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Hello readers,
Welcome to another edition of the AI For All newsletter! Meta has released a new video generator, and it’s appalling, Mark Zuckerberg is cool now, Tesla has a taxi, and AI is more important than climate change. How can this be? Let’s find out!
Missing the Mark
Meta shared research for a new video generator called Movie Gen, and it’s unpleasant. I can understand someone without my refined taste finding this revolutionary, but let us take a moment to jointly recoil in horror at the torrent of sludge that will inevitably ensue if these models are ever deemed financially viable enough to be released.
I confess that this story was only included as an excuse to talk about Mark Zuckerberg, who went from being bad at imitating a human to being slightly better at imitating a human, perfectly mirroring the progress of LLMs. Coincidence? Despite all of his unscrupulous history, the rotting user experience of Facebook and Instagram, and the failure of the Metaverse, apparently all it takes to be considered cool again is to go on a few podcasts and get a makeover, like it’s a new school year!
Make no mistake, the playbook hasn’t changed. Collect as much user data as possible and sell it to advertisers (when they’re not suing you for inflating ad metrics). In what seems all too related to this is the apparent non-difficulty of turning Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses into surveillance tech, which two students managed to demo.
Zuckerberg doesn’t even try to be realistic about generative AI because he knows that in a post-truth era, it’s all about vibes and playing to the crowd. It took him a decade to realize it, but better late than never. I’ll give him some credit, he’s already won the race to the bottom by offering his LLMs for free while OpenAI and Anthropic mull over their pricing. Side note, OpenAI’s losses will triple to $14 billion by 2026, and according to them, they won’t be profitable until 2029, which still seems generous to me.
In other news, Tesla revealed prototypes for its robotaxi, the Cybercab, and the Robovan. The Cybercab will supposedly be priced below $30,000 and be fully autonomous (it doesn’t have a steering wheel or pedals). Whether Tesla can actually deliver on any of this remains to be seen, but their track record isn’t good. Driverless robotaxis are a bad idea in general, are not terribly profitable, and they don’t alleviate the upstream problem of American car dependency, not that a car company would care.
While Musk is jumping on the latest trends to keep Tesla’s stock price inflated, our old friend from a paragraph ago, Mark Zuckerberg, thinks smart glasses will replace smartphones when they probably won’t. The point of making such claims is for these tech messiahs to appear visionary and project growth for Wall Street. We in tech should instead solve actual problems and delight users. That’s what it’s all about. 😊
Lastly, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and a man whose only discernible expertise seems to be shuffling money around, said something interesting. To paraphrase: We’re never going to meet our climate goals, and yeah, AI isn’t helping with that, but we should continue pouring billions into AI and data centers because AI will figure out how to solve the climate problem before humans cooperate on a solution.
Where do I even begin? First of all, we already know how to solve climate change, we just don’t have the will to do it. Secondly, if humanity refuses to cooperate on human-generated solutions, why would they cooperate on AI-generated ones? Thirdly, AI won’t discover a magical solution to climate change (kind of important to mention). Of course, I’m sure Schmidt, a prominent investor in AI, has no conflict of interest.
🔥 Rapid Fire
OpenAI partners with Hearst to bring lifestyle and news content to ChatGPT
Anthropic adds the Message Batches API to more cheaply process queries
Inflection AI introduces Inflection for Enterprise in collaboration with Intel
Writer introduces intelligent actions with Palmyra X 004 enterprise LLM
Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis wins Nobel Prize for AlphaFold
Geoffrey Hinton wins Nobel Prize for AI and is glad Sam Altman was fired
Pillar Security publishes The State of Attacks on GenAI cybersecurity report
Stripe and NVIDIA collaborate to expand global access to NVIDIA AI platform
AMD unveils Instinct MI325X AI chips to surpass NVIDIA’s H200 chips
IBM makes Granite LLM available through Gen AI Hub in SAP AI Core
Zoom unveils new AI innovations for work platform at Zoomtopia 2024
Anduril unveils Bolt & Bolt-M autonomous air vehicles, marines to buy
China advocates companies to use local AI chips over those from NVIDIA
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