There are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen -- AGI has arrived this week

Top 10 Generative AI Highlights and Insights 3.18.2023

[Week of 3/20/23 is another exciting week, stay tuned for my next newsletter too.]

It turns out that many people have not realized that #AI just advanced by years in the last week!

AI has experienced numerous decades of challenging times, such as the #AI #winter, and exciting times, like the #ChatGPT moment. However, last week was probably one of the most "happening" weeks in the entire history of AI.

During the week of March 13, 2023, there were ten (10) significant product stories that typically wouldn't occur within a few years, but truly happened in just one week.

Monday (3/13):

• Stanford released Alpaca, based on Meta’s LLaMa-7B model. Its performance is not likely as astonishingly good as ChatGPT, but the open-source language model cost less than $600 to train up. It is a cost reduction of 100x or 1000x for the base model.

Tuesday (3/14):

• OpenAI released GPT-4, which stunned the world again by being able to take both text and images. It's more accurate, more knowledgeable, and is able to "see" images and "reason."

• Anthropic launched Claude, a chatbot to rival OpenAI’s GPT. It was already used by Notion, Quora, and DuckDuckGo in a closed alpha but is ready for more beta testers broadly. It is still not public to everyone yet.

• Google unveiled PaLM API and MakerSuite, to take on GPT-4. PaLM will generate text, photos, code, videos, audio, and MakerSuite helps developers to quickly prototype ideas. However, It is a private preview only, and right now there is a wait just to be able to apply for a waitlist.

Wednesday 3/15:

• PyTorch 2.0 was released. It promises a big speedup for this popular ML library developed by Meta's AI Research Lab initially but is now the very tool used by OpenAI's deep learning framework.

• MidJourney v5 unveiled. I have been seeing photorealistic images and 5-fingered hands for humans for the first time.

Thursday 3/16:

• Microsoft Introduced AI Copilot for billions of productivity users. It helps Microsoft Office, CRM, and ERP professionals to reduce repetitive tasks. 

• Baidu unveiled ERNIE Bot, a generative AI model perhaps better at the Chinese Language than GPT. It is also a multi-modal model.

Friday 3/17:

• Stability.ai released Stable Diffusion Reimagine. It can create new images inspired by the originals.

• OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania published a paper looking at the labor market impact potential of Large Language Models like GPT. Their findings indicate that approximately 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of GPTs, while around 19% of workers may see at least 50% of their tasks impacted. The influence spans all wage levels, with higher-income jobs potentially facing greater exposure.

  Below I’m attaching Philipp Lenssen's Tweet on 3/15/2023 “Humanity Last Tweet” just fun, however. :)

  

There are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen. Last week was a monumental and special week for the AI industry. The “scary” thing is the momentum has not stopped and I expect another exciting week this week!