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MC.19: Exploring AI Perspectives from Gates and Altman's Podcast and Evaluating AI Hosting Providers

This week, delve into a discussion between Bill Gates and Sam Altman on the impact of AI, assess various AI hosting providers, and discover a remarkable robot replicating human tasks within a home.

Author

Samuel ROY
January 19, 2024

modern chaos issue 19

Modern chaos is a newsletter exploring tech and AI through the journey of a dev agency turning into a startup studio. We share our notes, analysis, and experiments, plus a bit of Emacs tips.

Hello everyone,

The last issue included a poll about a context-switching monitoring tool that would provide insights and guidance to uncover inefficient workflows.

A big thank you to everyone who answered the survey! I believe it contributes to the overall conversation and helps connect us on another level.

The breakdown:

  • 40% would use such an app

  • 30% are not interested at all

  • 30% are concerned about privacy

The concern about privacy is a strong market marker: you can differentiate purely for privacy reasons by building local-first apps. Moreover, if your app is as good as a closed one, there's no reason for people not to switch from a competitor lacking privacy features.

The current tech required to create a reliable app on the subject would need GPT4-vision, so people worried about privacy might not use it for fear of what the provider and OpenAI could do with the data.

Fortunately, open source alternatives are emerging like Llava 1.5. It's possible to run this kind of model locally, but it's not at the GPT4 level yet.

A good starting point would be to build a first version with the best available tech for people likely to use it, even if the processing is done server-side. If the app provides value to this segment, you can extend and experiment with local models to expand your user base.

I've added this idea to my to-do list as a thing to try and build. I will keep you updated and share the tool once it's done.

If you develop something similar on your side, drop me an email so I can share it in the newsletter for the whole community to try!

Cheers,

In this issue:

🔍 ArtificialAnalysis.ai: Compare Models and Hosting Providers
📊 Stack Overflow: Developer Survey 2023 — POLL
🤖 Mobile ALOHA: A Low-cost, Open-source Robot Trained by Imitation
🎙️ Unconfuse Me: A Podcast Between Sam Altman and Bill Gates
🔋 Microsoft: New Material Found by AI Could Reduce Lithium Use by 70%
📅 Emacs: A Guide to Syncing Calendars with your Org Agenda Using Shortcuts
🌲 Pinecone: Serverless Infrastructure

Updates & tools

ArtificialAnalysis.ai: Compare Models and Hosting Providers
With the multiple providers and models on the market, it’s nice to have a transparent comparison between all of them on different criteria like quality, speed, and price. I thought Together.ai was the fastest on the market for hosting Mixtral 8x7B, but it appears that Perplexity is outperforming everyone with 91 tokens/second. Of course, this doesn’t provide a complete picture. Together might be handling a much larger load than Perplexity, as serving models is a core product for them, whereas it’s a secondary one for Perplexity. MORE

Stack Overflow: Developer Survey 2023
AI is shaping new workflows among developers. Whether a professional developer or someone learning to code, people believe that their development workflow will be different in a year due to AI tools. MORE

POLL: What impact will AI have on your workflow in the coming year?

Please share your job title for more accurate analysis and insights.

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Mobile ALOHA: A Low-cost, Open-source Robot Trained by Imitation
This is a great experimentation of complex manipulations in a household setup. We can see the robot performing tasks such as sautéing and serving a piece of shrimp, and opening a two-door wall cabinet to store heavy cooking pots. Impressive! MORE

Unconfuse Me: A Podcast Between Sam Altman and Bill Gates
Sam Altman discusses the evolution of AI and how they are focusing their efforts towards multimodality and reasoning capabilities. They also talk about AI’s impact on society and the economy, raising vital questions about our purpose as humans in a world where machines are surpassing our abilities. MORE | TRANSCRIPT

Microsoft: New Material Found by AI Could Reduce Lithium Use by 70%
Microsoft researchers used AI to narrow down 32 million potential inorganic materials to 18 promising candidates in less than a week. I like to showcase some news that highlights the use of AI outside the trends, as a good reminder that a lot is happening in the background. MORE

Emacs: A Guide to Syncing Calendars with Your Org Agenda Using Shortcuts
I’m sharing my setup for syncing your Apple Calendar with your org agenda. It’s one-way only, but I appreciate its simplicity. MORE

Pinecone: Serverless Infrastructure
Pinecone has announced a serverless offer with 100$ in credits. The company is already a popular choice for developers building apps with Retrieval Augmented Generation, and chances are it will become even more so. As a heavy Postgres user, I’m more interested in extensions like pg_vector, but it’s nice to see alternatives on the market. MORE

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