Business & Technology Snapshot by TUATARA – September 2024

October is well underway, so it's time for the new edition of our newsletter – let’s recap the previous month in tech and business.

In our new CEO Perspective Video, we’ll examine the activities of some of the most prominent AI players and learn more about navigating in an AI Post-Hype Era.

1 - Keeping up with OpenAI – a small summary of the tumultuous September for the Gen AI leaders:

01: ?OpenAI asked US to approve energy-guzzling 5GW data centers, report says | by Ars Technica

“With great power, comes great responsibility” – those might have been Sam Altman’s opening words during the courageous pitch of giant 5 gigawatts data centres to US government:

The AI company's CEO, Sam Altman, supposedly pitched the plan after a recent meeting with the Biden administration where stakeholders discussed AI infrastructure needs. Bloomberg reviewed an OpenAI document outlining the plan, reporting that 5 gigawatts "is roughly the equivalent of five nuclear reactors" and warning that each data center will likely require "more energy than is used to power an entire city or about 3 million homes."

According to OpenAI, the US needs these massive data centers to expand AI capabilities domestically, protect national security, and effectively compete with China. If approved, the data centers would generate "thousands of new jobs," OpenAI's document promised, and help cement the US as an AI leader globally.

02: OpenAI releases o1, its first model with ‘reasoning’ abilities | by The Verge

Another step forward – o1 model, codenamed “Strawberry” – is here and it’s better than anything else. For a steep price.

“The training behind o1 is fundamentally different from its predecessors, OpenAI’s research lead, Jerry Tworek, tells me, though the company is being vague about the exact details. He says o1 “has been trained using a completely new optimization algorithm and a new training dataset specifically tailored for it.”????? OpenAI taught previous GPT models to mimic patterns from its training data. With o1, it trained the model to solve problems on its own using a technique known as reinforcement learning, which teaches the system through rewards and penalties. It then uses a “chain of thought” to process queries, similarly to how humans process problems by going through them step-by-step.”

03: OpenAI’s for-profit switch could include equity for Sam Altman | by The Verge

The new structure at OpenAI?

"OpenAI describes its business structure as “a partnership between our original Nonprofit and a new capped profit arm,” which has been a contributing factor in last year’s short-lived board coup against CEO Sam Altman and a recent lawsuit by cofounder Elon Musk. But that’s reportedly set to change along with a massive new funding round that’s still being negotiated but could value the ChatGPT maker at more than $150 billion."

Supposedly, these claims have been debunked by the man himself – we’ll see what the future holds.

2 - Apple iPhone 16 demand is so weak that employees can already buy it on discount (Quartz)

September is the month of the new iPhone – but the sales of the latest 16 models aren’t meeting expectations. Most probably because of AI – more precisely, a lack of it:

“One of the key factors for the lower-than-expected demand for the iPhone 16 Pro series is that the major selling point, Apple Intelligence, is not available at launch alongside the iPhone 16 release,” Kuo said.

An analysis of pre-orders by Jefferies released Wednesday found that demand for the new iPhone lineup is slowly beginning to improve in the U.S., with delivery times for the iPhone 16 Pro reaching two to three weeks in seven major cities analyzed by the investment bank. But this is still below last year’s levels.”

3 - Nvidia just dropped a bombshell: Its new AI model is open, massive, and ready to rival GPT-4 | by VentureBeat

Big things coming from Nvidia – new NVLM 1.0 is a family of frontier-class multimodal large language models that achieve state-of-the-art results on vision-language tasks, rivalling the leading proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4o) and open-access model:

“Nvidia has released a powerful open-source artificial intelligence model that competes with proprietary systems from industry leaders like OpenAI and Google.

The company’s new NVLM 1.0 family of large multimodal language models, led by the 72 billion parameter NVLM-D-72B, demonstrates exceptional performance across vision and language tasks while also enhancing text-only capabilities.”

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