Computerspeak by Alexandru Voica

Computerspeak by Alexandru Voica

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Computerspeak by Alexandru Voica
Computerspeak by Alexandru Voica
Liquid AI achieves worm-level AGI; kids are making their own LLMs; OpenAI readies GPT-4 successor; Europe's Fortune 100 meets AI; Google open sources AI text watermarking tool
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Liquid AI achieves worm-level AGI; kids are making their own LLMs; OpenAI readies GPT-4 successor; Europe's Fortune 100 meets AI; Google open sources AI text watermarking tool

Business Insider publishes the AI Power List; mother says AI chatbot led her son's suicide; Waymo exec discusses self-driving advances; UCL spinout aims to reduce data center energy consumption

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Alexandru Voica
Oct 25, 2024
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Computerspeak by Alexandru Voica
Computerspeak by Alexandru Voica
Liquid AI achieves worm-level AGI; kids are making their own LLMs; OpenAI readies GPT-4 successor; Europe's Fortune 100 meets AI; Google open sources AI text watermarking tool
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Yann LeCun said we’re still years away from AI achieving the level of intelligence of a house cat. But can today’s AI be as smart as a worm?

Liquid AI, a startup spun out of MIT, believes so. Inspired by the brain of the Caenorhabditis elegans roundworms found in soil environments, Liquid AI’s founders have built a new generation of multimodal AI models designed to be more efficient and capable than traditional LLMs, especially those based on the transformer architecture.

These new models are called Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs) and achieve better performance than other language models of the same size. For example, the LFM-1B version outperforms other 1 billion parameter models and is the first non-GPT architecture to significantly beat transformer models from Meta, Microsoft or Google. The LFM-3B even outperforms older 7B and 13B models, delivering the same high-quality results you’d get with a traditional LLM while using less computing power and memory.

Liquid Foundation Models

One of the main advantage of LFMs are their context window. Imagine trying to remember a long conversation or read a lengthy document; it gets difficult to keep track of everything. Traditional LLMs have a similar issue. They struggle with long sequences of information. LFMs are designed to efficiently compress inputs, allowing them to handle longer sequences without requiring as much memory. This makes them ideal for tasks like analyzing lengthy documents, having deeper conversations with chatbots, and improving information retrieval systems.

241019_HIGHRES_TEDAI_Vienna_Photo_CherieHansson_306.jpg
Liquid CEO and co-founder Ramin Hasani introduced the new LFMs at TED AI Vienna (credit: Chérie Hansson)

Instead of relying solely on the transformer architecture, LFMs are designed using principles from dynamical systems, signal processing, and numerical linear algebra. LFMs use special computational units organized in "depth groups" and "featurizer interconnections," which helps them maximize performance with minimal computational resources. While regular neural networks are defined by weights (static values that affect the relationships between neurons), LFMs take a different approach, using adaptive linear operators that respond to the input data, making them more flexible and capable of handling complex tasks. They're therefore designed to be scaled up or down depending on the task, giving developers more control over how the models behave and making them suitable for various applications from small edge devices to large servers, including fraud detection, self-driving cars or computational biology.

LFMs represent an interesting advancement in am increasingly crowded and commoditized AI market dominated by vanilla, transformer-based LLMs. Liquid AI’s founders offer a fresh perspective on how to build powerful and efficient AI models, and I’m genuinely interested to see how their technology will perform in the real world.

And now, here are the week’s news:

❤️Computer loves

Our top news picks for the week - your essential reading from the world of AI

  • MIT Technology Review: Kids are learning how to make their own little language models

  • Business Insider: The 2024 AI Power List

  • Wired: Liquid AI Is Redesigning the Neural Network

  • The Verge: OpenAI plans to release its next big AI model by December

  • New York Times: Can A.I. Be Blamed for a Teen’s Suicide?

  • Fortune: How Europe’s tech-shy Fortune 500 is embracing AI

  • MIT Technology Review: Google DeepMind is making its AI text watermark open source

  • WSJ: Nvidia Chief Makes Case for AI-First Companies

  • TechCrunch: Investments in generative AI startups topped $3.9B in Q3 2024

  • The Atlantic: The Age of AI Child Abuse Is Here

  • Fortune: Investors pour into photonics startups to stop data centers from hogging energy and to speed up AI

  • Fortune: Waymo engineering exec discusses self-driving AI models that will power the cars into new cities

  • FT: Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis on his Nobel Prize: ‘It feels like a watershed moment for AI’ 

  • FT: How AI groups are infusing their chatbots with personality

⚙️Computer does

AI in the wild: how artificial intelligence is used across industry, from the internet, social media, and retail to transportation, healthcare, banking, and more

  • The Guardian: Talk to your plants? Now the first AI-powered garden will allow them to talk back

  • The Verge: Notion is making a super customizable email app

  • TechCrunch: Anthropic’s AI can now run and write code

  • Reuters: How AI can help the food sector to meet new deforestation rules

  • Reuters: AI decodes oinks and grunts to keep pigs happy

  • Business Insider: The AI app Soula seeks to improve healthcare access for pregnant women

  • TechCrunch: Zoom partners with Suki to offer AI-powered medical note-taking

  • Fortune: Luminance debuts AI assistant for lawyers that’s aimed at doing some of the legal grunt work 

  • BBC: AI to help doctors spot broken bones on X-rays

  • The Atlantic: What Does That Bark Mean?

  • TechCrunch: Midjourney plans to let anyone on the web edit images with AI

🧑‍🎓Computer learns

Interesting trends and developments from various AI fields, companies and people

  • VentureBeat: Cohere launches new AI models to bridge global language divide

  • Sifted: Synthesia has quadrupled its team since 2022 to push for a 'ChatGPT-style' moment in AI video

  • TechCrunch: Google adds new disclosures for AI photos, but it’s still not obvious at first glance

  • Forbes: This AI Startup Wants To Free Sales Reps From The Pains Of Cold Calling

  • The Information: Chinese Apps Notch Early Wins in AI Video

  • VentureBeat: Meta just beat Google and Apple in the race to put powerful AI on phones

  • FT: Meet Joelle Pineau: shaping AI as the world grapples with its potential

  • Fortune: Solana soars 19% thanks to an AI memecoin frenzy

  • Fortune: ‘Can AI be an artist?’ A Sotheby’s auction tests the answer, while human artists protest AI training

  • Fortune: OpenAI suffers departure of yet another AI safety expert, and fresh claims around copyright infringement

  • Business Insider: This staid software company is kicking butt in AI. The CEO explains how.

  • Semafor: AI firms need to address security, open-source concerns: G42 exec

  • The Information: The Startup Fueling OpenAI and Anthropic’s Coding Race

  • The Information: OpenAI, in Duel With Anthropic, Doubles Down on AI That Writes Software

  • The Information: OpenAI Winds Down ‘AGI Readiness’ Team as Policy Leader Exits

  • WSJ: Perplexity CEO Proposes Revenue Deals for Publishers After Lawsuit

  • WSJ: Meet Hollywood’s AI Doomsayer: Joseph Gordon-Levitt

  • VentureBeat: OpenAI scientist Noam Brown stuns TED AI Conference: '20 seconds of thinking worth 100,000x more data'

  • VentureBeat: Cohere adds vision to its RAG search capabilities

  • VentureBeat: ‘This is a game changer’: Runway releases new AI facial expression motion capture feature Act-One

  • Fortune: Elon Musk’s xAI cofounder calls out cheating interviewee—and now employers are exposing the AI tools being abused by savvy job seekers

  • AP: Chipotle’s new AI recruiter aims to cut hiring time by 75%

  • The Verge: Microsoft and OpenAI are giving news outlets $10 million to use AI tools

  • Bloomberg: OpenAI Hires Former Uber Executive as Chief Compliance Officer

  • Reuters: OpenAI hires ex-White House official as chief economist

  • Reuters: Facebook owner Meta restarts facial recognition tech in 'celeb-bait' crackdown

  • The Verge: Canva has a shiny new text-to-image generator

  • TechCrunch: Marc Andreessen says AI model makers are in ‘a race to the bottom’ and it’s not good for business

  • TechCrunch: Stability claims its newest Stable Diffusion models generate more ‘diverse’ images

  • Axios: How on-device AI could shake up the phone app business

  • VentureBeat: AI startup Ideogram launches infinite Canvas for manipulating, combining generated images

  • VentureBeat: Generative AI grows 17% in 2024, but data quality plummets: Key findings from Appen’s State of AI Report

  • VentureBeat: AI video startup Genmo launches Mochi 1, an open source rival to Runway, Kling, and others

  • FT: Anthropic says latest AI model can control users’ computers

  • Business Insider: Marc Benioff says Microsoft rebranding Copilot as AI 'agents' shows they're in 'panic mode'

  • MIT Technology Review: Would you trust AI to mediate an argument?

  • VentureBeat: Gartner: 2025 will see the rise of AI agents (and other top trends)

  • VentureBeat: Meta Introduces Spirit LM open source model that combines text and speech inputs/outputs

  • TechCrunch: Gusto’s head of technology says hiring an army of specialists is the wrong approach to AI

  • TechCrunch: xAI, Elon Musk’s AI startup, launches an API

  • New York Times: Microsoft and OpenAI’s Close Partnership Shows Signs of Fraying

  • The Information: Can Greg Brockman Find a Future Back at OpenAI?

  • WSJ: The $14 Billion Question Dividing OpenAI and Microsoft

  • Reuters: IBM releases new AI models for businesses as genAI competition heats up

  • Reuters: Honeywell partners with Google to integrate data with generative AI

  • Reuters: Portugal could boost productivity if third of workforce trained in AI, study shows

  • FT: Chinese AI groups get creative to drive down cost of models

  • AP: Want employees to embrace AI? A Slack exec says knowing the 5 AI personalities is key

  • The Atlantic: The AI Boom Has an Expiration Date

  • MIT Technology Review: The race to find new materials with AI needs more data. Meta is giving massive amounts away for free.

  • Business Insider: Google Research execs reveal how they use AI in their daily lives — and where they think twice about it

  • The Guardian: Microsoft introduces ‘AI employees’ that can handle client queries

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