#196 - Nvidia Digits, Cosmos, PRIME, ICLR, InfAlign

Our 196th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's* big AI news!

*and sometimes last last week's

Recorded on 01/10/2024

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In this episode:

- Nvidia announced a $3,000 personal AI supercomputer called Digits, featuring the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, aiming to lower the barrier for developers working on large models.

- The U.S. Department of Justice finalizes a rule restricting the transmission of specific data types to countries of concern, including China and Russia, under executive order 14117.

- Meta allegedly trained Llama on pirated content from LibGen, with internal concerns about the legality confirmed through court filings.

- Microsoft paused construction on a section of a large data center project in Wisconsin to reassess based on new technological changes.

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Timestamps + Links:

• (00:00:00) Intro / Banter

• (00:04:52) Sponsor Break

• Tools & Apps

• (00:05:55) Nvidia announces $3,000 personal AI supercomputer called Digits (theverge.com/2025/1/6/24337530/nvidia-ces-digi…)

• (00:10:23) Meta removes AI character accounts after users criticize them as ‘creepy and unnecessary’ (nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-ai-insta-sh…)

• Applications & Business

• (00:16:16) NVIDIA Is Reportedly Focused Towards “Custom Chip” Manufacturing, Recruiting Top Taiwanese Talent (wccftech.com/nvidia-is-focused-towards-custom-…)

• (00:21:54) AI start-up Anthropic closes in on $60bn valuation (ft.com/content/6f786914-734f-4b4e-b757-ab56d0d…)

• (00:25:38) Why OpenAI is Taking So Long to Launch Agents (theinformation.com/articles/why-openai-is-taki…)

• (00:30:08) TSMC Set to Expand CoWoS Capacity to Record 75,000 Wafers in 2025, Doubling 2024 Output (trendforce.com/news/2025/01/02/news-tsmc-set-t…)

• (00:33:10) Microsoft 'pauses construction' on part of data center site in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin (datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-pause…)

• (00:37:23) Google folds more AI teams into DeepMind to ‘accelerate the research to developer pipeline’ (techcrunch.com/2025/01/09/google-folds-more-ai…)

• Projects & Open Source

• (00:41:59) Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI (arxiv.org/abs/2501.03575v1)

• (00:48:21) Microsoft releases Phi-4 language model on Hugging Face (artificialintelligence-news.com/news/microsoft…)

• Research & Advancements

• (00:50:16) PRIME: Online Reinforcement Learning with Process Rewards (marktechpost.com/2025/01/04/prime-an-open-sour…)

• (00:58:29) ICLR: In-Context Learning of Representations (arxiv.org/abs/2501.00070)

• (01:07:38) Do NOT Think That Much for 2+3=? On the Overthinking of o1-Like LLMs (arxiv.org/abs/2412.21187)

• (01:11:44) METAGENE-1: Metagenomic Foundation Model for Pandemic Monitoring (arxiv.org/abs/2501.02045)

• (01:15:45) TransPixar: Advancing Text-to-Video Generation with Transparency (arxiv.org/abs/2501.03006)

• (01:18:03) The amount of compute used to train frontier models has been growing at a breakneck pace of over 4x per year since 2018, resulting in an overall scale-up of more than 10,000x! But what factors are enabling this rapid growth? (epoch.ai/data/notable-ai-models#training-compu…)

• Policy & Safety

• (01:23:45) InfAlign: Inference-aware language model alignment (arxiv.org/abs/2412.19792)

• (01:28:44) Mark Zuckerberg gave Meta’s Llama team the OK to train on copyrighted works, filing claims (techcrunch.com/2025/01/09/mark-zuckerberg-gave…)

• (01:33:19) Anthropic gives court authority to intervene if chatbot spits out song lyrics (arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/anthropic-…)

• (01:35:57) US government says companies are no longer allowed to send bulk data to these nations (techradar.com/pro/security/us-government-says-…)

• (01:39:10) Trump announces $20B plan to build new data centers in the US (techcrunch.com/2025/01/07/trump-announces-20b-…)

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