The Memo - 11/Apr/2023

Anthropic's Claude-Next, OpenAI to capture $100T of world's wealth, the Stanford report, EleutherAI's Pythia 12B, and much more!

Apr 10, 2023

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 11/Apr/2023

Welcome back to The Memo.

AI is advancing much more quickly than any previous technology or invention. It is now nearly a certainty that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—and the runaway of the singularity (wiki)—will occur long before governmental or intergovernmental organizations have put effective policy in place.

As with nearly all major new human inventions post-GPT-4, AI should be directly engaged to solve this puzzle. Applying limited human minds to ‘super wicked problems’ (wiki) like global climate change, economic overhauls, AI policy, and even AI alignment, is both inefficient and ineffective. Instead, these conundrums are best given to AI itself.

In this edition, the Policy section focuses on the OpenAI/CIA link, AI science versus policy time lag, and new AI guidance out of Washington as the US Government heats up. We also feature an exclusive look at my confidential draft video on AI alignment.

We’ve had a couple of queries about searching The Memo archives for keywords, and you can do that in the platform here:
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In the Toys to play with section, we look at a new (free) interface for ChatGPT with voice-in and voice-out, a clever Midjourney v5 prompt set, a new chatbot for the M1 Macbook, and much more…

We’re also piloting a private discussion channel for paid subscribers, details at the end of this edition.

The BIG Stuff

New viz: AI Race 2023! (7/Apr/2023)

Sources:

BritGPT: ‘“Because AI needs computing horsepower, I today commit around £900m of funding… for an exascale supercomputer,” said the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt.’
Anthropic Claude-Next (see below): ‘we have been convinced of the necessity of commercialization, which we fully committed to in September [2022]…We’ve developed a strategy for go-to-market/’
Meta AI: ‘the company will commercialize its generative artificial intelligence by December [2023].’
Google/DeepMind Gemini: ‘Gemini’s goal is to develop a large language model (a computer program that can understand and generate human-like language) and will use up to 1 trillion parameters.’
OpenAI GPT-5: ‘[rumor only] GPT-5 is scheduled to complete training this December [2023] and that OpenAI expects it to achieve AGI.‘

It is possible that NVIDIA, Cerebras, and Tesla AI could also be in this list, though I haven’t seen any hard evidence that any of them are aiming for 2T+ parameters.

Watch the video:

Anthropic training Claude-Next (7/Apr/2023)

Anthropic says that it plans to build a “frontier model” — tentatively called “Claude-Next” — 10 times more capable than today’s most powerful AI [Alan: 5-10T parameters?], but that this will require a billion dollars in spending over the next 18 months.
Anthropic describes the frontier model as a “next-gen algorithm for AI self-teaching,” making reference to an AI training technique it developed called “constitutional AI.” At a high level, constitutional AI seeks to provide a way to align AI with human intentions — letting systems respond to questions and perform tasks using a simple set of guiding principles.
Anthropic estimates its frontier model will require on the order of 10^25 FLOPs, or floating point operations — several orders of magnitude larger than even the biggest models today. Of course, how this translates to computation time depends on the speed and scale of the system doing the computation; Anthropic implies (in the deck) it relies on clusters with “tens of thousands of GPUs.” [Alan: Anthropic uses Google Cloud exclusively (press release 3/Feb/2023), which uses proprietary TPU v4 chips.]…
“These models could begin to automate large portions of the economy,” the pitch deck reads. “We believe that companies that train the best 2025/26 models will be too far ahead for anyone to catch up in subsequent cycles.”

The Memo by LifeArchitect.ai

The Memo - 11/Apr/2023

Anthropic's Claude-Next, OpenAI to capture $100T of world's wealth, the Stanford report, EleutherAI's Pythia 12B, and much more!

The BIG Stuff

This post is for paid subscribers