AI Industry Shakeup and Major Announcements from NVIDIA's GTC 2024

AI Shakeups: Inflection CEO to Microsoft, NVIDIA Unveils Blackwell GPU, Elon's Grok-1 Open Sourced

The world of artificial intelligence has been shaken up by a series of major moves and announcements over the past week. From leadership changes to new AI hardware and platforms being unveiled, the industry is rapidly evolving.

Inflection AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman Joins Microsoft In a shocking development, Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI, has left the company to join Microsoft as the new CEO of Microsoft AI. Suleyman was one of the original founders of DeepMind before it was acquired by Google, and he left DeepMind to start Inflection AI along with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

Inflection AI is best known for creating the Pīie chatbot, one of the most advanced conversational AI assistants available. The move to Microsoft is seen by many as a major coup for the tech giant in the race to dominate artificial intelligence.

While Inflection AI will continue operations, the company has agreed to essentially sell its talent to Microsoft for $650 million. This arrangement may have been structured to avoid lengthy antitrust reviews. Inflection AI has promised to pay out more than investors originally put in while allowing them to retain equity.

The hiring of Suleyman is widely interpreted as Microsoft aggressively building up its AI capabilities to compete with Google and others. It's a stunning shift for someone who previously co-founded a company seen as a pioneer in AI after leaving Google.

NVIDIA Unveils Blackwell GPU and Robotics Platforms at GTC NVIDIA made a series of major AI announcements at its annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) last week. CEO Jensen Huang took the stage in front of a packed arena of over 17,000 attendees to outline the company's latest innovations.

The headliner was the unveiling of NVIDIA's next-generation Blackwell GPU, which offers up to 30x higher performance for large language model (LLM) inference compared to its predecessors. These new chips will enable more efficient and cost-effective deployment of trillion-parameter LLMs in real-time.

Robotics was also a central theme, with the announcement of Groot, a new foundation model that can be fine-tuned for various humanoid robotics applications. Additionally, Huang was obsessed with the concept of "digital twins" - virtual environments designed to simulate the real world for training and testing AI systems before real-world deployment.

As part of this digital twin push, NVIDIA announced Earth-2, a simulation of the entire planet to enable advanced weather and climate forecasting. The company claims it can create digital twins and emulations without actually owning the underlying hardware, such as quantum computers.

Three key terms emerged as focus areas for 2024: digital twins, synthetic data (AI-generated training data), and multimodality (AI models operating across text, audio, images, etc.).

Elon Musk's xAI Open Sources Grok-1, a 314B Param Model Staying true to his open-source AI principles, Elon Musk and xAI have released the largest publicly available language model to date. Grok-1 is a 314 billion parameter model that uses a "mixture of experts" architecture, an increasingly popular technique.

By open-sourcing the model under the Apache 2.0 license, companies and developers can now freely build applications on top of Grok-1 or directly integrate it into their products. This could spark a wave of innovation, making large language models more accessible.

While the model is still challenging to run locally due to its immense size, cloud services and companies that wrap APIs around open source models could help democratize access.

Apple Explores AI Partnerships for Siri Upgrade In a surprising move for the company known for its preference for homegrown technologies, Apple is reportedly exploring partnerships with Google and OpenAI to upgrade Siri with generative AI capabilities.

Rumors suggest Apple could integrate Google's AI model Gemini 1.5 into Siri, or leverage models from OpenAI like GPT-3. This would be a major shift, as Apple has acquired numerous AI companies over the years with the intention of developing its own in-house solution.

The potential partnerships could be revealed at Apple's upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), where the company typically unveils its latest software updates including enhancements to Siri. However, no official confirmation has been provided by Apple yet.

Stable Diffusion Introduces Stable Video 3D On the generative AI front, Stability AI has launched Stable Video 3D, a new model that advances 3D synthesis capabilities. The model can generate high-quality "orbital videos" of 3D objects from just a single 2D input image, with greatly improved consistency across different viewing angles.

While initially available for non-commercial use, with model weights on Hugging Face, Stability AI offers a $20 per month subscription for commercial deployment of its models like Stable Video 3D.

However, the launch was overshadowed by reports of Stability AI's internal struggles. Key researchers behind the original Stable Diffusion model have left the company amidst concerns about its financial situation and leadership under CEO Emad Mostaque.

MidJourney Shifts Legal Liability to Users The popular text-to-image AI model MidJourney has updated its terms of service, putting more legal liability on users for any violations or lawsuits arising from generated images. This contrasts with other providers like Google, OpenAI, and Adobe which have promised to help defend users in such cases.

The new MidJourney terms state that users will "indemnify and hold us harmless" from any costs or legal actions related to their use of MidJourney assets. This policy shift highlights the evolving legal complexities around generative AI IP implications.

Uncertainty Around Google's "Q-Star" AI Model Rumors have been swirling about an alleged leaked model called "Q-Star" from Google, touted as a revolutionary AI breakthrough. However, details remain vague and unverified, leading many experts to believe the "leaks" are likely fabricated or speculative.

While Google has confirmed the existence of an internal AI model called "Q-Star", no credible information about its technical capabilities or approach has been officially released yet. The leaks claim Q-Star uses novel energy-based models rather than the standard language modeling techniques.

Sora Updates from Anthropic and Morphoai As anticipation builds for the public release of Sora, Anthropic and Morphoai AI leaders have provided some additional, albeit vague, hints about the highly-anticipated multimodal AI assistant.

In interviews, the teams have refrained from specifying Sora's training data or technical details. However, they've indicated Sora was trained on publicly available and licensed data sources across different media formats like text, images, and potentially videos.

On timing, the teams hope to release Sora publicly sometime in 2023, carefully considering the AI system's potential impact on issues like elections and misinformation. But exact release dates and capabilities remain unclear for now.

The AI industry moves at a blistering pace, with major developments unfolding every week. As models become more capable and the stakes get higher, the battle for AI supremacy between tech giants and upstart AI labs is accelerating. Staying on top of the latest news has become critical for anyone working in this field or impacted by its rapid progress.