AI: Weekly Summary. RTZ #395

1. Nvidia king of the tech Hill: As Nvidia tops biggest US company list, founder/CEO Jensen Huang still balances unprecedented forces to stay on top. It’s been quite the thirty plus year ‘overnight success’ story with a start at Denny’s. And especially its performance since its 1999 IPO. The company continues to adroitly execute its AI GPU hardware and software infrastructure strategy, as its top customers also race to eventually compete with the company down the road. Historical analogs like Cisco may or may not apply this AI tech cycle. More here. 

   

2. ex-OpenAI founder Ilya’s new Safe AI Research Co.: OpenAI’s co-founder Ilya Sutskever is launching ‘Safe Superintelligence’ with two co founders, to try and do AGI as safe as possible. The core idea is to “create a safe, powerful AI system within a pure research organization that has no near-term intention of selling AI products or services.”  Especially relative to rivals like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI and others. The company will have offices in the US and Israel. No funding partners were announced, More here.

   

3. Anthropic upgrade Claude to 3.5 Sonnet: Anthropic continues its rapid LLM AI upgrade cycle announcing Claude Sonnet 3.5 after releasing 3.0 this past March. The new models compete head-to-head with the best from OpeNAI’s GPT-4 Omni, Google Gemini and others. And has additional enterprise software features like ‘Artifacts’ as well. Amazon AWS, an investor and partner, is also planning to offer Claude 3.5 Sonnet as part of its Bedrock AI services for enterprise customers. More here.

   

4. Google exploring AI sound for silent AI videos: Google Deepmind released new AI research around ‘Generating Audio for Video’, a pressing area as AI video generation models advance at an unprecedented pace. With dramatic progress by OpenAI’s Sora, LumaAI Dream Machine, and Runway AI of late, adding AI audio is the next missing link. Google calls it ‘video-to-audio (V2A) technology, making synchronized audiovisual generation possible by combining video pixels with natural language text prompts, to manifest rich sound environments for on-screen video. Link above has notable demo video links. AI video/audio remains a key competitive area for US vs China as well.

   

5. OpenAI eyes Anthropic type Benefit Corp structure, as it rolls out new AI products/services: OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman is discussing a roadmap to becoming a Benefit Corporation along the lines of Anthropic, Elon Musk’s xAI and others. These possibilities are part of ongoing plans by the company to modify its governance structure, after the Board actions and events of last November. All this as OpenAI continues to plan its rollout of additional AI products and services this year, including GPT-5 at some point. OpenAI will also be rolling out its joint services with Apple later this year.

   

Other AI Readings for weekend:

1. Meta’s Ray-ban AI ‘Smart Glasses’ success draws Big Tech interest .

   

2. Apple explores China AI partners for key market, as it builds out US AI strategy

   

Thanks for joining this Saturday with your beverage of choice. 

Up next, the Sunday ‘The Bigger Picture’ tomorrow. Stay tuned. 

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)