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AI in the NFL 🏈, Elon's Colossus, and Strawberry in 2 Weeks! 🍓

Plus, Living With a Home Robot for 48 Hours 🤖

Author

Steve Brown
September 12, 2024

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This week’s most interesting and relevant AI news and analysis

This Week in AI

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Synthetic has mentioned OpenAI’s next-generation AI capability, codenamed ‘Strawberry’ in several previous editions. The new model is rumored to bring powerful new reasoning capabilities and is designed to take its time to consider answers and ‘think’ its way through problems before responding. Will it be a disappointment, or will it define the next level of AI? We may find out later this month.

Elon Musk managed to ram through the construction of the world’s largest AI training installation in just 134 days. How did he do it? Apparently, permits are for losers who don’t take the AI arms race seriously enough 😀 Musk plans to double the system’s capabilities in the next few months and has already begun training his latest model, Grok 3. At least one analyst disagrees that Musk is leading the AI race, going so far as to declare the future of AI will be dominated by the “magnificent six” companies (excluding Tesla, which has long been considered part of the “magnificent seven.”)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a multi-billion-dollar industry. As search gives way to AI-powered research and agentic AI becomes the primary interface to find information and perform tasks online, SEO will become “CBO” or “AIO” (Chatbot optimization or AI optimization). This process has already begun as people figure out how to optimize for AI-integrated search and influence chatbots. Chatbots are easily manipulated by placing crawlable text on a website asking a bot to say nice things about your brand.

Nevada is working with Google to build a first-of-its-kind AI system to determine whether or not unemployed claimants should receive benefits. Trained on transcripts of unemployment appeals hearings and recommendations by human referees, the system will analyze hearing transcripts and documentary evidence to recommend whether a claim should be approved, denied, or modified. A human referee will then review that recommendation. Nevada has a significant claims backlog, with some cases pending since the pandemic. 🦠 In related news, a recent survey of American consumers revealed many people are uncomfortable with AI making decisions about their lives. No surprise there.

Quick Hits

Video: I Lived With a Humanoid Robot for 48 Hours 🤖

Neo, a humanoid robot built by 1X, spends a couple of days in the home of an online journalist. The robot has limitations but can navigate the house, do simple chores, hold a conversation, and understand simple human gestures and their intent. The Norwegian company plans to ship robots into homes starting next year. Their production targets are for 1000s of units in 2025, 10s of thousands in 2026, 100s of thousands in 2027, and millions of units in 2028. Their robots will cost around as much as an average car. (12 mins)

A previous episode, “They Built This Robot For Your Home,” provides additional detail on Neo. Enjoy! (18 min) 🤖

AI Tech and Innovation

Amazon-built AI tools now support NFL Thursday Night Football broadcasts, arming commentators with new stats on the probability of the quarterback being tackled in a blitz. As this explainer video outlines, Tackle Probability uses massive amounts of player and team statistics to make predictions. The system was trained in less than six months. 🏈

Synthetic’s Take: Expect AI to become an increasingly important component of professional sports. For example, Google DeepMind’s TacticAI, which emerged from a multi-year partnership with Liverpool FC, helps coaches optimize tactics to increase their team’s chance of scoring a goal during a corner kick.

Google has released DataGemma, the world’s first open models designed to help address the challenges of hallucination by grounding LLMs in the vast, real-world statistical data of Google’s data commons, which is a repository of publicly-available, trustworthy data. DataGemma uses both RIG (Retrieval-Interleaved Generation) and RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) to enhance factuality and reasoning.

Many AI researchers believe that for AI capabilities to reach human-level, so-called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), it must first be embodied. An embodied AI, built inside a robot to explore, experience, and interact with the physical world, should be able to create a world model, an understanding of how the world works, in much the same way a child does. A researcher from Google X’s now-defunct “Everyday Robots” team tells their story and why he believes robots are vital to humanity’s future.

A new AI has discovered organic light-harvesting molecules with five times better stability than compounds previously used in organic solar cells. Notably, the AI system can also explain to scientists WHY the compounds are more stable, helping them design better future materials. Researchers published their findings in Nature. ☀️⬛️

As part of Synthetic’s effort to provide balanced coverage on the future of AI, this piece argues that generative AI is a distraction from other types of AI applications that actually make companies money. Gartner’s chief of AI research, Erick Brethenoux, believes the current need for power-hungry, brute-force hardware indicates that AI techniques and algorithms still need refinement. Gartner advocates the combination of traditional AI with generative AI, which they call ‘composite AI,’ to maximize impact and limit risk.

AI Insights and Analysis

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“The days of every line of code being written by software engineers—those are completely over. There’s not one software engineer in our company today who doesn’t use code generators.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, speaking at a Goldman Sachs summit

Venture Capitalist ARK shares their perspective on the rapidly advancing humanoid robot market. They foresee a $24 trillion market opportunity and estimate that if priced at just $40,000 per unit, these robots need only offer a 15% productivity uplift to pay for themselves.

This excellent analysis piece explores Nvidia’s innovative competitors and assesses their chances of grabbing some of the AI king’s market share. Specifically, the article looks at Etched, Groq, Cerebras, and the ailing GraphCore and uses counter-positioning theory (one of Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers of business strategy) to judge their strategic chances. 📊

An effort known as ‘Project Sid’ populated a Minecraft world with 1,000 autonomous AI agents to see what would happen. The result was fascinating. Agents formed alliances, set up a shared trading currency, and collaborated to advance common goals. A crooked priest bribed other townsfolk to gain an unfair advantage. AI truly is a mirror of humanity. A short video on the project is available here.

Toolkit for the Future

AI extracts information from your receipts and organizes it in an easy-to-search database alongside IRS-approved, secure image scans. Capture receipts on the go📱, forward receipts 📧, use the web portal, or mail in a pile of physical receipts🧾. Try it free for 30 days.

This versatile AI assistant helps content creators to write text, edit content, change writing tone, create images, generate audio, easily translate text into other languages, quickly summarize hours-long YouTube videos, generate memes, and more. Free to try.

Extract data from websites and place it in a spreadsheet that fills itself and notifies you of any changes. Pre-built robots make it a breeze to get started. Extract whatever you need: job listings, property details, TikTok videos, hotel info, or competitor pricing. Free to try. No coding required.

Keep your sales team focused on customers during meetings. Laxis captures attendee comments verbatim and flags items for follow up. It auto-generates meeting summaries and follow-up emails in seconds, quickly identifying customer requirements, pain points, and action items. Free to try.