Walmart is using AI to negotiate deals

Walmart is using a chatbot named “Pactum AI” to automatically negotiate with suppliers.

It saves Walmart an average of 3% on expenses.

Notably, three out of every four suppliers prefer to negotiate with AI rather than humans.

LLaMA spearheaded the age of community-driven midsize LMs

It’s game-changing for many use cases that don’t require GPT-4’s full firepower.

Great blog post that covers Alpaca, Vicuna, Koala, WizardLM, OpenAssistant, and more!

Cognito Therapeutics raises $73M series B to advance neurotechnology platform for Alzheimer’s Disease

New investors Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF), Starbloom Capital, IAG Capital and WS Investment Company (Wilson Sonsini’s venture arm) joined the round.

The Series B funding brings the total amount raised since inception to $93 million.

Excellent TED talk from Sal Khan:

- many inspiring examples of GPTs finetuned into socratic tutors, assisting without giving away answers.

- none of it "out of the box", requires prompt engineering, finetuning, data collection, iteration.

- sense of barely scratching the surface.

Inflection AI, the startup from ex-DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman, has launched its first chatbot, Pi > https://heypi.com/talk

It’s designed to be better at natural, flowing conversation than lists, plans, or code.

NVIDIA’s groundbreaking graphics research

NVIDIA released that they will present around 20 research papers at SIGGRAPH 2023.

In one demo, they create realistic hair for 3D characters in real time.
It seems advanced technology is putting an end to bad hair days.

Research papers range from AI models that turn text into images to inverse rendering tools that transform images into 3D.

NVIDIA’s research has been on fire lately.

In Israel, AI surveillance is being used in ways comparable to what China did in Xinjiang.

Facial recognition reinforces boundaries in the West Bank w/ traffic light color codes. Soldiers train algos at checkpoints, collect Palestinian biometrics w/ apps.

Most people haven’t had a chance to use H100 yet. Theoretical FLOPs mean nothing - true speedup on Transformers is all that matters.

How does H100 fare against A100 in real battles?

Results on GPT from a third party MosaicML: the larger model you train, the more time you save.

Easiest way to get 32k context GPT-4 model access is to submit a good open source Eval that’s accepted

Evals that creatively utilize long context will be prioritized for review.

Submit your Evals to this repository
https://github.com/openai/evals

Microsoft is working with AMD both on Microsoft's own AI GPU, code-named Athena, and on bolstering AMD's own efforts to become a second supplier of GPUs apart from Nvidia.

To be clear, Microsoft is still very much relying on Nvidia and is in fact also working on how it can get more Nvidia GPUs because Microsoft doesn't have enough for all of its needs right now.

But the idea is for Microsoft to develop multiple options to get more GPUs and perhaps at some point to have some less expensive options to Nvidia. Of course for AMD, the idea is to leverage the AI demand boom to build a big GPU business.

Deepmind CEO says we'll have AGI in a few years

Deepmind CEO "progress in the last few years has been pretty incredible...I don’t see any reason why that progress is going to slow down. I think it may even accelerate. So I think we could be just a few years, maybe within a decade away.”

What programming language will run AGI?

Well, it might be Mojo. Modular just released a Python-like programming language that runs at the speed of C!

• *Truly* parallelizable
• Fully compatible w/ all Python packages
• Speed boosts from types (but not required)

Samsung will overtake TSMC within 5-years, the president of Samsung’s chip division said. “To be honest, our foundry technology is 1 or 2 years behind TSMC’s.” But once TSMC starts making GAA transistors at 2nm, “Samsung will lead the way,” he said.

Note: Samsung entered the chip foundry business 18-years ago and still lags behind TSMC.

Generative AI might not be that great at math and reasoning, but they can probably do 2x2 matrices and make powerpoints, which is probably good enough.

Wow... 80% of genes are differentially expressed in living versus post-mortem prefrontal cortex tissue.

Importantly implications for studying the 'living' biology of the human brain, rather than heavy reliance on what post-mortem tissue shows us.

Liechtenstein’s government plans to accept Bitcoin for payments.

А guide to crypto treasury management

If you've ever wanted to know everything about managing a crypto treasury, this guide is for you.

This is the industry's first, and only comprehensive guide on the subject.

Discover the objectives, challenges, and solutions for Web3 CFOs managing cryptocurrencies on their DAO, or company's balance sheets.

The full version of the guide will drop in Q4 2023.

German fintech Unstoppable Finance to launch Europe’s first 'DeFi-native bank'

Berlin-based fintech startup Unstoppable Finance, currently most well known for its self-custodial crypto wallet called Ultimate, announced today it will be rolling out Europe’s first compliant "DeFi-native bank" alongside a fiat-backed Euro-pegged stablecoin following MiCA’s guidance. 

The DeFI banking arm will ensure that the stablecoin is fully backed by reserves, as outlined by the new legislation from Brussels, says co-founder and CTO Peter Grosskopf.

The company’s stablecoin is legally classified as an “e-money token,” which typically refers to any blockchain-based stablecoin that indexes its value to the price of the fiat currency it references. 

The MiCA effect

The share of VC investment into European crypto projects is up almost 10x in one year - from a share of 5.9% in Q1 2022 to 47.6% in Q1 2023.

Regulatory clarity attracts capital & entrepreneurs from around the world.

Prediction: we're gonna see a wave of new A(G)I cos/large model companies in Europe (and perhaps other countries) that pitch the "AI sovereignty" agenda to local investors.

This will result in an exodus from local AI lab offices of large tech cos.

We heard France is cooking.

It’s a great way for large funds to deploy huge amounts of money diverted from metaverse/crypto/low-multiple SaaS investments.

But really don’t know if paying huge prices for cos that would otherwise have sold for these prices a few years back is wise.

Let’s see!

HuggingAGI

HuggingFace announced multi-modal agent API that can automatically chain 100,000+ of HF models (stable diffusion, whisper, OpenAssistant,...) for text, audio, image, video, time-series,… based on your commands.

All open-source so it can work locally!