GSV's AI News & Updates (04/04/22)

Controversial AI Moratorium Letter, Italy bans ChatGPT, BloombergGPT, Zoom partners with OpenAI, Perplexity raises $25.6M, Google Replit partnership

Apr 04, 2023

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General 🚀

The Controversial AI Moratorium Letter: Over 1,400 leaders and researchers in the industry - including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Emad Mostaque, Andrew Yang - signed an open letter urging AI labs to pause research and training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months.
- The AI community found itself divided: One side sees foundation AI models as something like nuclear weapons that could unleash massive harm, while the other side believes that an AI moratorium is the equivalent of the restrictions that were once imposed in technologies like the printing press, the telegraph, or electricity that enabled massive leaps forward and created massive wealth, improving the quality of life for generations.
- Andrew Ng on why the call for a 6 month moratorium on making AI progress beyond GPT-4 is a terrible idea.
- Scott Aaronson: if AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason.
ChatGPT Is Banned in Italy Over Privacy Concerns: Their main concern is that OpenAI is non-compliant with the EU data protection regulations and GDPR.
- OpenAI has 20 days to respond to the allegations and indicate what steps it has taken to comply. OpenAI has now placed a geo-block on the use of ChatGPT within Italy. Fines could rise as high as €20 Million or 4% of annual revenue.
Introducing BloombergGPT, Bloomberg’s 50-billion parameter large language model, purpose-built from scratch for finance: BloombergGPT outperforms similarly-sized open models on financial NLP tasks by significant margins — without sacrificing performance on general LLM benchmarks.
- Unlike other models, which trained on the public Internet, half of BloombergGPT's training data was Bloomberg's proprietary data - a 363 billion token dataset from Bloomberg Terminal, the largest domain-specific dataset yet.
Zoom partnered with OpenAI to transform its Zoom IQ feature into a "smart companion: features range from chapterizing recorded meetings and producing meeting notes to analyzing the quality of in-meeting questions by sales managers and cataloging competitive intelligence from sales calls
Davids in the Land of (AI) Goliaths: how do startups compete in the midst of a platform shift?
The case for how and why AI might kill us all: forget the collapse of employment, forget the spam and misinformation, forget human obsolescence and the upending of society. Some believe AI is flat-out going to wipe out all of biological life at its earliest opportunity.
The Accidental Consumer Tech Company; ChatGPT, Meta, and Product-Market Fit; Aggregation and APIs
Malleable software in the age of LLMs: all computer users may soon have the ability to author small bits of code. What structural changes does this imply for the production and distribution of software?
Modern Meditations: Reid Hoffman: the LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner discusses AI imagery, new nation-states, friendship, and “the storm before the calm.”
Google C.E.O. Sundar Pichai on the A.I. Moment: ‘You Will See Us Be Bold’
Your guide to AI: April 2023

Education and the Future of Work 📚

Perplexity AI Raises $25.6M led by NEA: to challenge Bing Chat and Google Bard in the conversational search space.
Google Partners with AI Startup Replit to Take on Microsoft’s GitHub: Replit’s software development tool will use Google artificial intelligence language models to better write code.
Can Turnitin Cure Higher Ed’s AI Fever?: The plagiarism detector will introduce its AI detection tool hoping to protect academic integrity in a post-ChatGPT world. The speedy launch and lack of an opt-out have some academics worried.
From Automation to Reinvention: How AI Is Shifting the Nature of Work: a workforce reevaluation as new AI systems reshape the landscape of higher-skilled professions.
Ethan Mollick: How to use AI to do practical stuff (a new guide)
AI could replace equivalent of 300 million jobs
How Will LLMs Change the Shape of our Product Teams?
Roblox and Its Generative AI: how game creation and the metaverse may be changing.
Vinod Khosla on how AI will ‘free humanity from the need to work’

Startups and Tools 🛠️

Jigso raises a $7.5M Seed: building an AI assistant to surface the data employees need automatically and to “create a business observability layer”.
HideGPT: evades detection and masks the fingerprint of GPT on any piece of text (up to 5,000 words!). It perturbs each sentence while leaving the original meaning intact, until all traces of LLMs are gone.
Literally Anything: transforms any natural language into simple apps, UI, widgets, website and more.

Tech 💻

From Deep to Long Learning?: recent line of work from Stanford dramatically increasing the context window for language models. Longer prompts or output longer generations = full book summaries, repository level code edits, and multimodal video generation.
Artificial Intelligence Is Teaching Us New, Surprising Things About the Human Mind: scientists are using AI to decipher the communication between neurons in the brain, perhaps allowing us to one day connect with computers through mere thinking.
Humanness in the Age of AI: a path to an open and permissionless identity protocol.
Regulating AI Will Be Essential: the middle ground would be creating a new federal agency, like the SEC or the FDA but staffed with experts on artificial intelligence.
Google denies Bard was trained with ChatGPT data
Five years of GPT progress
A Survey of Large Language Models