A Chinese o1 Model, AI's Manhattan Project, & More

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THEWHITEBOX

TLDR;

😟 AI’s Manhattan Project

🥳 We Finally Have the First Open-Source ‘o1’

😳 Writer’s Self-Evolving Models

🥰 Another Victor for AI Healthcare

🤖 Robotic Surgeons

🤔 ChatGPT Beats Doctors…

[TREND OF THE WEEK] FrontierMath, AI’s Door to AGI?

NEWSREEL

AI’s Manhattan Project

Shocked. That’s how most people have felt after reading this small paragraph. This is part of the annual report by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, signaling that AI is a matter of National Security, similar to how nuclear power and nuclear bombs were treated decades ago.

The program openly calls for a Manhattan-like Project so that the US races toward AGI before China (and based on the next news, we can’t blame them, considering China is catching up fast).

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

If there’s a place where we are skeptical about AI’s alleged capabilities is this newsletter. Obviously, I feel this Commission is being heavily lobbied/influenced by Big Tech and other AI incumbents because such AI treatment as of ‘vital importance’ would give them business security and even regulatory capture.

However, while I agree that the country that reaches AGI first will have a tremendous advantage, two things come to mind:

Achieving AGI won’t be a slowly-then-suddenly event; it will be something that will evolve over time. I feel they are framing AGI as a ‘Trinity test’ type event where the US built the nuclear bomb and ended the war in a couple of days in August 1945. I sincerely believe that won’t be the case for AGI.

Technology will be mostly open-sourced, so this idea that AI can be built inside a lab in Los Alamos feels utopic and would require a complete ban on AI development; this ban should be supranational, a matter which is very hard to push through with US enemies.

I see many loopholes in this strategy, but one thing’s for sure: AI is nothing like we have seen before, so caution is not a bad thing.

OPEN-SOURCE

We Finally Have the First Open-Source ‘o1’

DeepSeek has announced DeepSeek-r1, the first open-source implementation of an o1-type model, the new Large Reasoner Models (LRMs) that OpenAI presented back in September that allegedly vastly improved the reasoning capabilities of frontier AI models.

As you can see above, the model surpasses the results obtained by o1-preview (OpenAI’s top model) in several benchmarks, a wake-up call for them and their investors. Just over two months since o1’s release, both Nous Research with its Forge API and DeepSeek have presented features that match or surpass the performance of OpenAI’s flagship model.

Fascinatingly, you can chat with the model for free here today.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

The best thing about this release, besides the fact that we now have open-source LLMs that can perform ‘deep’ reasoning tasks (and by deep, I mean compared to what a standard LLM can do, which is not much), the most remarkable thing about this is that the researchers have also opened the internal chain-of-thought the model engages in…

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