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Daily Digest: New LLM in town
PLUS: OpenAI's new secret, more money and Bard update
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Daily Digest #291
Hello folks, here’s what we have today;
PICKS
Inflection, the AI startup by Reid Hoffman and Mustafa Suleyman has released their new LLM Inflection-2. They claim it’s the world’s second-best LLM after GPT-4 based on benchmarks.🍿Our Summary (also below)
OpenAI tender to continue after Altman returns. The employee stock sale led by Thrive Capital that values AI OpenAI at $86 billion is expected to close in December after Sam is reinstated following last weekend’s brief firing.🍿Our Summary (also below)
OpenAI made an AI breakthrough before Altman firing. This new research named Q * (Q star) is reported as capable of solving grade-school-level math problems. There are no confirmations/leaks of what Q-Star actually is but Twitter is going nuts explaining it as a mixture of Q-learning and A-Star techniques (previously known). And just like other leaks/speculations this week, now this is linked as the reason for Sam’s firing.
Bard can now help with understanding YouTube videos. In quieter news, Bard can now understand YouTube videos, summarize them or reference certain parts of a video for its answers. It sometimes declines for some videos (maybe copyright issues) but I tested it with songs (not the intended use case) and it was honestly good.
TOP TOOLS
Readany - Turn any website into a podcast/audiobook.
Vector to 3D - Convert SVG to 3D with a high quality ray-tracing render.
Llama packs by Llamaindex - Hub of prepackaged modules that you can use to kickstart your LLM application.
Grail Writer - Generate unlimited SEO-optimized articles powered by your OpenAI API key.
Hey Mind - A mirror for the mind.
Humane.watch - Humane ai pin on the Apple Watch.
Codesandbox adds autocomplete suggestions powered by Codeium.
Voice Changer by ElevanLabs - Transform your voice into another character and control its emotion and delivery.
NEWS
Intro to large language models by Andrej Karpathy.
The AI engineer path - Learn how to build next-generation AI products and kick-start your career as an AI Engineer.
Lookahead decoding by LMsys Org - Parallel decoding algorithm to accelerate LLM inference.
Defog raises $2.2M to build LLMs for data analysis.
Neuralink is recruiting for its PRIME study (brain implants in humans).
Opinion articles on the OpenAI news:
OpenAI & grand strategy - Preparing for tech's coming battles. - Packy McCormick (Not Boring)
What comes next for Sam Altman’s OpenAI? (The Information)
Sam and OpenAI team are back! More surprise developments! - Dharmesh Shah (Hubspot)
The king is back in the castle. - Dan Shipper (Every)
QUICK BITES
Inflection, the AI startup by Reid Hoffman and Mustafa Suleyman has released their new LLM Inflection-2. They claim it’s the world’s second-best LLM after GPT-4 based on benchmarks.
What is going on here?
Inflection AI releases its second LLM Inflection 2.
What does this mean?
Inflection-2 will soon power its consumer product PI (short for personal intelligence). Inflection-2 was trained on H100 GPUs (instead of A100s), resulting in lesser cost and higher speed while serving it, despite it being way bigger than Inflection-1.
They have not released details about model size, training size etc., just a bunch of selective comparisons with models. So, the claim of the second-best LLM is a bit fragile. But the performance on benchmarks is still impressive putting it in the top 3-4 LLMs alongside GPT-4 and Claude 2.
Why should I care?
Soon after formation, Inflection announced that it’ll create the largest cluster of H100 GPUs to train LLMs. And that move seems to be working out for them based on the claims about cost and speed. Though the team behind Inflection is pro-regulation and state certifications, so don’t expect the full power of Inflection-2 to be available via Pi.
QUICK BITES
An employee stock sale led by Thrive Capital that values AI startup OpenAI at $86 billion is expected to close in December after CEO Sam Altman was reinstated following a brief firing.
What is going on here?
OpenAI's business has grown exponentially since launching ChatGPT in late 2022, leading investors to commit up to $1 billion to buy shares from employees and other shareholders in a tender offer valuing the company at over 3 times its last valuation just 8 months ago.
What does this mean?
The tender offer allows employees to sell some of their shares and realize big gains while giving new and existing investors a rare chance to get equity in the fast-growing startup. Thrive Capital is leading the tender and plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars.
Ashton Kutcher's VC firm Sound Ventures also plans to participate after initially committing $100 million. The deal nearly fell apart when Altman was suddenly fired as CEO last week, but several major investors pushed for his reinstatement to avoid OpenAI imploding and their shares becoming worthless.
Why should I care?
There’s growing investor concern about OpenAI's unusual nonprofit/for-profit structure and lack of governance oversight. While Altman's return allowed the tender offer to get back on track, investors still have many unanswered questions about OpenAI's direction and accountability.
The tensions exposed in the past week mean more drama likely lies ahead as investors seek more control and transparency even as OpenAI asserts its independence.
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