Let's start with positive news, because with the billions being thrown into AI, it's quickly becoming about corporate politics or the egos running the companies. Which often ignores the new applications that can affect our lives in a positive way.
Gallery of Hope and AI Consensus
That's why the Gallery of Hope, an exhibition in London of memories yet to be made, is very special. AI was used to offer sick people a glimpse into their future, from attending a child's wedding to taking a special holiday, moments they know they may not live to see. It is a valuable contribution of technology to breast cancer awareness and the fight against it.
There is more positive news about AI from the UK. Where social media have played a detrimental role with disinformation during elections, Polis is now being used, an AI-powered tool that allows groups with very different opinions to reach consensus through voting and discussion. Might be a good tool to start with in most parliaments!
Interview tip: Hassabis instead of Altman
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was a guest on Lex Fridman's podcast for nearly two hours, in the week it was announced that Altman is making the rounds in Hollywood to promote Sora, the new service that can generate complete videos from text instructions. Altman remained very vague on the issue of who gets paid for OpenAI's use of other people's work as training data:
"We’ve tried some different models. But if I’m like an artist for example, A, I would like to be able to opt out of people generating art in my style. And B, if they do generate art in my style, I’d like to have some economic model associated with that."
- Sam Altman, CEO OpenAI
Sounds sweet, but Fridman didn't ask further about that sentence "we tried different models.What was tried and with whom? Which website, YouTuber or Instagrammer was paid for the fact that OpenAI probably, because that too was not discussed, copied their data and fed it into their system? The movie studios are eager to reduce actors' and crews' gages by using Sora, but how will they be compensated if their work is reused without the proper attribution and permission?
Take a look at this beautiful video created with Sora that OpenAI shared on Instagram: would Bugatti and Audi have given their permission, let alone been compensated, for the obviously brand-inspired images?
A more interesting insight into the thoughts of a leading AI developer than the podcast with Altman is this portrait of Demis Hassabis, the AI project leader at Google. The intro alone is feature-worthy:
"Demis Hassabis stares intently through the screen when I ask him whether he can save Google. It’s early evening in his native U.K. and the DeepMind founder is working overtime. His Google-owned AI research house now leads the company’s entire AI research effort, after ingesting Google Brain last summer, and the task ahead is immense."
Google is still doing quite okay
It is true that OpenAI and other smart chatbots pose an existential threat to Google, but Gemini is certainly not hopeless. Especially since Gemini can be deployed for free while OpenAI has to charge a subscription fee to survive, as the company needs every billion. That Altman is not a cheap guy, but I'll come back to that. Looking at the numbers, the financial performance of Alphabet, Google's parent company, has not suffered from the rise of OpenAI:
Quarter | revenue | net income
Q4 2022 | 76.05 | 13.62
Q4 2023 | 86.31 | 20.69
These are amounts in billions of dollars, pushing Alphabet's projected revenue toward three hundred and fifty billion dollars this year. That is comparable to the GDP of Colombia or Denmark, so Google's obituaries are somewhat premature.
Incidentally, am I the only one who thinks, upon reading that Hassabis has a Chinese-Singaporean mother and a Greek-Cypriot father, "so nice, how will they have met?
Voice clone not public for a while yet, because of... voting?
Back to OpenAI, which announced it had created a voice clone application, but currently only for a select group of companies because of the dangers of misuse.
"We recognize that generating speech that resembles people’s voices has serious risks, which are especially top of mind in an election year" said OpenAI, which claims it can mimic someone's voice with just 15 seconds of recording a person talking.
An investigation is already underway into an incident in which thousands of voters received "robocalls" from President Biden during the Democratic primaries in New Hampshire - at least, that's what they thought, because it wasn't him. Although Biden could also have been mistaken, which apparently happens to him occasionally.
A hundred billion dollar data center
The phenomenal site The Information had another scoop: Microsoft and OpenAI are working on a whopping one hundred billion dollar data center for an AI supercomputer with the delightfully pretentious name of Stargate. This in an effort to reduce dependence on Nvidia.
Reading the reports more closely, I'm especially interested in the rounding off method used by the journalists who reported the story: apparently, the project is estimated to cost "more than one hundred and fifteen billion dollars," but that doesn't look as good, so they rounded it off, downwards, to one hundred billion. For that fifteen billion after the decimal point, thirty juggernauts of data centers could normally be built. In AI, everything is bigger and more expensive; but a few hundred times more expensive?
Elon Musk and Amazon are still in it
Musk announced on X that his latest AI chatbot, Grok 1.5, will be available next week and will be better than all AI models, but he also said the same thing about the built quality of the Tesla Cybertruck before the window shattered seconds later. In short, we'll see.
Amazon announced it was investing nearly three billion dollars in OpenAI competitor Anthropic, maker of AI chatbot Claude. I enjoyed the way the Amazon man barely gave the journalist a chance to ask a question and regurgitated his entire press release, seemingly without breathing. You can see him trying to hold his laughter.
Open source AI model: Databricks
In the titanic battle between OpenAI/Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta, it is nice that startup Databricks has managed to develop a powerful open source AI model. Hopefully this will prove to be a serious option for startups and large companies to develop new AI applications without dependence on the Big Tech titans.
Last notable fact: among all the calls for software startups at leading startup incubator Y Combinator, Sam Altman's former employer, was a call to bring old-fashioned manufacturing back to the United States. Indeed, it is helpful if people can build something, especially when well over a hundred billion is being put into a new kind of data center. In this, Elon Musk is right: there is a lot of focus on design, but not enough on production. Microsoft and OpenAI are going to experience that when they actually start building a mega data center combined with a supercomputer. That's something very different from a big X-Box.
Spotlight 9: Cathie Wood guardian angel of Tesla
In what has been so far a dramatic year for Tesla, in which the company lost nearly 30 percent of its market capitalization, becoming the worst-performing stock in the S&P 500, TSLA shares suddenly rose more than five percent this week.
Cathie Wood's Ark Innovation ETF bought TSLA on Monday for twenty-eight million dollars, and as if that wasn't enough, Ark pocketed some more Tesla shares on Thursday for fourteen million dollars. Earlier this month Ark published a jubilant analysis of Tesla to which Musk responded briefly on X with: "wow.
Ark Invest has about as many haters as fans but at least it dares to come up with striking public reflections. Hopefully Ark will be proved right with this optimistic view of the near future:
"Techno-economic discontinuity is a process whereby technological breakthroughs create sudden and unprecedented transformations. Such discontinuities occurred during the second industrial revolution after introductions of the internal combustion engine, electrification, and telephony. We believe that a similar, unprecedented technological boom is now underway. ARK identifies five innovation platforms—Public Blockchains, Multiomic Sequencing, Energy Storage, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence—as the areas of technological foment creating the most meaningful convergences today. They are the emerging “general purpose technologies”1 that we believe will transform and accelerate economic growth."
- Ark Invest
This is a very positive vision, but one strongly focused on economic progress. If this economic growth can be accompanied by the development of technology that enables large-scale removal of CO2 from the atmosphere, there is hope for the world.
I would love to hear your response and tips and comments are always very welcome.
Enjoy your Sunday, see you next week!
