The Memo - 18/Jan/2023
AI21 Spices, GPT-4 delayed, AI passing the bar/CPA/medical exams, new lawsuits, and much more!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 18/Jan/2023
Welcome back to The Memo.
In the Toys to play with section, we look at a new game ‘AI or human art?’, a short movie by Midjourney, a free kids storybook writer leveraging GPT-3.5 + DALL-E 2, and more…
The BIG Stuff
DeepMind (and Google) may lead the closing of published AI research (12/Jan/2023)
Demis Hassabis [CEO of DeepMind, part of Alphabet/Google]: “We’re getting into an era where we have to start thinking about the freeloaders, or people who are reading but not contributing to that information base,” he says. “And that includes nation states as well.” He declines to name which states he means—“it’s pretty obvious, who you might think”—but he suggests that the AI industry’s culture of publishing its findings openly may soon need to end.
Without wanting to get political, I have to comment on DeepMind’s suggestion that they no longer publish AI findings as a way of reducing IP theft or copying...
I became a permanent resident of China back in 2009, and a few years ago was based in a Russian-speaking country with strong economic ties to Russia. Both nation states have their own AI research labs, with varying degrees of output. Yandex and Sber in Russia, and mega-labs like BAAI and Tsinghua University in China continue to train new AI models and publish new AI papers. Members from all these labs are readers of The Memo.
The unique openness of the AI research field is a brilliant phenomenon. Right now, anyone can go to arxiv.org or github.com and read in-depth papers about up-to-the-minute artificial intelligence. Meta AI, a US-based lab, even released a blow-by-blow account of training their OPT-175B model (GitHub).
Without complete openness and strong collaboration between all AI labs, universities, governments, and other organizations, AI progress could come to a complete stop.
I would be disappointed and deeply concerned for humanity if Demis’ attitude prevailed. The guarding of AI research is one of the few things that could pause the rapid pace of change (and exponential expansion) we are experiencing right now.
Read the interview: https://time.com/6246119/demis-hassabis-deepmind-interview/
Read Google’s recent PR release related to this, with Demis’ sign-off: https://ai.google/our-focus/
Download the PR release as PDF for your own policy/organization reference: https://ai.google/static/documents/google-why-we-focus-on-ai.pdf
GPT-4 delayed, OpenAI training a text-to-video model (12/Jan/2023)
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has ‘said OpenAI’s GPT-4 will launch only when they can do it safely & responsibly. “In general we are going to release technology much more slowly than people would like. We're going to sit on it for much longer…” Also confirmed [text-to-video] video model in the works…’
…Altman was asked if GPT-4 will come out in the first quarter or half of the year, as many expect. He responded by offering no certain timeframe. “It’ll come out at some point, when we are confident we can do it safely and responsibly,” he said.
When asked about one viral (and factually incorrect) chart that purportedly compares the number of parameters in GPT-3 (175 billion) to GPT-4 (100 trillion), Altman called it “complete bullshit.”
“The GPT-4 rumor mill is a ridiculous thing. I don’t know where it all comes from,” said the OpenAI CEO. “People are begging to be disappointed and they will be. The hype is just like… We don’t have an actual AGI and that’s sort of what’s expected of us.” – via The Verge (18/Jan/2023)
Read more: https://lifearchitect.ai/gpt-4
And that’s the end of the bad news…
The Interesting Stuff
Microsoft announces general availability of Azure OpenAI Service including APIs for GPT-3.5, Codex, DALL-E 2, ChatGPT (16/Jan/2023)
This is going to increase the number of enterprise customers with access to large language models. Here’s a look at OpenAI/Microsoft GPT-3 enterprise clients as of two months ago (Nov/2022):
In the press release, Microsoft revealed that KPMG and Al Jazeera are also notable customers as of 16/Jan/2023.
Read the release: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/general-availability-of-azure-openai-service-expands-access-to-large-advanced-ai-models-with-added-enterprise-benefits/
AI21 Labs launches Spices within Wordtune (17/Jan/2023)
Since its release in Aug/2021, I’ve enjoyed Israeli AI lab AI21’s Jurassic-1 (J1) model. At 178B parameters it is larger than GPT-3. And I really enjoyed playing with this new writing tool functionality based on J1.
Using a choice of 12 cues, Spices works alongside a writer to assist in the writing process, generating a range of textual options to add to and enhance sentences. Spices can also suggest statistics to strengthen an argument or sharpen a detail.
A key feature of Spices is that it always attributes its sources, providing users with links back to the source, solving one of the major issues that many Large Language Models (LLMs) face today…
“Spices is a toolbox that melds the best that both man and machine can offer, working alongside writers as a source of inspiration for better, more efficient and more compelling writing, while ensuring that writers themselves have the space and freedom to best express their thoughts, insights and information.”
Try it yourself for free: https://app.wordtune.com/editor/
See a demo: https://www.wordtune.com/spices
Read the release: https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/with-launch-of-wordtune-spices-ai21-labs-lifts-the-curtain-on-the-future-of-writing-301723245.html
Read a related article: https://techmonitor.ai/technology/ai-and-automation/chatgpt-alternative-wordtune-spice
Read the (very dry) related paper referencing Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with GPT-2 only.
DeepMind Sparrow dialogue model may be released this year (12/Jan/2023)
Further to the Time interview above, DeepMind’s CEO did allude to beta testing Sparrow (based on Chinchilla) some time this year. Chinchilla is currently the largest dense AI model in the world based on training tokens (1.4T tokens trained to 70B parameters).
DeepMind is also considering releasing its own chatbot, called Sparrow, for a “private beta” some time in 2023. (The delay is in order for DeepMind to work on reinforcement learning-based features that ChatGPT lacks, like citing its sources. “It’s right to be cautious on that front,” Hassabis says.)
Read the interview: https://time.com/6246119/demis-hassabis-deepmind-interview/
Learn more about Sparrow via my documented rules: https://lifearchitect.ai/sparrow/
…and my video from Oct/2022:
Bill Gates on 2023 AI (11/Jan/2023)
Question: Hi Bill. Many years ago, I think around 2000, I heard you say something on TV like, “people are vastly overestimating what the internet will be like in 5 years, and vastly underestimating what it will be like in 10 years.” Is any mammoth technology shift at a similar stage right now? Any tech shift - not necessarily the Internet
Bill Gates: AI is the big one. I don't think Web3 was that big or that metaverse stuff alone was revolutionary but AI is quite revolutionary.
via Reddit.
GPT-3.5 passes the bar exam, CPA, & medical licensing exam (Dec-Jan/2023)