The Weight of Expectations

PLUS: Figure 02

Author

AI For All
August 09, 2024

Hello readers,

Welcome to another edition of This Week in the Future! OpenAI is lowering expectations for this year’s DevDay and experienced more high profile departures, Figure unveiled its next-generation Figure 02 humanoid robot, and NVIDIA’s new flagship AI chips have been delayed. What does all this mean for the AI space? Let’s find out!

The Weight of Expectations

OpenAI continues to be an enigma. One that has captured people’s attention for so long that they’re hoping there is something at the end of this that makes it all worth it. The weight of expectations, or weights in AI’s case 😆, has never been so heavy. However, OpenAI is tempering expectations for this year’s DevDay by saying, “While we know developers are waiting for our next big model, which we shared has begun training earlier this year, these events will focus on advancements in the API and our dev tools.”

OpenAI did quietly release GPT-4o-2024-08-06, a slightly updated model now available on Azure. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also tweeted a picture of strawberries, leading many to conclude that Sam Altman likes strawberries … and also that the reveal of the secretive Project Strawberry (which we covered here) is imminent.

Meanwhile, OpenAI experienced yet another leadership exodus. President and co-founder Greg Brockman is on extended leave until the end of the year, co-founder John Schulman jumped ship to Anthropic, and product manager Peter Deng also left some time ago. Some have asked why this would happen if a breakthrough were imminent.

Very much dependent on OpenAI making progress is Figure, a robotics company that uses OpenAI’s vision models for its humanoid Figure 02. As far as robotics progress, Figure 02 has a sleeker design and 16 degrees of freedom in its hands, but it’s still infuriatingly slow. Maybe DeepMind’s ping-pong robot can help them out.

To top all this off, NVIDIA, who very much everyone is dependent on (and who Elliott Management issued a dire warning about), has been forced to delay its new flagship Blackwell chips until 2025 because of a design flaw.

Our Take

OpenAI is like a TV show. We’re at the point where audiences have devoted years of investment into the show, and now it’s time for some kind of grand finale. As long as the finale is yet to arrive, people can remain in denial about the cracks forming. “It’s all leading to something!” And then nothing. Betrayal turns into resentment, and you end up wishing the show you loved had never existed, so that you would be spared your pain. Or, you know, products just take some time. 😐️

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📖 What We’re Reading

“Mentions of AI in retailers’ earnings calls soared last year—which was no surprise, given that gen AI is poised to unlock between $240 billion to $390 billion in economic value for retailers, equivalent to a margin increase across the industry of 1.2 to 1.9 percentage points. This, combined with non-generative AI and analytics, could turn billions of dollars in value into trillions.”

Source: McKinsey

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