#193 - Sora release, Gemini 2, OpenAI's AGI Rule, US AI Czar

Our 193rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's* big AI news!

*and sometimes last last week's

Note: this one was recorded on 12/13, so the news is a bit outdated... will get things back on track soon!

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov (twitter.com/andrey_kurenkov) and Jeremie Harris (twitter.com/jeremiecharris).

Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.comand/or hello@gladstone.ai

Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at lastweekin.ai.

Sponsors:

•
The Generator - (babson.edu/thegenerator) An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence.

In this episode:

- OpenAI launches Sora, a text-to-video model with significant capabilities, and Gemini 2.0 from Google showcasing agentic potential in AI tools.

- Character.ai introduces a teen model to address safety concerns following two tragic incidents linked to addiction and harmful influence.

- The U.S. government sets up a task force to support the rapid development of AI data centers, reflecting the critical need for robust infrastructure.

- A paper from Anthropic reveals that frontier AI systems have reached the capability of self-replication, sparking discussions on future implications and safety protocols.

If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form (forms.gle/VmZDCzSBfeACe1Ke9).

Timestamps + Links:

• (00:00:00) Intro / Banter

• (00:02:44) News Preview

• (00:03:43) Response to listener comments

• (00:09:50) Sponsor Break

• Tools & Apps

• (00:11:12) OpenAI has finally released Sora (theverge.com/2024/12/9/24317092/openai-sora-te…)

• (00:21:16) Google Reveals Gemini 2, AI Agents, and a Prototype Personal Assistant (wired.com/story/google-gemini-2-ai-assistant-r…)

• (00:28:23) ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode adding video and screen sharing input (plus a Santa mode) (9to5mac.com/2024/12/12/chatgpt-advanced-voice-…)

• (00:30:43) Microsoft’s Copilot can browse the web with you using AI ‘Vision’ (theverge.com/2024/12/5/24313888/microsoft-copi…)

• (00:32:31) Musk’s xAI has launched Grok image generation model (teslarati.com/xai-launched-grok-image-generation)

• (00:35:22) Cognition Labs’ AI Software Engineer Devin Launched for Subscribers (gadgets360.com/ai/news/cognition-labs-devin-ai…)

• (00:40:43) Apple launches its ChatGPT integration with Siri (cnbc.com/2024/12/11/apple-launches-its-chatgpt…)

• (00:43:23) Reddit’s New AI Search Tool Helps You Find Reddit Answers Without Google (theverge.com/2024/12/9/24314445/reddit-answers…)

• Applications & Business

• (00:46:35) OpenAI Aiming to Eliminate Microsoft AGI Rule to Boost Future Investment (pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2024/open…)

• (00:53:34) GM halts funding of robotaxi development by Cruise (cnbc.com/2024/12/10/gm-halts-funding-of-robota…)

• (00:57:08) Largest AI data centre in the world to be built in northwest Alberta (edmonton.ctvnews.ca/largest-ai-data-centre-in-…)

• (01:02:36) Meta announces 4 million sq ft, 2GW Louisiana data center campus (datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/meta-announces-…)

• (01:05:22) Google’s future data centers will be built next to solar and wind farms (theverge.com/2024/12/10/24317888/googles-data-…)

• Projects & Open Source

• (01:08:37) Google DeepMind Just Released PaliGemma 2: A New Family of Open-Weight Vision Language Models (3B, 10B and 28B) (marktechpost.com/2024/12/05/google-ai-just-rel…)

• Research & Advancements

• (01:13:51) Training Large Language Models to Reason in a Continuous Latent Space (arxiv.org/abs/2412.06769)

• (01:25:37) An Evolved Universal Transformer Memory (arxiv.org/abs/2410.13166v3)

• (01:31:48) APOLLO: SGD-like Memory, AdamW-level Performance (huggingface.co/papers/2412.05270)

• (01:37:59) Clio: A system for privacy-preserving insights into real-world AI use (anthropic.com/research/clio)

• Policy & Safety

• (01:39:47) Character.AI steps up teen safety after bots allegedly caused suicide, self-harm (arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/character-…)

• (01:45:22) What Trump’s New AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks Means For the Tech Industry (time.com/7200518/david-sacks-new-white-house-a…)

• (01:49:03) Frontier AI systems have surpassed the self-replicating red line (github.com/WhitzardIndex/self-replication-rese…)

• (01:53:52) Chip war: China launches antitrust probe into US semiconductor giant Nvidia in sign of escalation (scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3290035/china-m…)

• (01:56:53) White House Creating Task Force on AI Datacenter Infrastructure (meritalk.com/articles/white-house-creating-tas…)

• (02:00:00) US clears export of advanced AI chips to UAE under Microsoft deal, Axios says (finance.yahoo.com/news/advanced-ai-chips-clear…)

• (02:02:19) Outro

See Privacy Policy at art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.