Monkey LLMs, AI Drones, Grok-2, & The King's Return

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👏 New Premium Content on AI applications, Hyperscaler fallacy, & more

📰 Hot news from Frontier AI labs, Amazing New Agents, and Google’s new smartphone AI features

🏝️ Insights on AI Drone wars, rethinking our framing on AI, tech layoffs, and an interview with Google Deepmind’s CEO

🆕 Trend of the Week: Large Language Monkeys that Surpass Frontier Models

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☁️ The Cloud Fallacy, How Cloud Companies Inflate Revenues

🥳 Killer Applications in AI, Round 2

NEWSREEL

LLMs, Agents, & War

This week, we have news from Google, xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, and MultiOn.

PRODUCT

Google Presents New AI Features

Google presented a new set of AI features in their Google Pixel event this week.

Among the different features, we have call notes, which summarize your phone conversations, and Gemini Live, which allows a Gemini model to interact with many of your applications to take action on your behalf (similar to Siri).

Importantly, this does not require continuous back-and-forth between the apps (everything is executed under the hood, which is lovely).

TheWhiteBox’s take:

Although the model will fail many times (as in the live demo during the presentation), this is expected. My main concern is that this Gemini version will obviously run in the cloud.

This is a stark comparison with Apple, which at least has tried to have some of the features run in your smartphone. Quite honestly, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with my personal phone calls going to a Google server to be summarized.

That said, the use cases shown seem more complex than what Apple promised in June, so it makes sense that most of them can’t be executed by an on-device AI.

LLMs

xAI Launches Grok-2, New Frontier Model

xAI, the AI company founded by Elon Musk that recently raised $6 billion, has launched the second version of its large language model, Grok.

It’s on par with most frontier AI models, even beating GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in some tasks. They also released a smaller Grok-2-mini version.

They have also partnered with Flux.01, which might be considered the best image generator in the world right now, from Black Forest Labs, a company founded by the creators of the original Stable Diffusion.

TheWhiteBox’s take:

Considering how good the model is, it’s not the super colossal news you would have expected. It seems agents are sucking all the air in the room from LLMs.

In my opinion, this is just a little bit of ‘showing off’ from xAI trying to maintain momentum ahead of the release of Grok-3, which should be released before the end of the year and will be trained in the world’s largest GPU cluster, a 100,000 H100 GPU install base.

If you’re wondering how large that data center is, it will require 140 MW of power (enough to power more than 100,000 homes) and may have cost around $4 billion to build ($2 billion to buy the GPUs,…

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