This issue of #InfocusAI will show how acute the struggle for leadership in AI is. We will talk about when Elon Musk expects the emergence of artificial intelligence capable of surpassing the smartest person, how China is catching up with America in the development of humanoid robots, and how Google’s new code writing service can compete with GitHub Copilot. You will also learn about Intel’s chip challenging NVIDIA, and the attitude of Russian musicians to competition with GenAI.
AI-focused digest – News from the AI world
Issue 39, March 29 – April 11, 2024
Elon Musk: AI will become smarter than the smartest person in the next two years
Elon Musk, the US billionaire and innovator, expects artificial intelligence to become smarter than the smartest person in the next two years. He expressed this opinion in his interview with Nicolai Tangen, CEO of the Norway wealth fund and philanthropist. Excerpts of their conversation posted on X have been quoted by Reuters and all the world’s mass media this week. According to Musk, the main obstacle on humanity’s way to AGI in the near future will be access to electricity. Until now, the main problem for the development of AI technologies has been called the shortage of chips. We are looking forward to seeing if the predictions of the US innovator will come true, and even more so, the appearance of the second version of the Grok model from his xAI startup. Are you also interested in comparing it with GPT-4?
Google new AI service for programmers to compete with GitHub Copilot
At the Cloud Next conference this week, Google has presented its new AI tool to help programmers write computer codes, i.e., Gemini Code Assist. By the way, it is not completely new. This is a kind of rebranding and significant update of the Duet AI service for developers that Google introduced last year. According to TechCrunch, the IT giant already hinted at that time that it would transfer it to the Gemini model. The main competitive feature of Code Assist is the support for Gemini 1.5 Pro with a context window of one million tokens. Experts write that Google’s service directly competes not even with the basic version of GitHub Copilot, but with Copilot Enterprise. To learn more, click here.
China’s UBTech and Baidu enter the technology race with Figure AI and OpenAI
And now let’s talk about the competition between Chinese and American artificial intelligence developers. Don’t you forget that we advised you to remember the Figure AI startup which managed to attract considerable investments and demonstrated a humanoid robot with built-in ChatGPT to the world in March 2024? Take note of another name — UBTech. This representative of the Chinese robotics industry befriended their Walker S humanoid robot with Baidu’s ERNIE bot so that the humanoid could communicate with people (in Chinese) and solve everyday tasks, including those for production. The Chinese response to the US progress in the development of humanoid robots with AI followed only a month later, which is impressive. You can read about the success of UBTech and Baidu on New Atlas. There you will also find a video demonstration of the robot’s operation.
Intel has introduced a new generation of AI chips – Gaudi 3
And another piece of news about competition between IT giants in the AI field. Intel has introduced a new chip for artificial intelligence, i.e., Gaudi 3, thereby causing another wave of articles in the mass media about competition with NVIDIA. It is reported that Gaudi 3 AI accelerators are able to surpass NVIDIA’s popular H100 GPUs by 1.7 times in time-to-train, and they are up to 2.3 times more power efficient when doing inference. They will be released to the market in Q3 2024, but some Intel’s customers have already received samples. To review technical specifications, go to VentureBeat.
Musicians in Russia are not afraid of Generative AI
And finally, a few words about music. CNews reports that a recent survey of representatives of the music industry showed that musicians in Russia are not afraid of competition with generative artificial intelligence, thus citing Muztorg, the company that conducted the study. In particular, 72% of the respondents believe that AI is not capable of replacing a real musician, and a half of them are sure that this will definitely not happen. However, 19% of the respondents noted that a neural network can be an assistant in writing melodies. In general, more than a half of the respondents stated that although the development of technologies may change the approach to creating music, in general it has a positive effect on the motivation of creative people.
