Weekend Warp

This week in AI did not belong to Elon Musk or Sam Altman (!!), but the guy who supplied shovels to the gold rush they have created – Jensen Huang and NVIDIA .

Obviously, the big big news this week is of Nvidia become the most valuable company on earth, vaulting past Apple and Microsoft on its way. The rise of Nvidia has been truly remarkable; it shares climbed 3.5 per cent to $135.58 last Tuesday, bringing its market capitalisation to $3.34tn. Founded in 1993, to build computer graphics cards for video gamers, Huang’s company has in the past year seen successive quarters of huge revenue growth, announcing a year-on-year increase of 265 per cent in February and 262 per cent in May. Its shares are up roughly 170 per cent since the start of the year, and 40 percent just this last month (see article here). This numbers boggle the mind, and the company has firmly positioned itself right at the center of the AI revolution. Huang predicts that the growth story is not over, and there will be a $1trn investment to reboot data centres with AI in the next few years. Guess which company will be at the centre of it all? On a side note, I had done a poll last month on if Nvidia would become the most valuable company on earth (poll) and only 3% predicted that it will be so in the next three months – most said much later, or not at all. Guess even the most optimistic of them all did not foresee this happening at this blinding speed!

Ilya Sutskever , one of the most respected AI researchers and former co-founder of OpenAI stole some limelight from his ex boss, Sam Altman, this week to launch his new company Safe Super Intelligence (Ilya’s tweet). The two had fallen out rather publicly late last year, when the OpenAI Board, which included Ilya, sacked Altman as CEO. Though Altman came back, and Ilya publicly expressed remorse, the die was cast and it was a matter of time. Sutskever is obsessed on creating ‘safe AI’ and felt that OpenAI was deviating from this mission. With SSI, he seems to have taken this space back. The company will have not dearth of funding or talent, given Ilya’s super stardom, but here is a crowded space becoming even more crowded.

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Feeling a bit left out, I guess, OpenAI made a revelation through CTO Mira Murati , who talked extensively “about the future of artificial intelligence, the next generation of ChatGPT, and its PhD-level intelligence. Murati says that GPT-3 had toddler-level intelligence, GPT-4 had the intelligence of a high-schooler, and the next generation of the model will have the intelligence of someone with a PhD for specific tasks. She also revealed that the next generation of GPT can be expected in “a year and a half”. She even said that when you have a conversation with the next-gen chatbot, in a lot of things you might feel like it’s smarter than you.” So, do we have AGI then?

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The space is certainly heating up….at warp speed.

Image credits: Anuj Magazine