The Memo - 31/May/2024
OpenAI Robotics, OpenAI + PwC, Mistral Codestral 22B, and much more!
To: US Govt, major govts, Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, Citi, Tencent, IBM, & 10,000+ more recipients…
From: Dr Alan D. Thompson <LifeArchitect.ai>
Sent: 31/May/2024
Subject: The Memo - AI that matters, as it happens, in plain English
AGI: 74%The Policy section in this edition is perhaps one of the most important so far. I believe that the AI threat and disinformation postmortem report (attached) will be seen as a seminal moment in the history of AI and safety.
Given the increased cadence of AI releases right now, I’ve again scheduled a range of weekly livestreams for June 2024, every Tuesday evening US time. You can click ‘notify’ here.
Contents
The BIG Stuff (OpenAI Robotics, OpenAI + PwC, Compute Table…)
The Interesting Stuff (Anthropic, Codestral 22B, OpenAI GPT ads…)
Policy (disinformation postmortem, Bilderberg, Anthropic, elections…)
Toys to Play With (Perplexity alternative, LAION…)
Flashback (Neuralink…)
Next (AI Roundtable in about 48 hours from this edition…)
The BIG Stuff
OpenAI is rebooting its robotics team (30/May/2024)
OpenAI is formally relaunching its previously abandoned robotics team, Forbes has learned. The company is currently hiring research engineers to rebuild the team, which it had shuttered in 2020, according to three sources. OpenAI has yet to publicly announce the details of its homegrown robotics efforts, but in a recent job listing explains that new hires would be “one of the first members of the team.” A source in position to know told Forbes the group has only existed for about two months [since April 2024].
Over the past year, OpenAI’s in-house startup fund has invested in several well-capitalized companies trying to develop humanoid robots, including Figure AI (raised $745 million), 1X Technologies ($125 million) and Physical Intelligence ($70 million)…
Robotics was a pillar of OpenAI’s mission from its early days. Cofounder Wojciech Zaremba oversaw a team that originally sought to build a “general purpose robot.” In 2019, more than a dozen OpenAI researchers published a paper describing how they had trained a pair of neural networks to solve a Rubik’s Cube using a single robotic hand. The authors claimed this was a foundational step towards training robotic systems to perform a variety of everyday tasks.
But in October 2020, the company abandoned its efforts, a move that Zaremba blamed on a lack of training data. “The decision [to disband the team] was quite hard for me,” Zaremba said in a 2021 interview. “But I got the realization some time ago that actually, that’s for the best from the perspective of the company.”
Read more via Forbes.
This is a really good sign for even faster progress towards artificial general intelligence—where a machine can perform at the level of an average human in practically any field—and I expect OpenAI’s renewed R&D in this space to have a major impact on the ‘conservative countdown to AGI.’
It may also be that omnimodels (or ‘world models’) like GPT-4o are designed to be so completely multimodal that they can be trained on patch data like movement, joint torques, proprioception, and more. Just like DeepMind Gato was doing two years ago! (Watch my in-depth analysis video of Gato from May/2022.)
Before the OpenAI Robotics team was disbanded in 2020 (due to being ‘too early,’ as well as the company wanting to focus on ‘just language’), the last OpenAI Robotics outputs from that time give some indications of how they deal with the concept of AI embodiment:
Read about the 2019 OpenAI Robotics Symposium (5/Jun/2019).
Watch the 2019 OpenAI video ‘Solving Rubik’s Cube with a Robot Hand’ (16/Oct/2019).
OpenAI signs 100,000 PwC workers to ChatGPT’s enterprise tier as PwC becomes its first resale partner (29/May/2024)
OpenAI has signed PwC as its largest customer yet with 100,000 users.
@$60/user/month that would be $72M/year retail enterprise licensing cost.
PwC could expand to 328,000 users (employees).
OpenAI COO had said that 2024 ‘is going to be the year of adoption for AI in the enterprise. We’re just seeing tremendous momentum.’ (4/Apr/2024)
OpenAI now has 1,200 staff across its 4 office locations: San Francisco, London, Dublin, Tokyo.
Read more via TechCrunch.
Compute Table updated (May/2024)
We are just about to hit US$1,000,000,000 ($1B) spends on training the latest frontier models. Recent announcements regarding Grok 2 and Grok 3 mean this table is bleeding edge. Table data is backed by sources linked below, except those in italics which are estimated.
