Artificial Intelligence

Google launched its Gemini AI model earlier today to compete with OpenAI’s popular GPT-4. While Google has a number of videos demonstrating Gemini’s capabilities, the one below stood out to me.

This multimodal AI model is capable of reasoning across images, audio, video, code, and, of course, text. So you can start drawing, and Gemini will understand you’re drawing a duck, or you can set some cups down on a table with a paper ball and Gemini reasons you want to play a game. If Gemini can understand my poor attempts at doodling, then I’ll be the one shouting, “what the quack!”

And wow, I do not have them. So I flew to Berlin to learn from a “Promptographer,” and I came home with more generated pancakes than I know what to do with.

The phrase became an internal joke after ChatGPT’s popularity exploded right out of the gate, according to the NYT’s recap of its launch a year ago and the reaction among Big Tech companies.

Google and Meta scrambled AI teams to launch competing products — even if that meant removing some guardrails — like Bard and LLaMa. And Microsoft’s rush to beat Google had Satya Nadella saying, “We have a big order coming to you, a really big order coming to you,” to Nvidia’s Jensen Huang as he ordered $2 billion in chips.

This chart from Omdia Research estimating Nvidia’s largest customers this year has been making the rounds in my social media feeds.

As I wrote in an earlier issue of Command Line, these H100s are essentially the tech industry’s new gold, since they are the preferred workhorse for powering generative AI. The gap in shipment volume between Meta, Microsoft and everyone else is quite something, and tracks with what I’ve heard from sources in recent months.

Nothing important happened while I was gone, right?

The answer, according to a pre-print study, is about one. Researchers at AI company Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University found that general-purpose AI models like GPT-4 are “orders of magnitude” more power-hungry than purpose-made models powering products like Google Translate.

The study, though not yet peer-reviewed, puts into context the environmental cost of generative AI, particularly of inefficient models (one image from the least efficient image-creating model can use as much CO2 as an average gas car driving about 4 miles, for instance).

Copilot, the AI chatbot formerly known as Bing Chat, is out of preview. That means Copilot is now available in 105 languages and 169 countries “on all modern browsers for mobile and web,” according to Caitlin Roulston, the director of communications at Microsoft.

Even though the preview label is going away today, Roulston says Microsoft will continue to “launch new features in preview while we iterate, listen to feedback, and improve the experience for our users.”

The city of Porto Alegre passed an ordinance that prevents folks whose water meters were stolen from being charged. Sounds benign, but city councilman Ramiro Rosário told AP that he didn’t disclose the fact he’d used ChatGPT to write the law until after it went into effect. According to Rosário, he intentionally kept it secret and hoped to “spark debate.”

Rosário also told g1 he chose a simple and uncontroversial topic for his experiment. Even so, it’s an unsettling precedent given that chatbots are known to introduce factual errors.

A new search tool will let users filter results by body type, starting with women’s fashion and wedding content.

Pinterest is a popular platform — especially for young people — when it comes to mood boarding and finding inspiration for everything from outfit ideas to hairstyles. The company has previously introduced similar filters for skin tone and hair pattern.

It still isn’t entirely clear how the advent of AI filmmaking tech is going to disrupt the entertainment industry.

But it feels pretty significant that Amazon reportedly fired longtime producer Joel Silver not of his alleged harassment towards female executives, but as retaliation in response to his refused to “Use artificial intelligence to finish a movie during the strike.

Sure, it’s not as eye-catching as Musk telling Disney to go fuck itself. But Musk and The New York Times’ Sorkin had a painfully ill-informed conversation about intellectual property and AI, starting with the factually wrong statement that AI companies claim they’re not training on copyrighted works. It’s been driving me up a wall, so kudos to Mike Masnick for laying out how silly it all was.

Musk says he hasn’t found anyone who knows why Sam Altman was ousted (and eventually brought back) — but believes a recent AI breakthrough could have caused the power struggle. A recent report suggested that OpenAI may have made progress towards AGI.