The Week of the Giants

TLDR;

😟 A $200/month ChatGPT?!

📹 Google Starts the AI Video Race

🇨🇳 China Claps Back with Tencent’s Hunyuan

⚡️ Meta Enters the Nuclear Race

🤨 Over Half of LinkedIn Posts are AI-Generated

🇺🇸 Trump Appoints Big-Tech Hawk to the DoJ

[ARTICLE OF THE WEEK] Amazon’s Great Week

NEWSREEL

A $200 ChatGPT?!

Yes, you read that correctly. OpenAI has just announced today a new $200/month tier named ChatGPT Pro, that will include access to the just-released o1 model, which is finally available to both Pro and Plus users (the latter being the $20/month subscription we were all in).

The difference is that the former will give you access to a more powerful o1, in the sense that OpenAI will allow it to think for longer. Funnily enough, one of the best things of this release (and one of the points highlighted by OpenAI) is that o1 is much more concise in its thinking, aka less wordy. LLMs are usually unbearably annoying and unnecessarily long in their responses, so this is beyond great.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

It’s too early to jump to conclusions, but boy, do those $200/month subscriptions look expensive. Personally, I’ve still have to find a single reason to use o1-preview or o1-mini on a daily basis, most of the tasks they are presumably helpful are ones I prefer to do so myself (also because I simply don’t trust their outputs).

A 10x in cost should yield a 10x improvement in this so-called ‘intelligence,’ but that seems outrageous. Probably, the reality is that they are making you pay a huge premium to access the top tier model while making their business model less unprofitable.

The issue? China is coming strong, and as long as Chinese labs keep closing the gap with closed source models by releasing amazing open-source models, there’s a non-zero chance that OpenAI will never make sense from a business perspective.

NEWSREEL

Google Starts the Video Race

While many start-ups are trying to make a name in the AI-generated video scene, with examples like Pika Labs, Runway, or Luma, Google is the first of the big guys finally releasing their video generation model, Veo.

Developed by Google DeepMind, is a video generation model that creates high-definition videos from text or image prompts, offering a variety of cinematic and visual styles. It ensures consistency and coherence, enabling realistic movements of people, animals, and objects within the generated footage (allegedly).

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

AI-generated video is undoubtedly the most impressive Generative AI technology. However, to date, it seems more like a product looking for a problem to solve than one that actually responds to real user needs.

The main issue is inconsistency; they can generate small videos, but these are often easily identifiable as ‘AI-generated’ due to a clear lack of world understanding (they do not fully adhere to the physics of the real world). That means they require extensive engineering from those using them, which means several tries and edits that can quickly increase costs, meaning that the only few…

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