• AI KATANA
  • Posts
  • Elon Musk’s xAI announces AI model Grok

Elon Musk’s xAI announces AI model Grok

Also: Why are fewer women using AI than men?

Author

AI KATANA
November 05, 2023

Hi!

Elon Musk's xAI recently unveiled Grok, an AI model designed to serve as a universal research assistant, promising real-time knowledge and a distinct personality to democratize information access. At a London event, Musk suggested that AI could render human labor unnecessary, highlighting its profound impact on employment and the necessity for regulation. Meanwhile, tech giants are investing heavily in cloud infrastructure to support AI growth, with Adobe facing scrutiny for selling AI-generated images of sensitive events, highlighting the need for ethical standards. China's focus on AI and humanoid robots in its tech rivalry with the US marks a significant shift towards high-tech industries, while a gender gap persists in AI usage, demanding more inclusive strategies. In related news, Stability AI's new tool can create 3D models, and Kai-Fu Lee's startup, valued at $1 billion, introduces an open-source LLM, emphasizing the pace of innovation in the AI domain.

Sliced:

  • X Elon Musk’s xAI announces AI model Grok

  • 🇬🇧 Elon Musk tells Rishi Sunak AI will put an end to work

  • ☁️ Tech giants pour billions into cloud capacity in AI push

  • 😞 Adobe Caught Selling AI-Generated Images of Israel-Palestine Violence

  • 🤖 The future is AI and humanoid robots, China’s industry minister says, in hi-tech research rivalry with US

  • 👩🏻 Why are fewer women using AI than men?

Grok is xAI's latest AI endeavor, boasting real-time world knowledge and a humorous, slightly rebellious character. It's a beta product, forged from two months of training, and it's expected to evolve rapidly with user input. xAI's mission with Grok is to provide a universal research assistant, democratizing access to information and fostering innovation across disciplines. Grok-1, the underlying model, has undergone numerous improvements, outperforming similar models on various benchmarks and demonstrating xAI's efficiency in training potent LLMs. In engineering Grok, xAI has developed a custom training and inference stack that maximizes compute efficiency, tackling the common issues faced in large-scale GPU utilization with a focus on sustainability. This stack is built on a foundation of Kubernetes, Rust, and JAX, chosen for their reliability and performance.

During an "in conversation" event with UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Elon Musk, the tech magnate and AI investor, conveyed his bold vision that artificial intelligence will ultimately make human labor obsolete, potentially ending the necessity for work. At this London summit, Musk speculated on the transformative and potentially disruptive impact of AI on jobs, despite concerns over AI-induced unemployment and the need for oversight on advanced AI technologies. Additionally, Musk touched on the personal benefits of AI, like providing companionship for his son and personalized tutoring for learners. However, no concrete plans for AI regulation or implementation in the UK were announced. The event was closed to television cameras and reporters were not permitted to ask questions, signaling a controlled dialogue amidst Musk's online critique of the summit. Despite this, the interaction between Sunak and Musk was notably cordial, with the Prime Minister expressing admiration for Musk's innovation, even as they tackled the complex implications of AI's rapid development.

In a bold expansion of technological infrastructure, tech behemoths Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet are significantly bolstering their cloud capacities to support burgeoning generative AI applications, with a combined capital expenditure reaching $42 billion in the last quarter, surging almost 20% year-on-year. This investment, reflective of a strategic pivot towards computational intensiveness demanded by AI, signals an industry-wide anticipation of generative AI's revenue potential, notably underscored by Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy's forecast of generating "tens of billions." As these giants vie for supremacy in the cloud market, which underpins Amazon's profitability, their concerted push into AI underscores the strategic imperative of maintaining a competitive edge in a rapidly evolving digital ecosystem.

Adobe is facing backlash for offering AI-generated images that falsely depict scenes from the Israel-Palestine conflict on its stock photo platform, a problematic revelation exposed by Crikey. These realistic images, including a series featuring a mother and child amid destruction, highlight the ethical dilemmas and potential for misinformation posed by AI in the media industry. Despite being labeled as AI-generated, their convincing authenticity and circulation across various online outlets underscore the danger of such content in misleading viewers. This situation underscores the imperative for rigorous standards in tagging and distributing AI-generated content to prevent the erosion of trust in digital media.

China's Industry Minister Jin Zhuanglong emphasized the importance of artificial intelligence and humanoid robots as symbols of the forthcoming technological revolution and industrial transformation. With a focus on emerging industries, China aims to drive growth and establish a strong position in the high-tech sector, particularly in its competitive dynamics with the United States. The country plans to concentrate on AI, humanoid robots, the metaverse, and 6G telecommunications to develop new economic engines. This strategic emphasis includes overhauling exports towards new-energy products and advanced manufacturing, with recent achievements such as the delivery of China's first domestically produced cruise liner, showcasing its shipbuilding capabilities.

A BBC News report by MaryLou Costa investigates why fewer women are utilizing AI than men, highlighting a significant gender gap in AI engagement. Jeweller Harriet Kelsall, who has dyslexia, and business coach Michelle Leivars illustrate the skepticism among women towards AI applications like ChatGPT, emphasizing concerns over accuracy, plagiarism, and the desire to maintain a personal touch in communications. A survey underscores this trend, showing that AI usage stands at 54% among men but only 35% among women. These cases raise critical questions about the barriers to AI adoption for women and the importance of addressing these issues to foster inclusive and trustworthy AI use across all demographics.

🛠️ AI tools updates

Stability AI, known for its Stable Diffusion text-to-image AI model, has ventured into the realm of 3D model generation with the introduction of Stable 3D. This new AI-powered application is designed to enable even non-experts to quickly generate "draft-quality" 3D models, potentially revolutionizing 3D content creation by simplifying a process that traditionally takes hours or days. Stable 3D works by allowing users to input natural language descriptions or upload images to create textured 3D objects, compatible with major platforms like Blender and Unreal Engine. While Stable 3D could democratize 3D modeling, concerns linger over the training data's provenance, especially in light of Stability AI's previous IP controversies with their Stable Diffusion model.

💵 Venture Capital updates

Kai-Fu Lee's new venture, 01.AI, has been valued at $1 billion and recently unveiled its first product, the open-source large language model (LLM) called Yi-34B. This bilingual model, trained with 34 billion parameters, is designed for the Chinese market, addressing the gap left by the unavailability of OpenAI and Google's products in China. The release of Yi-34B represents a strategic move in China's AI development and reflects the rapid advancements in the generative AI field. Despite its smaller size compared to models like Falcon-180B and Meta LlaMa2-70B, Yi-34B has ranked first amongst pre-trained LLM models. Lee's ambition doesn't stop there; he envisions releasing models with 100 to 400 billion parameters in the next year and a half.

🫡 Meme of the day

⭐️ Generative AI image of the day