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Daily Digest: Ben's Bites year in review & what's next...

PLUS: Mind-blowing Mistral & EU cranks up the AI act

December 11, 2023

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Daily Digest #303

Hi folks, just wanted to do a little year-in-review and how Ben’s Bites is changing…(normal email is below)

I started Ben's Bites as a daily AI newsletter in October 2022.

There were no others. Now there are lots.

For the first two posts, I wrote long-form content. But I had a job (from selling my company) so I had to make the posts easier to produce. I started curating all the best news and product launches in AI instead.

That was, and still is, Ben's Bites. We have 100k+ subscribers ❤️! That part isn’t changing…

I don't want to keep just playing the 'free AI newsletter' game. It doesn't feel very "me". The news and product launches can be exhausting for some, and that's ok. I like going deeper.

I like following my curiosity. I like jamming on new ideas. I like reverse engineering businesses. I like digging into the details.

My last startup, Makerpad, worked because I could explore new ideas, build them without code and film my process. That became the world’s #1 'no-code education' site.

Then I sold it to Zapier.

I had twins 6 months ago. Well, my wife did. But I did too! And after selling a company you're sometimes a little burnt out. I didn't want to build a company again. I was tired.

Ben's Bites is an accidental company. And it's filling me with energy. We have a small team helping it all come together - shoutout to Keshav, Daniel, Adam and Shanice.

Fun fact: We've covered 12k launches and stories, driving over 4 million clicks since we started.

2 weeks ago, I launched an experiment where I wrote deeper posts every day. The feedback has been phenomenal, thank you. Each post has been the most clicked link in the email. every. single. time.

I'm no longer tired. (It helps that the twins sleep through the night now).

I'm launching Ben's Bites Pro.

A weekly newsletter covering AI trends, ideas, business breakdowns and how companies are using it internally.

I will publish 1-2 posts a week that go deeper.

What to expect:

How are businesses using AI internally and in their products? There are a lot of AI tools out there and even more chatter about how revolutionary it is. But how is it being used inside a business? How are different teams using AI for work? Where in a company's product is it being used? What are the results? These are the questions I'll be tackling. e.g.

AI trends and business ideas. New opportunities are everywhere. Sometimes you just need to know how to find them. I'll be exploring what trends are taking off, who's capitalised on them already, how they did it and what business you could start to get in on the trend. e.g.

Business breakdowns of AI companies and entrepreneurs. Ever wondered how a solo founder makes $1M+ per year with an AI tool? Or how the entrepreneurs of big AI companies get to where they are now? I'll break down their stories and give you takeaway lessons from each deep dive. e.g.

Tool breakdowns. When do I use this AI tool vs other AI tools? Who is this tool perfect for? What are the features I should care about? We all have a thousand questions when it comes to tools. I'll make it simpler. E.g.

There will be no ads on the Pro tier posts.

What does it cost? Early-bird pricing is $100/year for the first 200 people. Increasing to $150/year after that.

If you’d like to sign up, you can do that here:

PICKS

  1. Mistral AI has released Mixtral 8x7B, an open-source sparse mixture-of-experts model with 45B parameters. Mistral models are now available via its dev platform and API in beta. Try the new model on replicate here or this chat model built on top of it.🍿Our Summary (also below)

  2. The EU has reached a provisional agreement on its Artificial Intelligence Act. The Act adds bans on multiple AI applications and systems based on their level of risk, but again with vague and wide statements.🍿Our Summary

  3. OpenAI picks WilmerHale lawyers for Altman firing investigation. Bret Taylor (current chair of the OpenAI board) mentions that they talked with many firms before going with WilmerHale. Also, Bret will be leaving when these problems are taken care of.

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TOP TOOLS
NEWS
QUICK BITES

Mistral AI has released Mixtral 8x7B, an open-source sparse mixture-of-experts model with 45B parameters that achieves state-of-the-art performance among open models. Mistral models are now available via its dev platform and API in beta.

What is going on here?

French AI startup Mistral releases a new open-source model.

What does this mean?

Mixtral matches or exceeds LLaMA 2 70B and GPT-3.5 on most NLP benchmarks, with 6x faster inference speed than LLaMA models. Mixtral uses a “mixture of experts” network that selectively uses only 12B of its 45B total parameters per inference, keeping costs similar to a 12B model. [Mostly everyone believes] that GPT-4 is also a mixture of experts.

Relevant links: magnet for the model [1], Mixtral on Replicate [2], Mixtral fine-tuned for chat [3].

Mistral now also has API endpoints and a platform for these models. There are 3 generative endpoints (Mistral-tiny, small and medium) and one embeddings endpoint (Mistral-embed). Mistral medium runs on another unreleased model with higher performance.

Why should I care?

Just like their first model, Mistral realised this one by tweeting a magnet to download the model. But another factor that boosted Mistral’s launch was Google’s edited demo of Gemini without any access to the models.

Mistral also raised at a $2B valuation just a few days back. Reminder: the startup was formed this year in June. It’s releasing the best-in-the-class open-source models for everyone to use. Along with Llama, these models are gearing to take OpenAI’s market share.

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