A week in Generative AI: Mistral, OpenAI & Optimus
News for the week ending 17th December 2023
A quieter news week this week as we head towards the end of the year. There’s a great presentation from Benedict Evans at the Slush conference that is well worth a watch and a good long read from TechCrunch on how enterprise CIOs are taking it slowly with generative AI.
Mistral AI, a Paris-based OpenAI rival, closed its $415 million funding round
This is a huge funding round, and great to see an EU based start up getting this kind of capital. They’ve got an interesting approach too, releasing some models to the open source community whilst keeping others behind an API, giving them an important stream of revenue. Some really good capabilities in their latest model too!
OpenAI inks deal with Axel Springer on licensing news for model training
This is definitely a good direction of travel for the genAI industry and I hope to see more publisher deals added to this over time. Probably what Google should have been doing years ago…
AI, and Everything Else
This is a great talk/presentation from Benedict Evans, well worth the 30 minute watch if you’re interested in some of the open questions around generative AI right now.
All the Jobs AI Is Coming for, According to a UK Study
This is a good study from the department of education in the UK. The first of it’s kind that I’ve seen that tried to break down the tasks in jobs and really try to quantify where AI will have an impact.
Tesla announces Optimus Gen-2 AI-powered robot
There are some impressive improvements over Gen-1, especially in the hands. Still looks like it walks quite slowly to me (this is a real time video) but maybe these robots don’t need to move too quickly on the factory floor, which is where they are heading first.
AI Ethics News
Introducing Purple Llama for Safe and Responsible AI Development
How GenAI can turn an autobiography into an interactive Black history lesson
OpenAI thinks superhuman AI is coming — and wants to build tools to control it
Elon Musk's Grok AI Is Pushing Misinformation and Legitimizing Conspiracies
Long Reads
OpenAI - Weak-to-strong generalization
Benedict Evans - AI, and everything else presentation
The Guardian - AI scientists make ‘exciting’ discovery using chatbots to solve maths problems
Techcrunch - When it comes to generative AI in the enterprise, CIOs are taking it slow
“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“
William Gibson