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Daily Digest: Maybe, it's all about money

Cutting costs, raising more or royalties

October 09, 2023

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Daily Digest #258

Hello folks, we’re thinking about expert-hosted video workshops that teach you how to do X with AI (e.g. build an AI chatbot without code, write and edit a blog post, generate images with midjourney etc) - they’ll be in a pro-tier subscription (inexpensive) and recorded.

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Here’s what we have today;

PICKS

  1. Microsoft's cooking up a new AI chip codenamed Athena. Sources say it could drop as early as next month. Microsoft and Open AI have been testing this new baby for a while. 🍿Our Summary (also below)

  2. Andreessen Horowitz discussed backing Ideogram - a rival to Midjourney seeking a $500 million valuation. Ideogram is seeking more funding to pay for increased cloud computing capacity amid high demand and competition in AI image generation. 🍿Our Summary (also below)

  3. BBC will block ChatGPT AI from scraping its content. The BBC thinks this scraping is not in the public interest. However, they are open to agree on a more structured and sustainable approach. Corporate for pay and play, right?

  4. Inside e/acc, the new religion in Silicon Valley. Followers want to accelerate technological progress as fast as possible without regulation, while others think it’s a cult. 🍿Our Summary (also below)

TOP TOOLS

  • LLM Boxing - Watch Mistral 7B and Llama 2 13B battle it out.

  • LongLLaMA - Large language model capable of handling long contexts of 256k tokens.

  • Leap Workflows - Build, test, & iterate multi-modal AI chains in your backend.

  • Funcchain - The most pythonic way of writing cognitive systems.

  • FL0 AI - Use AI to debug, deploy and scale your backend applications.

  • Airparser - Extract structured data from emails, PDFs, and documents.

  • Llava 1.5 - Locally usable multimodal vision assistant.

  • Script monkey - AI that writes entire screenplays for you.

NEWS
QUICK BITES

Microsoft's cooking up a new AI chip codenamed Athena. Sources say it could drop as early as next month. Microsoft and Open AI have been testing this new baby for a while.

What is going on here?

Microsoft could launch a new AI chip at its annual developer conference.

What does this mean?

This new chip, Athena, is meant for giant data centres and training those large language models we all know and love. Microsoft started working on Athena around 2019, years after Amazon and Google (right around the time they invested $1B in Open AI).

The game plan is to offer Athena through Azure cloud and reduce costs on all things AI. Their hope is to match Athena’s performance to Nvidia's H100 GPUs. Microsoft has also teamed up with AMD on their upcoming AI chip. Seems like a well-thought process to reduce reliance on its dear pal Nvidia.

Why should I care?

Owning the LLM hardware means Microsoft can accelerate its AI capabilities and push Azure ahead harder. This two-pronged approach - partnerships and proprietary tech - is textbook Microsoft strategy. Open AI wants to make custom hardware too. But Microsoft's move shows building competitive AI chips takes years.

And Nvidia needs to watch out. Despite hitting a trillion-dollar valuation, interest in alternative AI chips is rising. With big tech making their own, and startups looking at Intel or AMD, Nvidia's future growth might take a hit.

QUICK BITES

Ideogram, a startup using AI to generate unique images, has plans to raise $75-100 million in a new funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Ideogram launched last month with excellent text generation in images as its main selling point.

What is going on here?

Ideogram is seeking more funding to pay for increased cloud computing capacity amid high demand and competition in AI image generation.

What does this mean?

Ideogram, founded by former Google researchers, came out swinging with an AI text-to-image generator that pulled in over 1 million users in a little over 1 month. But its viral growth has led to server capacity issues, forcing the company to pause sign-ups at times.

Ideogram is now looking to raise $75-100M to expand its computing infrastructure. This signals a $500M pre-money valuation without any revenue.

If you’re following AI launched on X, a16z looks like the compute messiah for startups (and researchers). Ideogram could get all their troubles taken away by the a16z gods (in exchange for some equity, of course).

Why should I care?

AI startups are hitting server limits faster than I finish my pizza. As demand spikes, access to capital and servers is life or death for startups like Ideogram.

Thing is, Ideogram's just one of many players in this space battling tech titans like Google, Meta, and Adobe. And not to be a buzzkill, AI images have brought up the heat again in recent weeks (DallE-3 😉).

Also, who knows what legal troubles await around copyright issues? But when has potential drama stopped money from flowing in?

QUICK BITES

There is an emerging movement in Silicon Valley called "effective accelerationism" or "e/acc". Some think it’s the purpose of their life (and all humans), few think it’s a passing phase while others feel it’s more of a fanatic cult.

What is going on here?

E/acc is a pro-tech movement gaining traction in Silicon Valley that wants to accelerate technological progress as fast as possible without regulation.

What does this mean?

The e/acc ideology originated on social media from anonymous accounts like Beff Jezos and Bayeslord. Their philosophy? That we should step on the gas to advance technology as fast as humanly possible without pesky regulations slowing things down.

E/acc began as an online community filled with memes and confrontational rhetoric. But since this summer, it has been attracting major tech figures like Y Combinator's Garry Tan and Marc Andreessen. The core belief of the movement is that advancing technology rapidly will create abundance and solve humanity's problems. Recently the context has shifted to take “AI doomerism” hands-on.

The movement is getting a foot in the real world with conferences with Tan, Martin Shkreli, and others present. Some also want e/acc to become an organized political force.

Why should I care?

The rise of e/acc shows an ideological rift in Silicon Valley over AI's risks and regulations. As calls increase to regulate AI technology, e/acc represents a vocal countermovement of techno-optimists who believe innovation should proceed unchecked. And if we were to get deep, memes are a major part of how ideas spread in the online world—and eventually offline as well.

Whether e/acc successfully mobilizes as a political force or remains an online novelty, its rapid growth signals the debate on AI's societal impact is escalating. We should pay attention to movements like e/acc as harbingers of how different tech philosophies could shape AI's future. Understanding these perspectives, even if we disagree, can lead to more informed AI governance.

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