Welcome to our weekly roundup of handmade AI news.
This week, OpenAI gave us more vaporware to stay up for.
We won’t need data centers to coach models.
And big tech writes anti-establishment letters to ‘save’ AI.
Let’s dig in.
Strawberry rumors
You can have seen strawberries feature disproportionately in AI discussions this week. AI models still can’t inform you what number of Rs the word “strawberry” comprises and Sam Altman has been posting random pics of them on X.
Why is the AI world ranting on about strawberries? In frustratingly consistent fashion, OpenAI has leaked whispers and rumors of a brand new model called Strawberry and one other called Orion.
There’s been talk that they showed these to the Feds so who knows if we’ll get to make use of them or see them tossed into the “too dangerous” pile together with the GPT-4o voice assistant.
ChatGPT Plus users can have to attend a bit longer for features like Sora, Voice, and SearchGPT… pic.twitter.com/WRlQDEVZKb
Our first taste of voice interaction with ChatGPT may very well come from Apple. The iPhone 16 and Apple Intelligence rollout schedule could soon deliver a vastly improved Siri powered by ChatGPT.
Thankfully, Google has been releasing actual products and not only AI vaporware. The company unveiled 3 recent experimental Gemini models this week including a tiny one which punches above its weight.
Game changer
To train an AI model, you wish an enormous, expensive data center stuffed with NVIDIA hardware, right? Maybe not. An AI training optimization algorithm called DisTrO could completely disrupt how AI models are trained.
Imagine the computing power of the world’s internet-connected PCs and GPUs training a model sort of like how Bitcoin mining works. DisTrO could make that occur.
AI on the job
Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Matt Garman told his employees that AI could replace developers inside the following 24 months. This reality prompted an interesting discussion of adjusting workstreams and the worth of creativity.
The Chinese are also fans of AWS. With a bit creativity and AWS, they’ve been capable of access NVIDIA chips on the US export ban list.
While Garman and others attempt to reassure their human staff, Swedish FinTech company Klarna is embracing AI because it plans to slash its headcount by 50%. Klarna’s CEO says AI will see the corporate double its revenue per worker.
Will laws break AI?
Several AI safety regulations have recently kicked in, or are about to be signed into law, and never everyone seems to be a fan.
OpenAI has been critical of California’s AI safety bill which may very well be signed into law in the following few days. Former OpenAI employees turned whistleblowers wrote a scathing response to OpenAI’s opposition to the AI safety bill and called ‘Liar!’ on Sam Altman’s claims that he’s pro-AI safety.
Is SB 1047 a foul idea or is Sam Altman just being a crybaby?
https://t.co/BI85vrqAaT pic.twitter.com/TGphg58bRP
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek aren’t fans of the EU AI Act. They wrote a letter to EU regulators criticizing the regulations that kicked on this month. The short version of the letter is: ‘AI could give us cool stuff but you’re stopping that from happening.’
In other news…
Here are another clickworthy AI stories we enjoyed this week:
This is completely insane. A model is generating this game, in real-time, because the user plays.
Map the progress/trajectory of most other AI modalities onto this, and in just a few years, we’ll have AAA-quality games being generated in real time. pic.twitter.com/RQi8396j8u
And that’s a wrap.
Do you think that we’ll get to check out Strawberry or Orion anytime soon? I keep telling myself that I’m done waiting in expectation for GPT-5 but who am I kidding?
The DisTrO story may very well be huge. Would you hook your PC as much as be a part of the ‘hive mind’ to coach an enormous open-source model? AI alignment and guardrails shall be tough to implement once we get decentralized AI.
We’ll be keeping an in depth eye on California’s SB 1047 bill over the following few days. If it passes, we could see a bunch of AI folks joining Elon Musk as he heads to Texas. Or will OpenAI and Meta just suck it up and stay put?
Let us know what you think that, follow us on X, and please send us links to interesting AI research or news we can have missed.
