A step closer to AGI with OpenAI's ChatGPT o1

+ Amazon's $8 Billion AI Bet on Anthropic

Amazon is doubling down on its investment in Anthropic, and Open AI o1 gives a peek into the future of agentic AI.

In this week’s edition:

  • Amazon's $8 Billion AI Bet on Anthropic

  • A step closer to AGI - OpenAI's o1 Nears Genius IQ

  • Roundup: AI Adoption

  • Alibaba's QwQ-32B-Preview Model Shines in Math & Logic

  • Collaborate with AI Successfully (via HBR)

  • Toolbox

  • More news

  Big Moves

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Amazon is investing an additional $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic, doubling down on its initial $4 billion investment last year.

Need to know:

  • Anthropic will utilize AWS's custom chips, Trainium and Inferentia, to train and deploy its foundation models. This aims to enhance the performance and efficiency of Anthropic's AI models, benefiting from AWS's advanced hardware.

  • The collaboration has already seen success with Anthropic's Claude model family integrated into Amazon Bedrock. This has brought advanced AI capabilities to a wide range of users and customers, demonstrating the practical applications of their partnership.

  • The partnership extends beyond commercial sectors, with Amazon, Palantir, and Anthropic working together to introduce generative AI tools to the Department of Defense. This highlights the broad applicability of their AI technologies, including in critical sectors like defense.

This brings Amazon’s total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion, the largest AWS has made in an outside company, signaling a deep commitment to advancing AI capabilities.

  Breakthrough AI

OpenAI's new o1 model represents a breakthrough in complex reasoning and progress toward the ultimate goal of AGI. The model is said to go beyond pattern recognition to make inferences, understand cause and effect, and apply learned rules to solve problems.

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Need to know:

  • ChatGPT o1 showcases complex reasoning like logical thinking and problem-solving, unlike chatbots we’ve seen to date.

  • The model scored an impressive 124 on TrackingAI's IQ test, nearly 50% higher than other AI models and close to the human genius threshold.

  • OpenAI is exploring an AI-powered web browser aiming to reshape consumer expectations.

  • The company has attracted significant investment, with Microsoft contributing $13 billion and Nvidia investing $100 million.

Looking forward, ChatGPT o1's reasoning abilities could assist researchers, scientists, engineers, and developers in tackling complex problems and increase the rate of progress in such fields.

Its utility could create opportunities for platform partners like Apple to provide enhanced services integrated with their products.

  AI Adoption  
  • Small language models (SLMs) offer businesses more efficient, customized AI solutions while avoiding risks of large language models (LLMs). SLMs, trained on specific data types, provide tailored outputs and can excel in customer service, healthcare, finance, and retail by delivering accurate and contextually relevant responses.

  • AI drug discovery has surged over 400% since 2019, with protein structure prediction and clinical trial AI also seeing major growth. This signals increased R&D budgets and M&A in 2025 as firms search for competitive advantage.

  • Claude AI and Hume AI's EVI 2 integration enables intuitive voice control of computers, potentially replacing mouse and keyboard inputs. This emotional AI understands tone and controls devices accordingly after converting speech to text via Claude.

  • Cursor fuels debate on AI code generation. Industry critics warn of poor quality and clueless copying. But legacy code also has issues. More training and oversight, not rejection, may be the solution. For more insights, explore the conversation on X.

  AI Performance

Alibaba has just launched its newest AI model, QwQ-32B-Preview, which reportedly outperforms OpenAI’s o1 series in specific benchmarks like AIME and MATH tests.

Need to know:

  • QwQ-32B-Preview outperforms OpenAI’s o1 models in logic puzzles and math problems, showcasing advanced reasoning capabilities that set it apart from other large language models.

  • The model is available under a permissive license on Hugging Face, allowing users to download and utilize it, though Alibaba has restricted full replication by releasing only certain components.

  • With 32.5 billion parameters, QwQ-32B-Preview can manage prompts up to 32,000 words, offering significant capacity for complex tasks.

  • Despite its strengths, the model has limitations, such as unexpected language switches and delayed responses due to logical loops.

  • The model adheres to Chinese regulatory standards, avoiding politically sensitive topics, which may limit its global appeal but aligns it well with the Chinese domestic market.

As AI labs worldwide strive to refine reasoning technology, Alibaba’s QwQ-32B-Preview represents a notable advancement, highlighting both the potential and challenges of this rapidly evolving field.

  Tutorial

In "Set Your Team Up to Collaborate with AI Successfully" (Harvard Business Review, November 2024), Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic outlines strategies for integrating AI tools like generative AI into the workforce while fostering employee engagement and development. As organizations adopt AI, they must reskill employees so human talent can augment and be augmented by AI capabilities.

Action Items:

  • Create an AI strategy focused on enabling human employees to add value beyond automated tasks. Help employees understand how their skills can align with AI tools.

  • Measure and reward productivity outputs, not time inputs, so employees aren't punished for achieving more with AI. Consider offering learning stipends or time credits to employees who achieve higher productivity through AI.

  • Develop emotional intelligence and critical thinking to complement AI's technical skills. Foster human skills like empathy, curiosity, and deep expertise that AI is unlikely to master.

  • Provide mid-level managers with training on implementing AI and leading in the human-AI age. Invest in managers' abilities to motivate and develop teams leveraging AI.

  • Introduce "innovation grants" and a fail-forward culture that encourages experimentation with AI. Promote knowledge sharing around AI successes and failures.

  • Incentivize workforce reskilling and AI adoption through learning stipends and time credits. Position AI as a career booster and an enabler of new skills and growth opportunities.

  • Reward employees for questioning things and asking why to boost curiosity. Encourage a culture of inquisitiveness.

From the Toolbox

  • NovelAI: Generate creative content, including stories, poems, and articles, with AI-driven text generation and customization tools.

  • Voco: Generate realistic voiceovers and convert text to speech in over 50 voices and 40 languages using AI.

  • Otter: Automatically transcribe meetings, interviews, lectures, and other spoken content with AI.

  • Unbabel: Provide fast, high-quality translations powered by a combination of AI and human linguists.

  • Krisp: Improve productivity during virtual meetings with AI-driven noise cancellation and background blurring features.

  • D-ID: Anonymize faces in photos and videos to protect privacy using AI face re-identification.

  • Replika: Hold natural conversations with an AI friend that learns about you over time.

More…

Quick Bytes

  • AI will be the judge of that! OpenAI funds "Research AI Morality" project with Duke University to develop AI that makes moral judgments.

  • Google's Gemini 2.0 launch in December aims to surpass AI rivals like OpenAI, which is developing an AI browser, sparking a tech race to transform industries and daily life.

  • Uber’s new AI venture, a data labeling division, Scaled Solutions, hiring gig workers worldwide to help train enterprise AI models. However, concerns linger around data security and fair worker compensation.

  • ByteDance sues former intern for $1.1 million over alleged sabotage of its AI training infrastructure for TikTok's language model, sparking debate amid the heated global AI race.

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Dan @ The Revolution AI

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