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Sunday Links: AI Animation, Co-Pilot impact, and the Musk-Altman files
The Musk v Altman files, AI Ads and Quantum with AI.
Sunday Links: Scaling walls, Agent payments, and model brain scans
Here are the most interesting AI links I stumbled across this week: * 44 US AI startups that have raised $100M or more in 2024. If you're tired of AI funding announcements, here are some of the largest in one convenient list. You can probably consider these to be the companies with either enough revenue traction or enough of a perceived moat that they might be category winners or at least in large enough categories that there could be many big winners. (No doubt in the case of some, though, th
Sunday Links: The Death and Rebirth of Search, Robot Art, and Open Source Military AI
Web search will change dramatically, and OpenAI will buy chat.com. Military open-source and Robot Art hit the headlines.
Saturday Links: Spark, Data Namecalling, and Notebook Inception
Self reverencing AI/ML Notebooks, English language app builders and a lot of Monkeys.
Sunday Links: Self Driving Cars, Watermarking, and the need for safety with Bots
Waymo raises more money, uncontrolled bots can be dangerous, and Notebook LM might be the future of content.
Saturday Links: Multi-Agents, Reasoning, and Fairness
Multi-agent systems are coming, but there are some lessons to learn from the past.
Sunday Links: Nobel prizes, grounding, and icebergs
Two nobel prizes for AI, grounding via open source facts and, surprisingly, an Iceberg.
Friday Links: Sovereign LLMs, Agents and Protein Synthesis
Covering the fate of sovereign LLMs, protein synthesis and agent models.
Saturday Links: Smart Glasses, Novelty, and Stochastic Parrots
Are LLMs creative? Is OpenAI's new model really reasoning? and Meta's glasses strategy is on point.
Saturday Links: Pins, Agents, and our Digital Souls
Saturday Links: Pins, Agents, and our Digital Souls
Saturday Links: Safe driving, SaaS replacement, and AGI
After a refreshing holiday break, it's back to work and back to posting (thank you for your patience!). Much has happened in the past few weeks, so I'll be doing a bit of triage and catch up. Here is the first batch of links: * Human drivers are to blame for the most serious Waymo collisions. Detailed analysis from Timothy Lee on Waymo's published data. As many would have suspected, journeys by fully self-driving cars are likely many times safer than with human drivers. Even in the few inciden
Friday Links: Copyright, weird AI video, and fuzzy cameras
Here are this week's links. I'll be on a break next week, so unfortunately, there will be no posts. However, I'll be back again in the first week of September. I wish everyone happy holidays! * Artists Score Major Win in Copyright Case Against AI Art Generators. I'm not sure this counts as a major win yet (at least not as major as the headline suggests), but the judge in high-profile infringement cases has ruled that the court case can proceed. At issue is the use of copyrighted work (images,
Saturday Links: Claude prompt caching, ML as pachinko, and Google Assistant
Links covering everything from caching to Google's new assistant.
AI data contracts, content and search dilemmas
On July 1st, Reddit updated its Robot.txt files to exclude crawling of the site by anyone other than those with commercial agreements or for non-profit/education purposes. What are the lessons for content sites on the open web?
Friday Links: JSON, Agents, and the future AI Maintainers
Here are this week's links. * Github launches the ability to run and test AI Models. Github has retained its developer-friendly credentials despite having been owned by Microsoft for a long time now. This week saw the launch of the ability to run a wide range of AI models directly from your Github account (including LLama, Mistral, OpenAI, and Microsoft's own Phi models). Once you've experimented, you can move the working application directly over to Azure to run it in production. This is a pr
Sunday Links: Data workflow, Video Magic, and AI Autumn Leaves
Here are this week's AI links: * Netflix Open Sources Maestro, a Next-Gen Data Workflow Engine. Another example of big industry players releasing powerful open-source. Maestro is a highly scalable data orchestration layer for AI/ML systems. This isn't as headline-grabbing as an LLM, but still very valuable. Netflix has a history of releasing interesting open source that works at scale - see their collection of open source here. * Introducing SAM 2: The next generation of Meta Segment Anything
Sunday Links: Meta, Risk, and Model Collapse
This week, Meta almost dominates the headlines with its continuing push in open source and a model that is now officially "risky" in the EU. Let's get into the links: * Open Source AI Is the Path Forward. On Tuesday, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, published a lengthy open letter outlining his belief that open-source was essential to both the success and safety of AI (the letter is well worth a read). It also contained clear statements of intent that Meta would continue to open-source its generat
Saturday Links: Small models, embedding tuners and EU regulation
Here are this week's links: * More Small Languages Models: Arcee AI lands $24M Series A. I've written about the emergence of Small Language Models before. Acree focuses on task-specific narrow LLMs in a particular domain. The models are around 7B parameters and can also be mergers of expert knowledge in more than one domain. SmolLM goes even further with 135M, 360M, and 1.7B parameter models by using highly curated training days. These small models matter because they reduce inference costs an
Sunday Links: Five steps to AGI, return on investment and rabbit holes
Happy Sunday, and here are this week's AI links: * OpenAI's five-step ladder to AGI (is nonsense). From all the rumors about a possible ChatGPT 5, it does seem like it might be a major innovation, and my guess would be that it will include some symbolic or simulation systems to help guide "reasoning." Having said that, the tentative set of steps towards AGI signposted by the company this week seem (as the ARS tecnica article points out) seems like a marketing exercise. Step 2 "Reasoning" is de
Sunday Links: Training sets, $2B AI traders and the Chevron doctrine
Happy 4th of July week if you're in the US (and possibly in the UK!). This week's post is very late due to travel; my apologies. Still, here are the week's links (just three this week - back to normal service next weekend!): * IBM Reveals its Entire 6.48 TB LLM Training Dataset. IBM published detailed information about the training set used for its Granite 13B Open Source LLM. It's really helpful to have this kind of information both to assess the integrity of a model and for others to figure