What OpenAI’s wave of releases says about 2024

Welcome to another edition of ?? The AI Beat ??!

This week I surfed the latest tsunami wave of AI news, which culminated with today's giant breaker from OpenAI which crashed with a level of hype and excitement that threatened to sweep us all away with the current.

Also:

• Elon Musk unveils xAI’s first product Grok, an LLM offering realtime data, efficiency and ‘humor’
• Forget ChatGPT, why Llama and open source AI win 2023
• For marketers, generative AI changed everything in 2023
• AI pioneers Hinton, Ng, LeCun, Bengio amp up x-risk debate

OpenAI’s latest release announcements during the company’s first developer conference, Dev Day — custom GPTs! New GPT-4 Turbo! Assistants API! — crashed over Silicon Valley and the world today like a massive wave of hype and excitement that threatened to sweep us all away with the current.

Of course, observers of all things AI, like me, were already soaked to the skin, exhausted by last week’s tsunami of newsworthy AI announcements.

There was the White House’s AI Executive Order. The G7’s voluntary code of conduct. The UK Safety Summit. An amped-up x-risk debate by the ‘godfathers’ of AI; a ruling that pared down a prominent AI copyright case; and updates from Midjourney, Runway and Stability AI.

But wait, there’s more: Scarlett Johannson takes legal action against AI app! Google rolls out GenAI tools for advertiser product images! AMD soars on AI chip sales predictions! Collins Dictionary selects ‘AI’ as the word of the year!

And as usual, the weekend brought no rest for the AI weary, as Elon Musk released xAI’s first LLM, Grok, on Saturday.

The timing, therefore, could not have been better for Sam Altman to announce a slew of new capabilities and pricing changes for its AI platform —?Cheaper! Better! Heading towards AGI! After all, with just a few short weeks to go before ChatGPT enjoys its first birthday, OpenAI was due for a giant wave that we all have to figure out how to ride. Surf’s up, dude!

Predicting the AI tides of 2024

After a year and a half at VentureBeat, I’ve come to believe that every week in the wild world of AI news offers some clear takeaways. After the past week’s wave of announcements, it feels like some in the AI community are racing towards 2024 with a rising tide of hope (or in some cases, hubris) and, in some cases, a flood of fear.

These are three key ways I think this latest wave of AI news signals trends for 2024:

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Elon Musk unveils xAI’s first product Grok, an LLM offering realtime data, efficiency and ‘humor’

Following up on his proclamation last week that xAI would begin allowing selected users access to its first AI product, founder Elon Musk on Sunday morning revealed it to the world, and it is very much aligned with his sensibilities and often irreverent and immature sense of humor, while boasting access to realtime information and high efficiency.

The product is a Large Language Model (LLM) called “Grok,” named after the slang term that means “understanding,” and is built to compete with other leaders in the space such as OpenAI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude 2.

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Forget ChatGPT, why Llama and open source AI win 2023

Could a furry camelid take the 2023 crown for the biggest AI story of the year? If we’re talking about Llama, Meta’s large language model that took the AI research world by storm in February — followed by the commercial Llama 2 in July and Code Llama in August — I would argue that the answer is… (writer takes a moment to duck) yes.?

I can almost see readers getting ready to pounce. “What? Come on — of course ChatGPT was the biggest AI story of 2023!” I can hear the crowds yelling. “OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which launched on November 30, 2022 and reached 100 million users by February? ChatGPT, which brought generative AI into popular culture? It’s the bigger story by far!”?

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For marketers, generative AI changed everything in 2023

Generative AI is completely transforming the business of marketing, say a variety of experts VentureBeat spoke to over the past few weeks, including executives, vendors, agencies and consultants.?

Marketing, with its goal of identifying and communicating with customers — through data analysis and content creation — has long been cited as one of the most obvious candidates for disruption by generative AI tools. Hundreds of generative AI marketing applications and platforms have gotten attention in the wake of ChatGPT’s release in November 2022 (even if they were released earlier), including Jasper, Writer, Copy.ai and Notion for copywriting; and DALL-E 3, Midjourney, Runway Gen-2,? Synthesia, Canva and Adobe Firefly for images, video and design.?

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AI pioneers Hinton, Ng, LeCun, Bengio amp up x-risk debate

In a series of online articles, blog posts and posts on X/LinkedIn over the past few days, AI pioneers (sometimes called “godfathers” of AI) Geoffrey Hinton, Andrew Ng, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio have amped up their debate over existential risks of AI by commenting publicly on each other’s posts. The debate clearly places Hinton and Bengio on the side that is highly concerned about AI’s existential risks, or x-risks, while Ng and LeCun believe the concerns are overblown, or even a conspiracy theory Big Tech firms are using to consolidate power.

It’s a far cry from the united front of AI positivity they have shown over the years since leading the way on the deep learning ‘revolution’ that began in 2012. Even a year ago, LeCun and Hinton pushed back in interviews with VentureBeat against Gary Marcus and other critics who said deep learning had “hit a wall.”?

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