Daily Digest: Elon's progress

PLUS: Gov wants AI officers, AI chatbot tutorial

March 29, 2024

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Hello folks, here’s what we have today;

PICKS

  1. I published a tutorial: Build an AI chatbot with a knowledge source, in 5 minutes.

  2. Elon’s xAI is starting to make serious progress. They just announced Grok-1.5, an improvement over Grok-1. Grok 1.5 joins the long-context game with accepting upto 128k tokens. It has better reasoning and code generation too. It will be soon available to early testers and X users.

  3. The Biden administration is ordering that every federal agency appoint a "chief AI officer" to look over the responsible use of artificial intelligence in their operations and day to day work. The US government will also hire 100 AI professionals to build its roaster of AI talent.🍿Our Summary (also below)

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QUICK BITES

Elon’s xAI has been making progress quick now. It open-sourced Grok-1 less than 2 weeks ago and is now announcing Grok-1.5.

What is going on here?

xAI announced Grok-1.5 and improvement over their previous model Grok-1.

What does this mean?

Grok 1.5 gets two improvements over it’s baby brother Grok-1.

  • It has gotten better in reasoning, math, and code generation.

  • It joins the long-context game with accepting upto 128k tokens.

Based on benchmarks, Grok-1.5 looks like another model that’s almost near GPT-4 level (March 2023 one) but not quite there. Others in this category are Mistral-large and Claude 3 Sonnet.

Grok-1.5 will be available to early testers and users on X (Twitter) soon.

Why should I care?

Although there’s no mention of open-sourcing Grok-1.5, I consider the possibility high based on Elon’s ongoing lawsuit with OpenAI. It hasn’t been long since Grok-1 was open sourced, so we have to wait and see how it affects the open-source ecosystem. But I consider that it won’t negligible.

Also, it’s interesting to see xAI making quick progress. Grok-1.5’s context window should be able to use near a thousand tweets in one go. Imagine asking Grok, “Hey, what all did Ben tweet about in last month?”

QUICK BITES

The Biden administration is ordering that every federal agency appoint a "chief AI officer" to look over the responsible use of artificial intelligence in their operations and day to day work.

What is going on here?

The White House is cracking the AI governance whip across all federal agencies.

What does this mean?

Every single US government agency now needs to designate a senior official as their chief AI officer within the next 60 days. These AI chiefs will basically act as watchdogs, monitoring how their agencies use AI and ensuring it doesn't trample on citizen safety or civil rights.

Their main responsibilities? Conducting risk assessments on all agency AI applications, enforcing compliance with new federal AI standards, and serving as the public-facing authority on their agency's AI efforts. That means these AI officers will be the one giving you advance notice about impactful AI deployments and talking to the public about opt-outs for automated decision-making systems.

The US federal government will also hire 100 AI professionals i.e. people who know the tech and can work with it to build its AI talent roaster.

Why should I care?

Having a key officer for each agency, instead of scrambling all around makes sense. These chief AI officers will have serious authority to rein in reckless government uses of AI that could automate bias, erode due process, or jeopardise public safety. At the same time, their mandate is also to actively advance American AI capabilities and leadership.

The question is how effective these officers would be i.e will they do the real work or just talk around like politicians do. Ideally, they will act as a champion of tech and people both.

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