AI is always Non-Destructive: All AI processes aim to preserve and prioritise work done by human teams.AI gets a Pencil, Humans get a Pen: Anything created by an AI process (initially) has a distinct visual/experiential identity so that human team members can identify it quickly.
The Pleias AI lab in France have a focus on open data and lower budget models. This article describes both a new synthetic data set based on limited, high quality sources ("50,000 vital Wikipedia articles, expanded into a wide collection of problems and resolution paths, from math exercises to creative writing, information extraction or sourced synthesis") and two models they've created. The smaller, Monad, with only 56M parameters, they claim as "a contender for the smallest viable model" created so far. They're using the work Wikipedia have done to pick out the 50,000 most "vital" articles from their total of 7M in English Wikipedia. This is an important direction: pushing for more capable models at smaller scale, with cheaper training based on open sources. Some similar sentiments expressed by Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face:
As an example, he suggested the use case of a banking customer chatbot. “You don’t need it to tell you about the meaning of life, right? You can use a smaller, more specialized model that is going to be cheaper, that is going to be faster, that maybe you’re going to be able to run on your infrastructure as an enterprise, and I think that is the future of AI.”
Major Labels Sign Licensing Deals With AI Music Company Klay
Interesting for two reasons. First, new AI music startup Klay has licensing deals with three of the biggest record companies (Warner Music, Universal Music and Sony), hence the news stories. But second: their product sounds like it won't be an AI music generation site like Udio or Suno. Instead they're going to make a streaming service to rival Spotify and then add in the ability for users to create AI remixes. It is less surprising that the big publishing houses are getting behind this, as it potentially creates deeper engagement between artists and fans. It is an evolution of bands opening material for fans to remix their songs, like the campaign around the release of Year Zero by Nine Inch Nails, or Radiohead with Nude in 2008. A good example of a second, more disruptive wave of product innovation, following prompt-based song creation.
Klay is building a product that will offer the features of a streaming service like Spotify, amplified by AI technology that will let users remake songs in different styles.
- from "Major Music Labels Strike Deals With New AI Streaming Service", Bloomberg
Jargon Watch
Bragawatt: Talking up how many Gigawatts will power your new AI datacentre.
Adversarial Poetry: Expressing your jailbreak as poetry makes it more likely to succeed. I'm not aware that any science fiction author predicted this one.
The Blob: Amid a lot of "AI bubble" discussion recently, Steven Levy in Wired neatly encapsulates the intertwined relationships between OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft, Anthropic and others:
This rococo collection of partnerships, mergers, funding arrangements, government initiatives, and strategic investments links the fate of virtually every big player in the AI-o-sphere. I call this entity the Blob.