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Sam Altman thinks he might get shot
Welcome, Algorithm Adventurers.
Sam Altman thinks he might get shot for his role in AI advancements, and he doesn’t look worried.
He was interviewed by Lex Fridman a few days ago and he dropped a few bombshells on the future of AI and his experience in the industry so far. Let’s investigate.
In today’s Tale, you’ll discover:
The best direct quotes from Sam Altman’s latest interview
Everything you need to know about the “open sourced“ Grok and how you can access it
All the important updates from the first day of Nvidia’s GTC conference
Read in 4 minutes…
Recent Breakthroughs
Sam Altman’s Interview
Image credit: Lex Fridman
Sam Altman’s Heart to Heart With Lex
Sam recently went on Lex Fridman’s podcast and it was a pretty interesting conversation full of shocking revelations.
He seemed resigned to the notion that someone may shoot him one day, plus he acknowledged that Q* exists.
Here are the top direct quotes from OpenAI’s CEO:
Sam on shocking the world with AI updates: “Our goal is not to have shock updates to the world. But that's what we're trying to do that's our state of strategy and I think we're somehow missing the mark.”
On releasing GPT 5: Sam said that they don’t plan to release ChatGPT 5 this year. But they’re going to release another cool model.
“We will release an amazing model this year. I don't know what we'll call it. We'll release, over the coming months, many different things. I think they'll be very cool.”
On Q star: “We’re not ready to talk about that.”
On something going wrong with AI: “I think some things are going to go theatrically wrong with AI. I don't know what the percent chance is that I eventually get shot but it's not zero.”
Nvidia’s GTC Conference
Nvidia is Building a Robot Brain
a fictional Groot robot
Yesterday, Nvidia’s GTC developer conference kicked off and the keynote speech from CEO Jensen Huang lasted 2 hours.
The techies in attendance were entranced by Huang’s magical voice as he listed all the neat stuff he’s been cooking up behind the scenes.
It was like watching a Drake concert, except the background dancers were actually robots.
Let’s break down what went on on the first day of the GTC conference:
💡 Super duper computers: They announced a new chip, Blackwell, that’s worth $10 billion. It’s supposed to be 30X faster than the one making them billions of dollars right now.
Why it matters: Huang hinted that models like ChatGPT and Claude are just the beginning. The new Blackwell chips will allow companies to train future models with multi-modality data, such as graphs, images, videos, text, and charts, making them 10 times better and faster. Yikes.
💡 Robo Boys: After summoning his army of robots (via hologram,) Huang announced that Nvidia is building brains for the humanoids. The robots will run on a technology called GR00T (Generalist Robot 00 Technology.)
Why it matters: In simple terms, GR00T robots understand natural human communication and learn physical skills just by watching us - allowing them to move around, adapt their functioning, and work alongside humans in useful ways.
Together With Notion
Notion AI in action
In the future, AI agents will automate boring repetitive tasks freeing up mental real estate to do fun things, like creating content.
However, using these agent tools collaboratively is crucial to get the best outcomes.
I can’t think of a better way of doing this than Notion AI.
Notion AI helps you connect ideas across your notes, books, meeting notes, and tweets to provide you with new ideas and strategies based on all the knowledge you have recorded in your second brain.
It has incredible intuition for identifying what exactly you’re looking for and how you intend to use it.
Unlike ChatGPT, it’s not based on random, general knowledge, but on every tweet, note, and idea you have ever recorded on Notion.
Ready to unlock the power of your second brain? Sign up for Notion AI today and experience the power of knowledge.
New AI Tools
Grok release
Grok LLM Drop
Elon Keeps his Promise, but not entirely
Turns out, Elon is a man of his word.
He dropped Grok at the start of the week but it’s not all that it’s cut out to be. Only a few people with a lot of money can use the “Open source model”
We’ll talk about the model itself in a while, but first I want you to get a few things straight:
There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors around the term “Open” in the AI world. Traditionally, when a developer made their software open source, they published their code publicly and allowed the community to make changes and improvements.
This is not the case with AI. Long story short, machine learning is incredibly complex and can’t be inspected, audited, and improved the way traditional code can.
That said, the old definition of “open” does not apply to the AI world. Currently, companies release “open” models through a public-facing interface or API (Grok) or by releasing a paper describing the development process (Apple’s MLLMs paper).
However, they don’t release the training data and weights used to mold the model because of several reasons I’ll cover in a future newsletter.
That said, here’s everything you need to know about Grok:
xAI open-sourced their 314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Expert model on GitHub
The model isn’t tuned for a specific application such as using it for conversations like ChatGPT
It’s licensed under the Apache License 2.0 which allows it to be modified, distributed, and used commercially
The good news is that Grok is readily available for anyone to download, modify, and fine-tune. Combine that with the 314B parameter limit and engineers can make some huge tweaks, run tests, and see how the model performs.
However, the size of the model is also its Achilles heel. To use Grok, you’ll need hundreds of GB of high-speed RAM. That’s equivalent to 12 Nvidia H100s, and these babies cost $30,000 each.
So Musk kept his promise but the model is definitely not what people expected it to be.
Closing Remarks
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