The AI Rundown by Lightscape Partners - 06/24/24

Good morning, and welcome back to another week of The AI Rundown.

Last week in AI:

• Nvidia overtook Microsoft as the largest US company, amassing a $3.34 trillion valuation. The soaring stock continues to rise as the demand for H100s remains essential to AI model training and inference.

• In the chip war, the US is looking to reduce China’s availability to create advanced semiconductors, asking Japan and the Netherlands to block equipment imports essential to the chip-making process.

• Dell and Nvidia are teaming up to build the “AI Factory” to train xAI’s new model. The process will require tens of thousands of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs.

Otherwise, let’s get into it.

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Top AI Stories of the Week

NVIDIA passes Microsoft in market cap becoming the largest company in the US. Link.

• Nvidia has surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization, becoming the most valuable public company.

• This remarkable growth is driven by the high demand for Nvidia's AI and high-performance computing processors, especially the Nvidia H100 and H200, with further contributions expected from the upcoming Blackwell B200 products.

• Nvidia's market cap reached $3.34 trillion, edging out Microsoft's $3.33 trillion.

• Analysts anticipate a competitive race to a $4 trillion market cap among Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple as they capitalize on the AI boom​.

The US seeks international help restricting China’s AI chip progress. Link.

• The United States is seeking to curb the support provided by ASML Holding NV and Tokyo Electron Ltd. to China's AI memory chip industry.

• This initiative involves tightening export controls to prevent China from acquiring advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment essential for producing high-end memory chips used in artificial intelligence applications.

• Japan and the Netherlands are expected to align with the U.S. measures, effectively creating a near-total blockade on China’s ability to purchase this critical equipment.

• This move is part of a broader strategy to limit China's technological advancements in AI and semiconductor sectors due to national security concerns.

Dell and NVIDIA are building xAI’s gigafactory of compute. Link.

• Elon Musk's AI startup, xAI, is collaborating with Dell Technologies and Nvidia to construct a state-of-the-art AI supercomputer.

• This initiative, dubbed the Dell “AI Factory”, will feature Nvidia's cutting-edge GPUs to power xAI's Grok language model.

• Dell and Super Micro will provide server racks, with the supercomputer expected to use tens of thousands of Nvidia H100 GPUs.

• The project aims to have the supercomputer operational by fall 2025, positioning xAI as a significant competitor to AI giants like OpenAI and Google​.

Startups

OpenAI co-founder, Ilya Sutskever, announces a new startup focused on building safe superintelligence. Link.

• Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI, has launched a new company called Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), focusing exclusively on developing safe superintelligence.

• The company aims to tackle what Sutskever and his team consider the most critical technical challenge of our time by advancing AI capabilities while prioritizing safety measures.

• SSI is co-founded by Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.

Former Figure AI CTO announces his own humanoid startup months after leaving the firm. Link.

• Jerry Pratt, former CTO of Figure AI, announced last week that he is starting his own humanoid robotics company named Persona AI.

• The new founder spent almost 2 years at Figure AI, quietly departing in March of this year.

• It is unclear how much the startup has raised yet.

Brett Adcock, Figure CEO, announces new startup to prevent school shootings. Link.

• The new startup is licensing NASA technology to help prevent school shootings.

• The startup aims to implement advanced safety measures using this technology, focusing on creating safer school environments.

• This initiative leverages cutting-edge tech originally developed for space exploration, repurposing it to address the urgent issue of school safety.

• The serial founder is initially bootstrapping the startup, sinking $2 million of his own capital into the company.

Models and LLMs

Meta releases four new models. Link.

1. Chameleon: A multi-modal model that processes and generates both text and images simultaneously, enabling creative applications like generating captions for images or creating new scenes from text and image prompts.

2. Multi-Token Prediction: This model improves the efficiency of language models by predicting multiple future words at once instead of one at a time, which enhances training speed and performance.

3. JASCO: A text-to-music generation model that allows more control over the generated music by accepting various inputs like chords or beats, enabling more versatile and higher-quality music generation.

4. AudioSeal: An audio watermarking technique designed to detect AI-generated speech, capable of pinpointing AI-generated segments within longer audio snippets, making detection faster and more efficient.

Anthropic releases Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Link.

• Claude 3.5 Sonnet, the latest AI model from Anthropic, aims to outperform other large language models (LLMs) in terms of intelligence, speed, and cost-efficiency.

• It excels in graduate-level reasoning, undergraduate-level knowledge, and coding proficiency. Claude 3.5 Sonnet is available for free on Claude.ai and the Claude iOS app, with premium access for subscribers.

• New features include Artifacts, allowing users to interact dynamically with generated content.

Content Creation

TikTok released Symphony, a suite of generative AI-powered solutions for content creation. Link.

• TikTok's Symphony AI Creative Suite includes the TikTok Creative Assistant, an AI tool that aids brands and creators in generating ideas, discovering trends, and writing scripts.

• Integrated within the TikTok Creative Center, it leverages extensive TikTok knowledge to support users throughout the creative process.

• The suite also offers features like the Top Ads Dashboard and Trend Discovery to keep users informed about successful ads and current trends on TikTok.

• This initiative aims to streamline content creation, allowing users to focus more on producing creative content​

Get up to speed on the current landscape

Bessemer’s AI Infrastructure Market Map. Link.

Thank you for reading the AI Rundown by Lightscape Partners. Please send any questions, comments, or suggestions to [email protected].