Microsoft Spyware, Google's Massive Bet, & KAN networks

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Welcome to the newsletter that keeps you updated on the latest developments at the cutting edge of AI by breaking down the most advanced systems in the world & the hottest news in the industry.

10-minute weekly reads.

💎 Big Announcement 💎

Next week, I am officially launching my community, TheWhiteBox, a place for high-quality, highly-curated AI content without unnecessary hype or ads, across research, models, markets, and AI products.

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🚨 Week’s Update 🚨

Hello again! This week, we have news from Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI, contortionist robots, and more.

Starting with Microsoft, they presented their new AI laptops. Besides being the self-proclaimed most powerful laptop, even superior to the Macbook M3, they will include an on-device LLM, Phi-3-Silica.

The most controversial announcement was the feature ‘Recall.’ Phi-3-Silica will monitor every action you perform on your laptop, allowing you to perform a semantic search of everything you’ve done. This video shows a clear example.

This superpowerful feature has been met with huge controversy, calling it “spyware”, but some pointed out it would become a cleaer easy path to our private lives. Even Elon Musk reacted negatively.

Moving on, Anthropic made a huge announcement with its efforts in demystifying LLMs. They studied how different combinations of neurons in Claude 3 Sonnet elicited very specific behavior.

More research on this could one day lead to the capacity to block certain behaviors of models to make them safer to use while giving us a deeper understanding.

We also saw OpenAI’s worst week in a while, with two prominent researchers, co-founder Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, leaving. The latter even claimed OpenAI no longer prioritized safety, which is a very concerning statement. I cover all that happened in my Medium blog post.

Returning to Microsoft, CTO Kevin Scott announced how big the company was betting on AI. Specifically, they add around 72,000 NVIDIA H100s, the state-of-the-art AI hardware, every month, a $3 billion-a-month investment.

For reference, Mistral is reported to having just 1,500 H100s in total. This just goes to show how unbalanced AI is becoming.

To end on a positive note, Unitree has presented a $16.000 contortionist robot that can perform various actions and even fold itself for packing.

We might be entering the age of “affordable“ robots, an age where everyone gets their robotic friend to help on chores or cook.

🧐 You Should Pay Attention to 🧐

The Biggest Pivot in History

KANs & The Challenge on Deep Learning

😦 The Biggest Pivot in History 😦

Heavily speculated for months, Google has finally revealed its plans regarding AI and the future of search in what might become one of the most brutal business model pivots in capitalism's history.

But does this massive bet of unknown consequences imply it’s time to short Google?

In my humble opinion, Google appears stronger than ever. And the reason is even less obvious:

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