AI Progress and Capabilities
- Sam Altman said that "all of this has happened before, all of this will happen again" and "the hurricane turns faster and faster but it stays perfectly calm in the eye", possibly alluding to the rapid progress in AI.
- Gemini 1.5 Pro from Google is impressive, with "objectively sharper optics and higher contrast images than the Apple Vision Pro" according to Yann LeCun. However, John Carmack points out there are many variables that make this comparison not definitive.
- François Chollet believes his 2023 views on LLM capabilities were overestimating their potential and usefulness. He outlines four levels of generalization LLMs can achieve, with general intelligence being the ability to synthesize new programs to solve never-seen-before tasks.
- Gemma from Google is able to be deployed zero-shot in the wild in San Francisco for real-world tasks, without any reinforcement learning, just from next-token prediction on simulation and YouTube data.
AI Investments and Business
- Softbank sold all its Nvidia shares in 2019 for $3.6B, which would be worth $93B today. Investing in AI was one of the primary goals of Softbank's Vision Fund.
- Nvidia's early years involved relentlessly improving despite competitors having advantages. Their differentiator was taking software more seriously, building the CUDA ecosystem.
- Google faces a problem with the likes of OpenAI and Perplexity showing that many "search" tasks are better served through conversational AI, similar to how Google disrupted with PageRank and links 25 years ago.
- Compute and data are the currency of the future according to Alexandr Wang.
AI Safety and Regulation
- Elon Musk's lawsuit revealed an investor remark after meeting with Demis Hassabis that "the best thing he could have done for the human race was shoot Mr. Hassabis then and there".
- India is regulating the ability to spin up AI models, which some see as self-sabotage at a critical moment, similar to China kicking out its tech giants.
- Vinod Khosla called for banning open-source AI platforms, which Yann LeCun believes would cause us to lose the "war" he thinks we are in.
Memes and Humor
- "Thank god I didn't go into computer science" says the junior analyst in New York staring at Excel. "Thank god I didn't go into finance" says the ML scientist in San Francisco, also staring at a spreadsheet.
- Geoff Hinton being spotted working on Gemini at Google leads to speculation he's preparing to take back the CEO role from Sundar Pichai to save the company he built.
- "Trump's internal LLM seems to have suffered excessive pruning. How many parameters does he have left? How short is his context window now?"
Other Relevant Tweets for AI Engineers