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- Sam Altman's secret AI chip venture
Welcome, AI enthusiasts.
Sam Altman wants AI to continue accelerating — and isn’t going to let major chip shortages stand in his way.
The CEO is reportedly in talks with investors and manufacturers on a new global chipmaking venture, chasing billions from the Middle East. Let’s investigate…
In today’s AI rundown:
Altman chasing billions for chip manufacturing
OpenAI suspends Dean Bot AI taking on Biden
How to generate a powerpoint in seconds with Copilot
Meta introduces Mosiac-SDF for 3D shape generation
5 new AI tools & 4 new AI jobs
More AI & tech news
Read time: 4 minutes
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
OPENAI
Image source: Bloomberg
The Rundown: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is seeking billions from investors to establish a global network of semiconductor factories focused on producing AI chips, according to a new report from Bloomberg.
The details:
Altman is aiming to work with ‘top major chipmakers’ to set up manufacturing plants worldwide to help meet surging demand for compute power.
The chip efforts were briefly halted amid Altman’s brief removal as CEO in November, but discussions were revived upon returning.
Altman is reportedly in talks with Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC to manufacture, alongside discussions with wealthy Middle East investors.
The chip venture aims to decrease reliance on Nvidia, while also trying to get ahead of a potential massive future supply shortage.
Why it matters: To the joy of accelerationists, Altman looks to be rushing to ensure chip shortages won’t limit AI progress. But competing with chip giants is no small task — and further entanglement with the Middle East and new business ventures likely opens Altman and OpenAI up to even more scrutiny.
TOGETHER WITH OCTOAI
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Inference costs on OpenAI are too high for new apps to become successful businesses.
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POLITICS & AI
Image source: DeanBot
The Rundown: OpenAI just suspended the account of the developer behind Dean Bot, a chatbot mimicking Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips — saying the use violates the company’s ban on using its tech in political campaigns.
The details:
A super PAC called We Deserve Better is behind the chatbot, contracting AI startup Delphi to build the application.
One of the PAC co-founders is Matt Krisiloff, former chief of staff to Sam Altman — with reported support from hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman.
The chatbot was trained on Phillips’ podcasts, interviews, and speeches — and can respond via voice to help educate and interact with potential voters.
The account suspension is reportedly OpenAI’s first action against the use of GPT in political campaigns.
The bot was originally powered by an OpenAI API, but is being pivoted to open-source tech in wake of the suspension.
Why it matters: AI’s political drama has officially begun — and OpenAI will likely be playing whack-a-mole with these issues all year. But with capable open-source alternatives, the tech’s usage in campaigns isn’t going away — and its wider adoption is something AI experts currently fear the most.
AI TRAINING
Image source: Ethan Mollick on X
The Rundown: Microsoft Copilot’s new AI integration with PowerPoint allows you to create in-depth presentations with speaker notes from documents in seconds.
Step-by-step:
Open Microsoft PowerPoint (make sure it's updated to the latest version) and click the ‘Copilot’ button on the top right taskbar.
In the prompt box, explain what you’d like to create. Options include creating a presentation from scratch, uploading documents to create from a file, or creating individual slides.
Copilot will provide suggestions based on your prompt. Accept, modify, or reject the outputs as needed.
Copilot is also capable of adjusting layouts and images, generating speaker notes, animating slides, and more — all by chatting conversationally via the chat box.
PRESENTED BY IMAGINE AI LIVE
The Rundown: Businesses powered by AI don’t just lead; they dominate. Don't let your business be the one that gets left behind...
The Imagine AI Live 24 conference, happening March 27-28 at the luxurious Fontainebleau in Las Vegas, will become the nexus of AI innovation and business transformation.
Join like-minded AI leaders, thinkers, and disruptors in a quest to redefine business and the future of work with AI.
AI RESEARCH
Image source: Meta
The Rundown: Meta researchers just published a paper on Mosaic-SDF, a new 3D format tailored for training generative AI models to quickly and efficiently create novel shapes.
The details:
M-SDF represents a 3D shape using tiny voxel grids placed around its surface, capturing detail efficiently.
The format is fast to compute from shapes, low in parameters, and compatible with powerful AI models.
The researchers showed M-SDF's utility by training a neural model that generates creative 3D shapes based on text captions.
Why it matters: M-SDF provides an efficient 3D shape representation for unlocking AI's generative potential in the area, which could significantly advance creative 3D applications.
NEW TOOLS & JOBS
📊 Artificial Analysis- Find and compare the latest AI models (link)
🥷 Honcho- A context management solution for building AI Agents and LLM-powered apps (link)
📖 Reading Coach by Microsoft- A personalized, inclusive, and responsible AI reading coach to help students learn to read faster (link)
👩💼 AI Lawyer 2.0- A legal assistance AI for lawyers and consumers that has features such as document automation and advanced research (link)
🦸 WittyWingMan- Upload chat screenshots, and WittyWingman will craft personalized replies to keep the conversation lively (link)
🐙 OctoAI- MLSys Engineer - Kernel Optimization (link)
💻 OpenAI- Front End Engineer, Evals & Understanding (link)
🗣️ Anthropic- HR Business Partner (link)
👩💻 Cohere- Technical Product Marketing Associate (link)
P.S. Due to popular requests, emojis are back to help you get context faster!
QUICK HITS
Elon Musk said there is currently a massive gigawatt-class GPU cluster being constructed in Kuwait during an interview with entrepreneur Peter Diamandis.
MultiOn CEO Div Garg discussed the future of AI agents with Nathan Labenz, saying autonomous agents will soon change the nature of jobs as we know them.
Mindaugas Galvosas showed off a video demo of MedivisAR, an FDA-cleared, AI-powered AR platform for surgeries.
Stability AI unveiled Stable LM 2 1.6B, a fast and compact 1.6B parameter multilingual language model that outperforms similar small models
Two Google DeepMind researchers are reportedly in talks to leave and launch a new AI startup in Paris, with potentially over $220M in initial funding to create a new AI model.
Bloomberg reported that Elon Musk’s xAI has secured $500M in commitments towards a $1B investment round, at a valuation of at least $15B — but Musk dispelled the article as ‘fake news’.
NASA published research demonstrating self-assembling robotic structures, utilizing mobile robots and reusable frames to enable the construction of buildings that… build themselves.
THAT’S A WRAP
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