🚀 XAI • CALLING PI • CLAUDE 2 • LLAMA 2 THE PEOPLE | V29
Things are launching left, right and center
🚀 XAI FINALLY LAUNCHES
↗ x.ai
For months there have been rumours that Elon Musk is working on a new AI research lab. Well last week xAI came out of stealth. The company, with the goal “to understand the true nature of the universe“, was revealed by tweet on the 12th of July.
Why the 12th of July 2023?” I hear you asking – well, 7 + 12 + 23 = 42, which famously is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything in Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”.
Joining Elon on this journey is a collection of industry veterans from OpenAI, DeepMind, Google Brain and Microsoft Research, that collectively worked on a number of fundamental technological advancements in AI (including the Adam optimizer, batch normalisation, Inception, AlphaStar and GPT-4, if you are interested).
The team also hosted a 1 1/2 hours Twitter Spaces (obviously ^^) talking more about their backgrounds and goals.
You can listen to the recording here.
💬 ANTHROPIC IS RELEASING CLAUDE 2
Anthropic, the AI research company founded by a couple of OpenAI alumni, just launched the second iteration of their LLM-powered chatbot Claude.
Claude 2 is only available in the US & UK for now. Similar to GPT-4 it managed to perform above human average in many university and professional tests like the GRE and the bar exam:
Claude 2 can work with an over 6 times larger context – meaning the amount of text a model can handle in one prompt – then ChatGPT (100k vs 16k tokens) which makes it possible to directly apply it to very large corpuses of text.
☎️ HI, THIS IS PI SPEAKING
Remember the iconic conversation between Hal and Dave in 2001 Space Odyssey? You can now actually talk to an AI (although hopefully in much more positive scenarios).
In the latest Input we wrote about Inflection AI raising $1.3 billion to build the largest AI compute cluster in the world. The first product released by Inflection is a chatbot called Pi, that was built with a focus on emotional intelligence (Pi stands for “Personal Intelligence“). Since May users are able to chat with Pi through the web or more recently through an app.
Now you can actually give Pi a call. Quite a weird experience I have to say. But admittedly I’ve already spent some time chit-chatting with Pi.
Download the app and give Pi a call here.
🦙 LLAMA 2 IS OUT AND FULLY OPEN SOURCE
↗ Meta
Some might remember when the original LLaMA escaped by accident (or by design, who knows…) this March.
Now Meta released the next generation Llama 2 and it is completely open source.
It took back the title for the best performing open source model from Falcon (who overtook the initial Llama version).
A range of Llama 2 models can be downloaded directly as well as being available through many platforms, including AWS and Hugging Face. Although Meta also announced a special partnership with Microsoft, which is a pretty interesting move.
For more in depth context, here is a very good longer form conversation in which Mark Zuckerberg talks about why he sees open source is the right way forward:
The Input is a newsletter made with 🖤 by Nice Outside on planet earth. If you have feedback, are interested in geeking out about any of the things mentioned above or just want to jam on an idea, feel free to reach out to max@no.studio.