Weekend Warp

In technology, there are decades where nothing happens. And then there are weeks where decades happen. In the last few months, technology seems to be moving at warp speed. To make some sense out of this, I pick three to five stories every week which are the most significant of all.

If AI is the current boss of all tech, the boss of all AI is certainly Satya Nadella . Let’s be honest – 微软 itself is not a leader in AI. That crown still sits firmly on 谷歌 ’s head, thanks to Google DeepMind and the erstwhile Google Brain. If there was a second place, it would perhaps be OpenAI , though Meta would be a keen challenger too. But Microsoft has something, or someone, these companies do not – Satya Nadella as CEO. He has forged ahead with the OpenAI partnership, sprinkling the magic pixie dust of GenAI on all its products and solutions at a speed every startup would envy, and a scale no startup can even imagine. He has struck deals with Mistral AI and Meta, brought in Mustafa Suleyman , who cofounded Inflection AI and DeepMind, to head Microsoft AI, and now has reached across continents to do another landmark deal. Microsoft announced a $1.5bn investment in the hottest AI company in the East (barring China), G42 – the AI arm of the UAE, famous for creating world class LLMs like Falcon and Jais. This not only gives Microsoft a cloud and AI foothold in the one of the richest regions in the world, it unlocks much bigger potential deals and funding, and also gives the US a strategic foothold in the Arab world vis-à-vis China. It is a smart geopolitical and business move. All hail the King!

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I suppose people at Microsoft Research want to change my mind on AI Leadership ??, so they countered by introducing the AI Amazing Product of the Week : VASA – 1. VASA-1 takes in a single portrait photo and an audio file and converts it into a hyper realistic talking face video complete with lip sync, realistic facial features and head movement. The model is currently only a research preview and not available for anyone outside of the Microsoft Research team to try. Similar lip sync and head movement technology is already available from Runway and 英伟达 but this seems to be of a much higher quality and realism. Google Research also has something similar called VLOGGER AI. Potential use cases are in gaming, social media and film making. There are obvious ethical issues too, by making deepfakes easier to make, perhaps. The point, however, is that this AI based tech is gong to advance exponentially and there is nothing we can do about it. The thing we can hope for is that companies, especially Big Tech, put in the right guard rails and safety mechanisms before general availability. That seems to be happening – the guardrails around ChatGPT are quite impressive, text-to-video phenomenan Sora has not been released and OpenAI promises to build the right guard rails for that. Hopefully, the same is true for VASA, which currently is just a research project.

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Another company which laid a claim to AI Superstardom is startup Anthropic , invested in by 亚马逊 and 谷歌 , which claimed that Claude 3 Opus has bested the current leader, GPT4 Turbo, in certain tests. I do hear good things about Claude from enterprises also, and Anthropic is swiftly emerging as the ‘third power’ besides Google and Microsoft-OpenAI. Time for Mistral to up its game, and for OpenAI to unveil GPT5…

Read more on Claude here

The space is certainly heating up….at warp speed.