. . AI: OpenAI's announcements, new AIs from Elon Musk and Kai-Fu Lee

Friends, OpenAI, Elon Musk, and Kai-Fu Lee all made big announcements in AI since the last time I’ve emailed you - but don’t miss this Google DeepMind study below questioning just how good AIs really are at generalizing beyond the domains they’ve been trained in. It underlines, once again, just how important training data is.

Welcome to those of you new here - thanks! AI Time to Impact is a daily newsletter finding the top stories in AI according to a weighted analysis of AI community engagement, then analyzed and forecast by an ensemble of LLMs and me, your humble editor. I hope these summaries make you feel smarter, in less time than the alternatives.

Smart and charming reader Paul Biggs went so far this weekend to call this newsletter “a next-gen Techmeme for #AI 🤖.” Thanks Paul!

And now today’s news…

Marshall Kirkpatrick, Editor

OpenAI Launches Enhanced GPT-4 Turbo Model

First impacted: Developers, AI Assistants Creators
Time to impact: Short to medium

OpenAI held its first developer conference today and CEO Sam Altman unveiled a new model called GPT-4 Turbo, boasting a 128K context window ("it can fit the equivalent of more than 300 pages of text in a single prompt"), recent knowledge through April 2023, and big price reductions for input and output tokens. The enhanced model, which includes features like Assistants API and tools such as Retrieval and Code Interpreter, is designed to aid developers in creating AI assistants within their applications, and is now multimodal, supporting vision, DALL·E 3, and text-to-speech. [New models and developer products announced at DevDay] Share by email

OpenAI Announces Custom GPT App Store

First impacted: AI enthusiasts, AI developers
Time to impact: Medium

OpenAI has introduced a new feature that allows users to create and share custom versions of ChatGPT for specific tasks (including with all natural langaguge, no code required), and is preparing to launch a GPT Store where verified builders' creations can be purchased. The company has implemented privacy and safety measures, including user control over data sharing with third-party APIs and the ability for builders to use user chats for model improvement, and developers can integrate these LLMs with real-world actions through APIs. Canva and Zappier "GPTs" were demoed at the event today. [Introducing GPTs] Share by email

Google Study Challenges Transformer Models' Generalization Abilities

First impacted: AI researchers, AI model developers
Time to impact: Medium

A recent Google study has questioned the generalization capabilities of transformer models such as GPT, indicating that these LLMs struggle to extend beyond their training data. The research has ignited a debate, with the most startling revelation being that despite their complexity and extensive pretraining data, these LLMs allegedly do not generalize beyond their training data, thereby challenging the notion of their trajectory towards human-level intelligence. The paper’s authors say they are very impressed by how well LLMs deal with things that ARE in their training data, but… “when presented with tasks or functions which are out-of-domain of their pretraining data, we demonstrate various failure modes of transformers and degradation of their generalization for even simple extrapolation tasks.” [Pretraining Data Mixtures Enable Narrow Model Selection Capabilities in Transformer Models] Share by email

AI Pioneer Kai-Fu Lee Launches AI Startup & It's Already an Industry Leading Unicorn

First impacted: AI technology developers, Open-source model users
Time to impact: Short to medium

AI pioneer Kai-Fu Lee's startup, 01.AI, has launched what it calls the world's leading open-source model, Yi-34B. Lee told Bloomberg the startup, which was initiated 8 months ago, has reached a valuation of more than $1 billion after a funding round that included Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s cloud unit. [零一万物-AI2.0大模型技术和应用的全球公司（01.ai）] Share by email

Musk's xAI Launches Grok, an AI Model Informed by X Posts

First impacted: AI researchers, Software developers
Time to impact: Medium to long

Elon Musk's AI company xAI has announced Grok, an AI system in beta, designed to answer intricate queries and propose potential questions. Informed by real-time global knowledge via the 𝕏 platform, the system describes itself as a naughty, spicy, uncensored and sarcastic way to understand the universe. Only X users over the age of 13 and paying for the newest Premium+ $16 level of X account are able to access Grok. [Announcing Grok] Share by email

xAI Launches PromptIDE for Advanced Prompt Engineering

First impacted: AI researchers, Software developers
Time to impact: Medium

Elon Musk's xAI quickly launched PromptIDE, a sophisticated tool aimed at expediting research in prompt engineering and interpretability, featuring an integrated development environment (IDE) that provides access to Grok-1, the model behind Grok. The PromptIDE, equipped with a Python code editor, a software development kit, and a range of analytics, also offers automatic saving of prompts, versioning, and file upload capabilities; Musk fans praised the swift development and the tool's potential for fostering a transparent community. [xAI PromptIDE] Share by email

That’s it! More AI top stories tomorrow.

-Marshall