Fear Chinese Robots & LLMs, LLMs Know More Than They Show, & More

In partnership with

THEWHITEBOX

TLDR;

🇨🇳 We Need to Talk About Chinese Robots

😍 Alibaba’s Qwen 2.5 Coder is Amazing

🥵 Generative AI is Stalling

🫣 Apple’s New AI Product

🎭 A New Unbeatable Benchmark

🌊 Google’s New Flood Forecasting Model

[TREND OF THE WEEK] LLMs Know More Than They Show

OTHER PREMIUM CONTENT

Other New Premium Content

How Alibaba Uses an 8k LLM to Process 1 Million Token Sequences. A deep dive into a new method by Alibaba to create an agent with an LLM with a small context window that can process with 100% up to 1 million tokens. (Only Full Premium Subscribers)

Differential Transformers. Microsoft has presented a new LLM architecture that could finally retire the standard Transformer. But how does it work? (All Premium Subscribers)

NEWSREEL

We Need to Talk About Chinese Robots…

As I explained to Premium subscribers in Tuesday’s newsletter, this delusion that China is behind the US in AI terms is quickly transcending into concerns. Now, not only does the US have reasons to be worried about the rapid improvement of Chinese LLMs (see below Qwen 2.5), but we also have robots that are as agile as many animals in the open world, as proven by the following video.

These quadrupeds display uncanny agility in open terrain. They can get over obstacles almost a meter in size, go down 50-degree slopes without falling, and seemingly move from four legs to two if the situation requires one or the other.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

AI Cold War topics aside, perception and embodiment (having a body that provides sensory feedback about the world) were crucial in developing human intelligence.

Thus, having robots with improved motor control could naturally lead to more competent models, and hopefully, even ‘world models’ like the ones humans possess (think of world models as what you humans call ‘common sense’) that allow us to survive in the open world.

As to whether the video is ‘faked,’ like Tesla faked the robotic movements of its humanoids during the last presentation (they were teleoperated), based on the complexity of the movements, it’s extremely unlikely these robots are teleoperated, but who knows?

That said, I think it’s wise to be at least slightly skeptical about anything you see in AI today.

FRONTIER AI

Alibaba’s Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B is Amazing

Alibaba’s new Qwen 2.5 Coder series is scary good. On Tuesday, we explained how the 7B version already beat the original GPT-4 in some benchmarks despite being hundreds of times smaller.

Now they have officially released the 32 billion parameter version, and it’s impressive, to say the least.

The model matches the performance of most state-of-the-art models like GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, beating them in most coding benchmarks (although to be fair, the benchmark that really matters, the Aider Benchmark, shows Claude 3.5 Sonnet being considerably better).

TheWhiteBox’s take:

Benchmarks aside, this is again a wake-up call for the West; China is no longer behind.

While we still have to see a Chinese Large Reasoner…

Enjoyed the introduction? Subscribe or sign in to continue with this edition.