening them.
This week’s latest AI science and medicine news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/science-and-medicine-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
AI Video News of the Week: AI video in this case refers to generative video. Much like imagery meant generative imagery. This usually text-to-video, where a user enters a prompt (“a wizard walking out of a flaming building”) and a tool like Pika or Runway generates an video in the likeness of the description. It also covers animation of still images, where an image is given motion (like a photo of a waterfall appearing to have flowing water). As with images, this is different than AI vision, where an AI “looks at” an image or video and can derive context, details, and contents. Video, in this case, is video creation and modification/editing.
This week’s latest AI video news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/video-news-week-ending-05-03-2024/
X/Twitter/Grok: Grok is one of several AI’s developed by X, and it’s a bit blended in with Telsa and other Elon Musk technology. Not every week will have a Grok section, but like Meta, Google, Apple, and OpenAI, X will be in the news enough to have its own section.
This week’s latest X news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/twitter-x-grok-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Technical and AI Developer News of the Week: Everything that is too technical for general consumption goes here. These are stories I think are important, but might be inaccessible and confusing. It’s also a space for developer news and deep dives into how AI works, under the hood.
This week’s technical and dev AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/03/tech-and-development-week-ending-05-03-2024/
Credits/Sources
Most of these weekly links come from just a few prolific oversharing sources. Please follow them, as they work hard to find the news each week and they make it a lot easier for me to compile.
- Robert Scoble: https://x.com/Scobleizer
- Ethan Mollick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emollick/
- Alan Thompson: https://lifearchitect.ai/
- Theoretically Media: https://www.youtube.com/@TheoreticallyMedia
- The Rundown: https://www.therundown.ai/
- Bilawal Sidhu: https://twitter.com/bilawalsidhu/
- TLDR: https://tldr.tech/ai
- Jeremiah Owyang: https://twitter.com/jowyang
- Nick St. Pierre: https://twitter.com/nickfloats
- Dr. Jim Fan: https://twitter.com/DrJimFan
- All About AI: https://www.youtube.com/@AllAboutAI
- Marshall Kirkpatrick: https://aitimetoimpact.com/
- AI News (Smol Talk): https://buttondown.email/ainews/archive/
For previous issues, please visit the archives!
Thanks for reading!
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