A week in Generative AI: OpenAI, Apple Intelligence & F.02
News for the week ending 11th August 2024
There is lots of news this week from OpenAI, with a couple of co-founders leaving(ish), the announcement of their next DevDay and rumours of their next model, codenamed “Strawberry“, having advanced reasoning capabilities. It also looks like Apple Intelligence will come to the EU at launch, despite earlier reports, and Groq, the specialist AI chip company, annoucing a huge funding round to take on Nvidia. Figure AI also released their second generation robot after teasing it last week and there’s a table tennis playing robot from Google DeepMind, because why not?!
OpenAI co-founder Schulman leaves for Anthropic, Brockman takes extended leave
It’s been a big week of news from OpenAI, and not all for good reasons. The main headline is that there has been an exodus of three big names from OpenAI:
Greg Brockman, co-founder and President of OpenAI and Sam Altman’s right-hand man has taken an extended sabbatical until the end of the year.
John Schulman, another co-founder has left to join rival Anthropic, citing the desire to do more technical work alongside others that are deeply engaged in topics he’s interested in.
Peter Deng, a product manager for ChatGPT has also left recently.
This week OpenAI also announced their next DevDay, which is happening this time in San Francisco, London, and Singapore. The main San Francisco event is on the 1st October and OpenAI have already stated that they won’t be announcing their ‘next big model’, instead focusing on helping developers connect with each other and explore new features and products.
A few other snippets of news from OpenAI this week:
ChatGPT’s mobile app just had its biggest month yet.
OpenAI introduced Structured Outputs in the API for developers. This is a big deal as it bridges the gap between large language models and traditional programming.
There are rumours that the next model, codenamed project Strawberry, will deliver advanced reasoning.
Apple Intelligence may come to EU after all… but only for Mac
There are some hints that Apple Intelligence will be available in the EU at launch, despite Apple stating earlier in the summer that it wouldn’t launch until next year beacuse of the “uncertain regularoty environment“. Unfortunately it looks like Apple Intelligence will only be avaialble on Macs to start with, which makes sense as it’s only really the iPhone and iPad that are attracting regulatory scrutiny from the EU.
AI chip startup Groq lands $640M to challenge Nvidia
This is a huge investment round and comes alongside news that Yann LeCun will also serve as technical advisor to the company. Groq are the leading specialist AI-chip company, which can run large language models much faster and more efficiently. This is desperately needed to address the energy consumption challenges associated with the rapid growth of generative AI over the last couple of years.
Nvidia are currently estimated to control between 70% and 95% of the market for AI chips, so it’s important that new companies with alternative approaches get big financial backing like this.
Figure’s new humanoid robot leverages OpenAI for natural speech conversations
After last week’s tease, Figure have now released footage of their second generation humanoid robot. As I suspected, F.02 is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o advanced voice mode to enable natural speech conversations.
F.02 looks stuning and there are lots of really impressive mechanical innovations in the robot. However, it still looks pretty slow and awkward when walking and there are limited demonstrations of practical uses for F.02. Hopefully these will come, otherwise this is a great step in the right direction of progress, but not practically groundbreaking.
Google DeepMind develops a ‘solidly amateur’ table tennis robot
This is fun! Nowhere near olympic-level, but achieving a 55% win-rate against “intermediate“ players. It’s not able to react to fast shots, and like the F.02 has limited practical uses, but interesting to see nonetheless.
AI Ethics News
OpenAI Can Watermark AI Text With '99.9% Certainty,' but It Won't (Yet)
UK launches formal probe into Amazon's ties with AI startup Anthropic
OpenAI finds that GPT-4o does some truly bizarre stuff sometimes
Apple Intelligence's Instructions Reveal How Apple Is Directing Its New AI
Long Reads
Kurzgesagt: A.I. ‐ Humanity's Final Invention?
Techcrunch: Tesla Dojo: Elon Musk’s big plan to build an AI supercomputer, explained
“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“
William Gibson