The Memo - 2/Dec/2023
BASIS benchmark for ASI, $20B+ of H100s sold in 90 days, Amazon Q, and much more!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 2/Dec/2023
Welcome back to The Memo.
December 2023 already?!
If we include my first few articles about post-2020 AI, then we’re about to enter our fifth year together talking about AI, language models, and this revolution of many names (AIGC or artificial intelligence for generalized computation, LLMs, Generative AI, GenAI, Transformers, Frontier models, Foundation models, Transformative AI). What’s that saying about time flying and having fun?
2024 is going to be a huge year for AI, bringing both formidable and comforting advances…
The Policy section in this edition might be my favourite so far, including a spectacular analogy by a major government leader, comparing AI and handwriting. We also explore a new legal ruling for AI-generated images.
In the Toys to play with section, we look at the latest and greatest way to run LLMs locally on your own computer, live voice interpretation that is eye-poppingly amazing, a new LLM orchestration pipeline, how AI will influence your love life, and much more.
The BIG Stuff
Introducing BASIS (Nov/2023)
We are rapidly approaching a position of being unable to test AI because ‘no one is smart enough’ (watch my Sep/2023 video of this keynote title, to Devoxx Ukraine).
Introducing BASIS, the Betts artificial superintelligence suite, aimed at measuring the smartest AI in the world against the smartest human-created test items in the world.
It was great to work with Mensan, founder of the World Genius Directory, and ultra-high-ceiling test designer Dr Jason Betts on this project, a benchmarking suite for artificial superintelligence. There were some really funky specs, like having all items designed in a ‘clean room’ and then sealed in a locked bag. We both felt a bit like spies!
The suite is designed for testing frontier models like Gemini and GPT-5, aiming for IQ=180.
The suite is being made available to AI research labs around the world, on request.
Read more: https://lifearchitect.ai/basis/
Watch the livestream: https://youtube.com/live/DGPMJN0sskQ
Two alternative benchmarks were also released in November 2023:
GAIA by Meta/HuggingFace, media level for IQ=100. (paper, dataset)
GPQA by NYU/Cohere/Anthropic, expert level for IQ=125. (paper, dataset)
Note that both GAIA and GPQA:
are not for the higher ceiling of artificial superintelligence
were not air-gapped
are already compromised, with datasets released and available online
OpenAI: Compute is king (20/Nov/2023)
The numbers for compute and $ being thrown around are getting crazy.
We’ve gone from OpenAI having access to 25,000 GPUs (Morgan Stanley, Feb/2023), a mix of A100s and H100s, to tripling that number and focusing exclusively on H100s (according to NVIDIA, the H100 is up to nine times faster for AI training). We’re in for a wild ride.
OpenAI, with plans for >$50B annual datacenter spend to race to AGI… one of OpenAI’s next training supercomputers in Arizona was going to have more than 75,000+ GPUs in a singular site by the middle of next year.
Our data also shows us that Microsoft is directly buying more than 400,000 GPUs next year [2024] for both training and copilot/API inference. Furthermore, Microsoft also has tens of thousands of GPUs coming in via cloud deals with CoreWeave, Lambda, and Oracle.
NVIDIA sold half a million H100 AI GPUs in Q3 thanks to Meta, Facebook — lead times stretch up to 52 weeks: Omdia (28/Nov/2023)
NVIDIA reportedly sold nearly half a million of its H100 GPUs for AI and high-performance computing in the third quarter of 2023, largely due to purchases by Meta and Facebook. The demand is so high that the lead time for H100-based servers now ranges from 36 to 52 weeks.
Let’s not forget that TSMC are the ones doing all the work here (read more in The Memo edition 17/Aug/2023). And the entire planet Earth is the critical path, every resource on that path seems to be running at 100% capacity. If only we had some sort of AGI to help us out here… (Actually, NVIDIA have already implemented AI for their latest chip design, Oct/2023).
Alan’s calcs: 500,000x GPUs sold in 90 days
= 5,555x GPUs sold per day
and, related:
500,000x GPUs at US$40,000/each
= $20,000,000,000 ($20B)
The Interesting Stuff
Exclusive: 17 new model highlights for November 2023 (Nov/2023)
While research continues at the rate of one new AI paper published every ~8 minutes (see The Memo edition 9/Jul/2023), we’re also seeing one new major model released every ~42 hours on average.
In 2023, November saw 17 major model announcements. As a comparison, October was 10 models, and September was 18 models. Some parameter counts are estimated. Here they are:
01-ai Yi-34B, xAI Grok-0 (33B), xAI Grok-1 (33B), Samsung Gauss (7B), NTU OtterHD-8B, Google DeepMind Mirasol3B (3B), Microsoft Florence-2 (0.771B), Microsoft phi-2 (2.7B), Microsoft Orca 2 (13B), Allen AI TÜLU 2 (70B), Anthropic Claude 2.1 (130B), Inflection AI Inflection-2 (1.2T), Berkeley Starling-7B, Microsoft Transformers-Arithmetic (0.1B), EPFL MEDITRON (70B), IEIT Yuan 2.0 (102B), Google DeepMind Q-Transformer.
I also have a new and publicly-available GPT-4 bot helping out with the comma separated formatting above: https://poe.com/TheMemoModelsBot
See more about each of these models on the Models Table: https://lifearchitect.ai/models-table/
ChatGPT's 1-year anniversary: how it changed the world (30/Nov/2023)
VentureBeat takes a retrospective look at how OpenAI's ChatGPT has influenced the world one year since its launch, noting its rapid adoption and the controversies it has sparked, leading to debates about the role of large language models in society.
That article is a very strange and limited look at ChatGPT’s accomplishments.
See ChatGPT’s achievements on my shared sheet.
Coke executive mentions GPT-5 (23/Nov/2023)
Manolo Arroyo (Global Chief Marketing Officer for The Coca‑Cola Company):
I can give you maybe an insight, some pieces of new news that no one has shared so far. We have a partnership with Bain and OpenAI...
We were actually the first company that was combining GPT, which is the engine that enables ChatGPT, and DALL-E. Back then, no one knew that because of the partnership with OpenAI, we were the first company using GPT-4 and DALL-E 2 into one integrated consumer digital experience. No one knows, because it hasn't been launched yet, that Coca Cola Diwali has been done with GPT-5 which is still not commercially available, and DALL-E 3 that has also not been launched...
And that's how in just six months this technology is progressing... launch it for Christmas [2023] globally...
(— Coca-Cola’s Mega Marketing Transformation by The Morning Brief (The Economic Times) at 17m31s)
It’s possible that Manolo is referring to GPT-V(ision) or GPT-4.5. It is unlikely that he actually means GPT-5, which OpenAI’s CEO has promised (including under oath) would not start training until December 2023.
Read more: https://lifearchitect.ai/gpt-5/
2022: Anthropic pranked OpenAI with thousands of paper clips to warn about AI apocalypse (23/Nov/2023)
An employee from Anthropic, a rival of OpenAI, sent thousands of paper clips in the shape of OpenAI’s logo to OpenAI’s office. The prank alluded to the possibility that OpenAI’s approach to AI could lead to humanity’s extinction, referencing the ‘paper clip maximizer’ scenario (wiki) by philosopher Nick Bostrom.
The OpenAI Turkey-Shoot Clusterfuck (1/Dec/2023)
I was being polite calling it a circus in the last edition (The Memo 23/Nov/2023). Journalist Charles Duhigg was inside OpenAI offices during the ‘five-day crisis that some people at Microsoft began calling the Turkey-Shoot Clusterfuck.’
Some members of the OpenAI board had found Altman an unnervingly slippery operator. For example, earlier this fall he’d confronted one member, Helen Toner, a director at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, at Georgetown University, for co-writing a paper that seemingly criticized OpenAI for “stoking the flames of AI hype.” Toner had defended herself (though she later apologized to the board for not anticipating how the paper might be perceived).
Altman began approaching other board members, individually, about replacing her. When these members compared notes about the conversations, some felt that Altman had misrepresented them as supporting Toner’s removal. “He’d play them off against each other by lying about what other people thought,” the person familiar with the board’s discussions told me.
“Things like that had been happening for years.” (A person familiar with Altman’s perspective said that he acknowledges having been “ham-fisted in the way he tried to get a board member removed,” but that he hadn’t attempted to manipulate the board.)
Read the source New Yorker article.
Read former board member Helen Toner’s statement via Twitter.
Sidenote: Given that Reuters blamed the board coup on Q* and other AGI ‘breakthroughs’ (23/Nov/2023), it just may be that Reuters (and journalists Anna Tong, Jeffrey Dastin, and Krystal Hu) is no longer a reliable source.
As a reminder, the size of the gap between an AI lab having new tech and the public having access to that tech will be due to ‘other human factors’, such as company leaders behaving in very human ways…
Read more: https://lifearchitect.ai/gap/
OpenAI blog: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board (29/Nov/2023)
OpenAI has finally released a statement about the board and company mission.
TL;DR: nothing has really changed (well, Ilya is out, I suppose).
Sam Altman has returned as CEO of OpenAI, with Mira Murati serving as CTO and Greg Brockman returning as President. The new initial board consists of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo.
Microsoft will have a non-voting seat, and has not revealed the name of this member.
Read more: https://openai.com/blog/sam-altman-returns-as-ceo-openai-has-a-new-initial-board
Read former board member Helen Toner’s statement via Twitter.
Realtime generative AI art is here thanks to LCM-LoRA (16/Nov/2023)
A new machine learning technique, known as LCM-LoRA (Latent Consistency Model Low-Rank Adaptation), has been developed by researchers at Tsinghua University and HuggingFace. This technique enables the generation of AI art in real time, which is a significant leap forward from the previous wait times of a few seconds to minutes.
Try it: https://huggingface.co/spaces/ilumine-AI/LCM-Painter
Introducing SDXL Turbo: a real-time text-to-image generation model (28/Nov/2023)
If you feel that Stability AI only just released a new model recently, you’re right. And here’s another one!
Stability AI has released SDXL Turbo, a real-time text-to-image generation model that uses a novel distillation technique called Adversarial Diffusion Distillation. The model synthesises image outputs in a single step, while maintaining high sampling fidelity.
The live demo video is… unexpected.
Try it via Clipdrop (login): https://clipdrop.co/stable-diffusion-turbo
Watch the video (link):
Amazon Q: Generative AI powered assistant (28/Nov/2023)
Amazon has introduced Amazon Q, a generative AI–powered assistant designed for work, which can streamline tasks, speed decision-making, and spark creativity and innovation at work. The AI can be personalized to your business, understands your company's information, code, and system, personalizes interactions based on your role and permissions, and is built with security and privacy in mind.
Amazon Q offers 40+ built-in connectors to popular enterprise applications and document repositories, including S3, Salesforce, Google Drive, Microsoft 365, ServiceNow, Gmail, Slack, Atlassian, and Zendesk.
The S3 connector is a fairly serious differentiator, and may set Amazon apart in this space. A huge percentage of F500s use AWS and S3, and providing this functionality allows them to bring in their entire knowledge base with a single click (or maybe two!).
While Amazon has their Titan model (my link) available, they also offer access to many other models via Amazon Bedrock:
Amazon Bedrock offers easy access to a choice of high-performing foundation models from leading AI companies, including AI21 Labs [Jurassic-2], Anthropic [Claude], Cohere [Command], Meta [Llama 2], Stability AI [Stable LM], and Amazon [Titan, and the upcoming Olympus 2T]. (— via Amazon)
Read more via Amazon Web Services.
Pika 1.0 (29/Nov/2023)
Pika labs have announced their text-to-video and image-to-video model, and it looks amazing. We are one step closer to generating entire feature length films in time for dinner.
Read the announce: https://twitter.com/pika_labs/status/1729510078959497562
Short film by AI (29/Nov/2023)
The latest AI video outputs are so good that we are moments away from text to movie. Notice the little camera movements in this new AI film. I expect that this kind of output (not by Pika) could be output by a model providing script and scaffolding (like GPT-4), and then the text-to-video model could generate a full movie in a matter of seconds…
Watch the video (link):
AI-MO Prize launches $10M challenge (2023)
XTX Markets has launched the AI Mathematical Olympiad Prize, a $10M fund to encourage the development of AI models that can reason mathematically. The grand prize of $5M is set for the first publicly-shared AI model to perform at a level equivalent to winning a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
The first AI-MO approved competitions will open in early 2024.
The world’s smartest person, Aussie Prof Terence Tao (now at UCLA) says:
Despite recent advances, using AI to solve, or at least assist with solving, advanced mathematical problems remains an incredibly complicated and multifaceted challenge. It will be important to experiment with multiple approaches to this goal, and to benchmark the performance of each of them.
The AI-MO Prize promises to provide at least one such set of benchmarks which will help compare different AI problem solving strategies at a technical level, in a manner that will be accessible and appealing to the broader public. (— Terence Tao).
Read more: https://aimoprize.com/
Meet the first Spanish AI model earning up to €10,000 per month (22/Nov/2023)
Aitana, the first Spanish model created by artificial intelligence, can earn up to €10,000 a month according to her creator, Rubén Cruz, the founder of The Clueless Agency. The virtual model has gained more than 121,000 followers on Instagram in a few months and has become the face of several brands.
Neuralink, Elon Musk's brain implant startup, quietly raises an additional $43M (25/Nov/2023)
Neuralink, the Elon Musk-founded company developing implantable chips that can read brain waves, has raised an additional $43 million in venture capital, according to a filing with the SEC. The filing shows the company increased its previous tranche, led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, from $280 million to $323 million in early August. Thirty-two investors participated, according to the filing.
Read (not very much) more via TC.
Huawei working on an Apple Vision Pro competitor (27/Nov/2023)
Huawei is reportedly developing a competitor to Apple's Vision Pro, with rumors suggesting the device will feature a 'flagship processor' and an active fan for heat dissipation. The Chinese tech giant is aiming for a lightweight build and may price it below Apple's $3,500 headset to attract consumers.
Millions of new materials discovered with deep learning (29/Nov/2023)
DeepMind's AI tool, Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME), has discovered 2.2 million new crystals, including 380,000 stable materials that could power future technologies. GNoME has dramatically increased the speed and efficiency of discovery by predicting the stability of these new materials, which have the potential to develop future technologies ranging from superconductors, powering supercomputers, to next-generation batteries for electric vehicles.
Google’s Dr Jeff Dean is acknowledged in the paper.
Read my report on Google Pathways (Aug/2022): https://lifearchitect.ai/pathways/
Policy
World’s first AI minister likens risk of overregulation to calligraphers that kept the printing press out of the Middle East for nearly 200 years (28/Nov/2023)
(Omar Sultan Al Olama is Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence in the United Arab Emirates. He was appointed in October 2017 by the Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.)
Omar Al Olama, the world's first minister of AI, warned that overregulating artificial intelligence could have serious consequences, drawing parallels to the Ottoman Empire's refusal to adopt the printing press. He suggests that concerns today about AI, such as job losses and misinformation, mirror those faced during the introduction of the printing press, resulting in its ban in the Middle East for 200 years.
…the issues policymakers are now facing with regard to AI—such as its impact on job losses, misinformation, and fear of social upheaval—are very similar to the problems faced by the empire’s then leader, Sultan Selim I.
“We overregulated a technology, which was the printing press,” said Al Olama. “It was adopted everywhere on Earth. The Middle East banned it for 200 years.
“The calligraphers came to the sultan and said: ‘We’re going to lose our jobs, do something to protect us’—so, job loss protection, very similar to AI,” the UAE minister explained. “The religious scholars said people are going to print fake versions of the Quran and corrupt society—misinformation, second reason.”
Lastly, Al Olama said, it was fear of the unknown that led to this fateful decision.
“The top advisors of the sultan said: ‘We actually do not know what this technology is going to do; let us ban it, see what happens to other societies, and then reconsider,’” he explained.
US, other nations unveil deal to keep AI safe from rogue actors (27/Nov/2023)
The United States, alongside 17 other countries, has announced an international agreement to safeguard artificial intelligence (AI) systems from rogue actors and encourages providers to follow ‘secure by design principles’.
The guidance, released by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the United Kingdom’s National Security Centre, outlines steps to ensure AI systems are built to ‘function as intended’ without compromising sensitive data to unauthorized users.
Download the report (PDF): https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/files/Guidelines-for-secure-AI-system-development.pdf
Beijing internet court recognizes copyright in AI-generated images (30/Nov/2023)
Here’s a big one involving images generated via Stable Diffusion.
On November 27, 2023, the Beijing Internet Court issued a decision recognizing copyright in AI-generated images. This is contradictory to the decision reached by the U.S. Copyright Office that did not recognize copyright in AI-generated images.
The [Beijing] Court stated that from the time the plaintiff conceived the image involved in the case to the final selection of the image involved, the plaintiff made a certain amount of intellectual investment, such as designing the presentation of characters, selecting prompt words, arranging the order of prompt words, and setting relevant parameters and so on. The images involved in the case reflected the plaintiff’s intellectual investment, so the images involved in the case met the requirements of “intellectual achievements.”
…
In the absence of contrary evidence, it can be concluded that the images involved in the case were independently completed by the plaintiff and reflected the plaintiff’s personalized expression. In summary, the images involved in the case meet the requirements of “originality.”
Read more: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/beijing-internet-court-recognizes-copyright-ai-generated-images.
Try Stable Diffusion yourself (free, no login): https://www.mage.space/
Law written by artificial intelligence is approved by councilors in Porto Alegre (29/Nov/2023)
In Brazil (translated by Google):
A law written by an artificial intelligence tool was unanimously approved by the Porto Alegre City Council and sanctioned by Mayor Sebastião Melo on the 23rd of this month. Proposed by councilor Ramiro Rosário, the bill that exempts residents from charges for replacing the water consumption meter, if the object is stolen, was entirely written by the ChatGPT tool , from the company OpenAI.
The "authorship" of the project was only revealed to the other councilors, the mayor and the population after the law was approved and sanctioned . "Our strategy was not to mention to anyone that it had been made by artificial intelligence, precisely to let it proceed normally and carry out this experiment", says Ramiro Rosário.
In order for ChatGPT to prepare the text of the bill, the councilor asked the tool to create a "municipal law for the city of Porto Alegre, with legislative and not executive origins, which deals with the prohibition of charging the property owner payment for a new water measuring clock by the Municipal Department of Water and Sewage (DMAE) when it is stolen". The tool's response was eight articles and a justification, which were sent to the city's City Council's internal system without any changes.
The text underwent review, spelling correction and adaptation to legislative language by the Legislative Writing Section, leaving two articles, one with several sections, in its final draft. Thus, it was sent to the committees, which approved it, and later for a vote in the plenary.
“Artificial intelligence didn't just deliver the text I proposed, it went further: it proposed deadlines and included this article, which we hadn't thought of. I thought it was sensational", says the councilor. One of the votes in favor of approving the law in the City Council was from the president of the house, Hamilton Sossmeier. The councilor says that the project went through all legal and legislative procedures, which found no impediment to the approval of the law.
Read the original in Portuguese.
Toys to Play With
Mozilla: Introducing llamafile (29/Nov/2023)
This looks to be the newest and best way to run LLMs locally.
Today we’re announcing the first release of llamafile and inviting the open source community to participate in this new project.
llamafile lets you turn large language model (LLM) weights into executables.
Say you have a set of LLM weights in the form of a 4GB file (in the commonly-used GGUF format). With llamafile you can transform that 4GB file into a binary that runs on six OSes without needing to be installed.
Read more: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2023/11/introducing-llamafile/
Step through it with Simon: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Nov/29/llamafile/
Try it: https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile
Live voice-to-voice with Meta’s new SeamlessExpressive model (30/Nov/2023)
SeamlessExpressive is an AI model that aims to maintain expressive speech style elements in the translation, across nearly 100 languages.
Read the paper: https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/seamless-multilingual-expressive-and-streaming-speech-translation/
Try it: https://seamless.metademolab.com/expressive/
ElevenLabs Voice Changer (23/Nov/2023)
AI Speech to Speech Converter
Transform your voice into another character and control its emotion and delivery. Easily create custom voices for games, videos, podcasts, and more with a single click.
Read the announce: https://twitter.com/elevenlabsio/status/1727460218345242979
Try it: https://elevenlabs.io/voice-changer
txtai (Nov/2023)
txtai is an all-in-one embeddings database for semantic search, LLM orchestration and language model workflows.
Pipelines powered by language models that run LLM prompts, question-answering, labeling, transcription, translation, summarization and more.
Take a look: https://github.com/neuml/txtai
The best sex of your life will be with AI (30/Nov/2023)
This is a fun article, and it is even more fun putting it into the ‘toys to play with’ section of The Memo.
The author posits the idea that the future of sexual experiences will be dominated by AI-powered experiences, possibly delivered through virtual reality, augmented reality, or brain interfaces. These AI entities will be able to cater to individual desires and preferences, providing a level of satisfaction that surpasses any human capability.
Read more via Medium.
Flashback
A colleague put me into a time machine all the way back to 2017, when I was writing about Elon Musk’s gifted school in California. The article, originally published in the Journal of Australian Mensa, was released at the same time as the discovery of Google’s Transformer.
Was there something in the air?
The future of gifted education assumes integrated artificial intelligence, so is more focused on the human side of life. It includes abstract reasoning, strategy, ethics, decision-making, and cooperation.
Read it online: https://lifearchitect.ai/ad-astra/
Or download the article as published (Mensa – PDF).
Next
I’m often asked about hard stats for how LLMs have impacted our lives. Here’s a viz, and I expect it to also appear in the end of year report.
See more: https://lifearchitect.ai/use-cases/
The next roundtable will be:
Life Architect - The Memo - Roundtable #5
Follows the Chatham House Rule (no recording, no outside discussion)
Saturday 9/Dec/2023 at 4PM Los Angeles
Saturday 9/Dec/2023 at 7PM New York
Sunday 10/Dec/2023 at 8AM Perth (primary/reference time zone)
or check your timezone via Google.
You don’t need to do anything for this; there’s no registration or forms to fill in, I don’t want your email, you don’t even need to turn on your camera or give your real name!
All my very best,
Alan
LifeArchitect.ai
Gemini Pro has arrived in Bard. So far very impressed, and the improvement in latency is really substantial when compared to ChatGPT.