New AI models from Meta are making waves in technology circles.
Meta’s new Llama models have differently sized underlying datasets, with the Llama 3 8B model featuring eight billion parameters, and the Llama 3 70B model some seventy billion parameters.
The company’s new models, which were trained on 24,000 GPU clusters, perform well across benchmarks that Meta put them up against, besting some rivals’ models that were already in the market.
What matters for those of us not competing to build and release the most capable, or largest AI models, what we care about is that they are still getting better with time.
While Meta takes an open-source approach to AI work, its competitors are often prefer more closed-source work.
Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast and airs every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
You can subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, and all the casts.
You also can follow Equity on X and Threads at @EquityPod.
For the full interview transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, read on, or check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast.
OpenAI is expanding to Japan, with the opening of a new Tokyo office and plans for a GPT-4 model optimized specifically for the Japanese language.
Japan is the current G7 chair and President of the G7’s Hiroshima AI Process, an initiative to promote AI safety, including stronger AI governance.
EnterprisingAs president of OpenAI Japan, Nagasaki will be tasked with building a local team on the ground to double down on OpenAI’s business in the country.
OpenAI says ChatGPT is also being used by local governments to “improve the efficiency of public services in Japan.”ChatGPT has long been conversant in multiple languages, including Japanese.
For now, OpenAI is giving early access to the GPT-4 custom model to some local businesses, with access gradually opened up via the OpenAI API “in the coming months.”
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s viral AI-powered chatbot, just got a big upgrade.
OpenAI announced today that premium ChatGPT users — customers paying for ChatGPT Plus, Team or Enterprise — can now leveraged an updated and enhanced version of GPT-4 Turbo, one of the models that powers the conversational ChatGPT experience.
It was trained on publicly available data up to December 2023, in contrast to the previous edition of GPT-4 Turbo available in ChatGPT, which had an April 2023 cut-off.
“When writing with ChatGPT [with the new GPT-4 Turbo], responses will be more direct, less verbose and use more conversational language,” OpenAI writes in a post on X.
Our new GPT-4 Turbo is now available to paid ChatGPT users.
OpenAI is expanding a program, Custom Model, to help enterprise customers develop tailored generative AI models using its technology for specific use cases, domains and applications.
“Dozens” of customers have enrolled in Custom Model since.
As for custom-trained models, they’re custom models built with OpenAI — using OpenAI’s base models and tools (e.g.
Fine-tuned and custom models could also lessen the strain on OpenAI’s model serving infrastructure.
Alongside the expanded Custom Model program and custom model building, OpenAI today unveiled new model fine-tuning features for developers working with GPT-3.5, including a new dashboard for comparing model quality and performance, support for integrations with third-party platforms (starting with the AI developer platform Weights & Biases) and enhancements to tooling.
Ghost Autonomy, a startup working on autonomous driving software for automaker partners, has shut down, TechCrunch has learned.
“We are proud of the substantial technical innovations and progress the Ghost team made on its mission to deliver software-defined consumer autonomy,” the note on its website reads.
“The path to long-term profitability was uncertain given the current funding climate and long-term investment required for autonomy development and commercialization.
We are exploring potential long-term destinations for our team’s innovations.”The shutdown comes just five months since the startup partnered with OpenAI through the OpenAI Startup Fund to gain early access to OpenAI systems and Azure resources from Microsoft.
Like so many startups trying to commercialize autonomous vehicle technology, Ghost has shifted its approach over the years.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has transferred formal control of the eponymously firm’s named corporate venture fund to Ian Cathaway, OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch.
The Open AI Startup Fund, launched in 2021, was initially set up with Altman as its named controller.
Cathaway joined OpenAI in 2021 and played a key role managing the Startup Fund, leading investments in Ambience Healthcare, Cursor, Harvey, and Speak.
Last year, the fund had $175 million in commitments, and now holds $325 million in gross net asset value, according to an SEC filing.
The Startup Fund has backed at least 16 other startups, according to PitchBook data.
The big cloud vendors have all already lined up with other chatbot partners: Microsoft with OpenAI, Google and Amazon with Anthropic; Cohere picking up assorted others like Oracle and Salesforce.
If and when Inflection ever perfected Pi on its enormous AI infrastructure, the race looked to be already lost.
Despite close ties with OpenAI, Microsoft also has many reasons to be needing a backup for it’s all-important AI gambit.
There are so many red flags with OpenAI that Microsoft is wise to wean its dependence.
Then again, just like Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI, we wonder if regulators will also have something to say about this deal.
In June 2023, Inflection announced it had raised $1.3 billion to build what it called “more personal AI.” The lead investor was Microsoft.
Today, less than a year later, Microsoft announced that it was essentially eating Inflection alive (though I think they phrased it differently).
Co-founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan will go to Microsoft, where the former will head up the newly formed Microsoft AI division, along with “several members” of their team as Microsoft put it — or “most of the staff,” as Bloomberg reports it.
Ultimately Microsoft got a bit of extra leverage on the company instead of eating it alive.
Whether it was OpenAI or Inflection, Microsoft was feeding their cash and compute addictions, whispering in their ear about partnerships, and then as soon as they tripped, out came the hidden fork and knife.
OpenAI’s legal battle with The New York Times over data to train its AI models might still be brewing.
But OpenAI’s forging ahead on deals with other publishers, including some of France’s and Spain’s largest news publishers.
OpenAI on Wednesday announced that it signed contracts with Le Monde and Prisa Media to bring French and Spanish news content to OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.
So, OpenAI’s revealed licensing deals with a handful of content providers at this point.
The Information reported in January that OpenAI was offering publishers between $1 million and $5 million a year to access archives to train its GenAI models.
