#190 - AI scaling struggles, OpenAI Agents, Super Weights

Our 190th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's* big AI news!
*and sometimes last last week's

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.

Note from Andrey: this one is coming out a bit later than planned, apologies! Next one will be coming out sooner.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected]

Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.

Sponsors:

• The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence
  

In this episode:
* OpenAI's pitch for a $100 billion data center and AI strategy plan outlines infrastructure and regulatory needs, emphasizing AI's foundational role akin to electricity. 
* Google's Gemini model challenges OpenAI's dominance, showing strong performance in chatbot arenas alongside generative AI advancements. 
* DeepMind's AlphaFold3 gets open-sourced for academic use, while new chips from NVIDIA and Google show significant performance boosts. 
* Anthropic and TSMC updates highlight strategic funding, regulation influences, and the complex dynamics of AI hardware and international policy.

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Timestamps + Links:

• (00:00:00) Intro / Banter
• (00:02:44) News Preview
• (00:03:34) Sponsor Break
• Tools & Apps
  • (00:04:36) OpenAI, Google and Anthropic Are Struggling to Build More Advanced AI
  • (00:16:22) OpenAI Nears Launch of AI Agent Tool to Automate Tasks for Users
  • (00:19:14) Google drops new Gemini model and it goes straight to the top of the LLM leaderboard
  • (00:19:14)  Chinese AI startup takes aim at OpenAI's Sora with image-to-video tool launch
  • (00:20:04) Introducing the Forge Reasoning API Beta and Nous Chat: An Evolution in LLM Inference
• Applications & Business
  • (00:23:47) OpenAI Discusses AI Data Center That Could Cost $100 Billion
  • (00:26:48) Elon Musk's massive AI data center gets unlocked — xAI gets approved for 150MW of power, enabling all 100,000 GPUs to run concurrently
  • (00:29:34) Newest Google and Nvidia Chips Speed AI Training
  • (00:34:45) Ex-OpenAI CTO Murati’s New Team Takes Shape
  • (00:34:45) Amazon Discussing New Multibillion-Dollar Investment in Anthropic
• Projects & Open Source
  • (00:37:52) Google DeepMind open-sources AlphaFold 3, ushering in a new era for drug discovery and molecular biology
  • (00:41:29) Near plans to build world’s largest 1.4T parameter open-source AI model
• Research & Advancements
  • (00:45:38) The Super Weight in Large Language Models
  • (00:55:42) Compositional Abilities Emerge Multiplicatively: Exploring Diffusion Models on a Synthetic Task
  • (01:03:47) Mixture-of-Transformers: A Sparse and Scalable Architecture for Multi-Modal Foundation Models
  • (01:08:14) Contextualized Evaluations: Taking the Guesswork Out of Language Model Evaluations
• Policy & Safety
  • (01:11:14) The Code of Practice for general-purpose AI offers a unique opportunity for the EU
  • (01:15:38) Three Sketches of ASL-4 Safety Case Components
  • (01:23:05) U.S Department of Commerce finalizes $6.6 billion CHIPS Act funding for TSMC Fab 21 Arizona site , TSMC cannot make 2nm chips abroad now: MOEA
  • (01:26:21) OpenAI to present plans for U.S. AI strategy and an alliance to compete with China
  • (01:30:42) OpenAI loses another lead safety researcher, Lilian Weng
• (01:33:00) Outro