A week in Generative AI: Nvidia, Consolidation & Apple
News for the week ending 24th March 2024
The big news of the week was Nvidia’s GTC event where Jensen Huang unveiled a huge number of new products from new GPU chips through to a simulated robotics training platform. We also saw some big changes at the top of Inflection AI and Stability AI in what could be the start of some consolidation in the GenAI sector.
Nvidia's keynote at GTC held some surprises
This was a big event, held at the 18,000 capacity SAP Center in San Jose. Jensen Huang even joked, saying to the audience “I hope you realise this is not a concert“. It’s a sign of how mainstream AI has now become that an Nvidia keynote like this can draw such a big crowd.
At the event, Nvidia unveiled their new “Blackwell” chip which delivers a 1000x increase in compute power vs the “Pascal” chip they released 8 years ago. Nvidia has increased compute power faster than Moore’s law over this period and plans to launch new chips every 6 months for several years, further increasing their pace of innovation.
Nvidia is using AI to help design these new chips, leading to a feedback loop of improvements where AI is helping to make AI faster/better. They also announced a huge number of other advancements, one of the more interesting being project GR00T, a foundational model for humanoid robotics as well as a new robot training simulator.
Microsoft hires Inflection co-founder to run consumer AI division
A big surprise this week, with news of Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simony joining Microsoft, as Inflection had built quite a different approach to GenAI chatbots with Pi, an emotionally intelligent personal AI.
Questions still linger over the future of Inflection and the impact this will have on its investors, but Microsoft is certainly playing hard and investing heavily when it comes to the battle for top AI talent!
Stability AI CEO resigns because you can't beat centralized AI with more centralized AI
Stability AI have been struggling for a little while now, facing challenges generating revenue and increased competition from Midjourney, OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 and other image generating models.
Both Stability AI and Inflection AI are what I’d describe as “2nd tier” AI companies, so maybe this week’s news is a sign that we’ll start to see some consolidation in the GenAI sector during the course of 2024. I suspect more power/influence will become concentrated in the big platforms like OpenAI and Google who are focused on “general models“ and applications with smaller companies needing to specialise in point-applications like AI-generated avatars (HeyGen), interactive characters (Character.ai), and transcription (Descript).
Apple researchers achieve breakthroughs in multimodal AI
It’s great to see Apple contributing to the GenAI research scene and this paper not only presents a new approach to multi-modal training, but also confirms the hypothesis that training a model on different types of content leads to better generalised performance.
We’re still just scratching the surface of what’s possible with multi-modality and I think we’ll see a lot more in this space as we add both sensor data and action/response data from robotics in the real world.
I’m excited to see what Apple announces at WWDC in June!
Open release of Grok-1
Off the back of Elon Musk suing OpenAI for abandoning its original open source mission to pursue profit, xAI has released Grok-1 to the open source community. This is by far and away the largest model ever to be open sourced at 314bn parameters, beating Falcon 180B. It’s also a “Mixture of Experts“ model, which I believe is the first of it’s kind to be open sourced.
AI Ethics News
New technology to show why images and video are genuine launches on BBC News
Why it's impossible to review AIs, and why TechCrunch is doing it anyway
AI versions of deceased loved ones could be a serious threat to mental health
Long Reads
Lex Fridman Podcast - Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Stratechery - Nvidia Waves and Moats
Wired - 8 Google Employees Invented Modern AI. Here’s the Inside Story
One Useful Thing - Which AI should I use? Superpowers and the State of Play
“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“
William Gibson