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On Monday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sat in for a five-hour podcast interview with AI influencer Lex Fridman. The 2 lined a spread of subjects, from timelines for superintelligence to progress on Anthropic’s subsequent flagship tech.
To spare you the obtain, we’ve pulled out the salient factors.
Regardless of proof on the contrary, Amodei believes that “scaling up” fashions continues to be a viable path towards extra succesful AI. By scaling up, Amodei clarified that he means growing not solely the quantity of compute used to coach fashions, but additionally fashions’ sizes — and the scale of fashions’ coaching units.
“Probably, the scaling is going to continue, and there’s some magic to it that we haven’t really explained on a theoretical basis yet,” Amodei stated.
Amodei additionally doesn’t suppose a scarcity of knowledge will current a problem to AI growth, not like some specialists. Both by producing artificial knowledge or extrapolating out from current knowledge, AI builders will “get around” knowledge limitations, he says. (It stays to be seen whether or not the problems with artificial knowledge are resolvable, I’ll notice right here.)
Amodei does acknowledge that AI compute is prone to grow to be extra expensive within the close to time period, partly as a consequence of scaling. He expects firms will spend billions of {dollars} on clusters to coach fashions subsequent yr, and that by 2027, they’ll be spending a whole bunch of billions. (Certainly, OpenAI is rumored to be planning a $100 billion knowledge middle.)
And Amodei was candid about how even the perfect fashions are unpredictable in nature.
“It’s just very hard to control the behavior of a model — to steer the behavior of a model in all circumstances at once,” he stated. “There’s this ‘whack-a-mole’ aspect, where you push on one thing and these other things start to move as well, that you may not even notice or measure.”
Nonetheless, Amodei anticipates that Anthropic — or a rival — will create a “superintelligent” AI by 2026 or 2027 — one exceeding “human-level” efficiency on quite a few duties. And he worries concerning the implications of this.
“We are rapidly running out of truly convincing blockers, truly compelling reasons why this will not happen in the next few years,” he stated. “I worry about economics and the concentration of power. That’s actually what I worry about more — the abuse of power.”
Good factor, then, that he’s able to do one thing about it.
Information
An AI information app: AI newsreader Particle, launched by former Twitter engineers, goals to assist readers higher perceive the information with the assistance of AI know-how.
Author raises: Author has raised $200 million at a $1.9 billion valuation to broaden its enterprise-focused generative AI platform.
Construct on Trainium: Amazon Net Companies (AWS) has launched Construct on Trainium, a brand new program that’ll award $110 million to establishments, scientists, and college students researching AI utilizing AWS infrastructure.
Pink Hat buys a startup: IBM’s Pink Hat is buying Neural Magic, a startup that optimizes AI fashions to run sooner on commodity processors and GPUs.
Free Grok: X, previously Twitter, is testing a free model of its AI chatbot, Grok.
AI for the Grammy: The Beatles’ monitor “Now and Then,” which was refined with using AI and launched final yr, has been nominated for 2 Grammy awards.
Anthropic for protection: Anthropic is teaming up with knowledge analytics agency Palantir and AWS to supply U.S. intelligence and protection companies entry to Anthropic’s Claude household of AI fashions.
A brand new area: OpenAI purchased Chat.com, including to its assortment of high-profile domains.
Analysis paper of the week
Google claims to have developed an improved AI mannequin for flood forecasting.
The mannequin, which builds on the corporate’s earlier work on this space, can predict flooding circumstances precisely as much as seven days upfront in dozens of nations. In idea, the mannequin can provide a flood forecast for wherever on Earth, however Google notes that many areas lack historic knowledge to validate towards.
Google’s providing a waitlist for API entry to the mannequin to catastrophe administration and hydrology specialists. It’s additionally making forecasts from the mannequin obtainable by way of its Flood Hub platform.
“By making our forecasts available globally on Flood Hub … we hope to contribute to the research community,” the corporate writes in a weblog submit. “These data can be used by expert users and researchers to inform more studies and analysis into how floods impact communities around the world.”
Mannequin of the week
Rami Seid, an AI developer, has launched a Minecraft-simulating mannequin that may run on a single Nvidia RTX 4090.
Just like AI startup Decart’s not too long ago launched “open-world” mannequin, Seid’s, known as Lucid v1, emulates Minecraft’s recreation world in actual time (or near it). Weighing in at 1 billion parameters, Lucid v1 takes in keyboard and mouse actions and generates frames, simulating all of the physics and graphics.
Lucid v1 suffers from the identical limitations as different game-simulating fashions. The decision is sort of low, and it tends to shortly “forget” the extent structure — flip your character round and also you’ll see a rearranged scene.
However Seid and her associate, Ollin Boer Bohan, say they plan to proceed growing the mannequin, which is out there for obtain and powers the net demo right here.
Seize bag
DeepMind, Google’s premier AI lab, has launched the code for AlphaFold 3, its AI-powered protein prediction mannequin.
AlphaFold 3 was introduced six months in the past, however DeepMind controversially withheld the code. As a substitute, it offered entry through an internet server that restricted the quantity and kinds of predictions scientists might make.
Critics noticed the transfer as an effort to guard DeepMind’s business pursuits on the expense of reproducibility. DeepMind spin-off, Isomorphic Labs, is making use of AlphaFold 3, which might mannequin proteins in live performance with different molecules, to drug discovery.
Now teachers can use the mannequin to make any predictions they like — together with how proteins behave within the presence of potential medication. Scientists with an educational affiliation can request code entry right here.
