šŸ˜ŗ Elon spooked OpenAI

PLUS: AI just fixed one of the creepiest movies of all time...

Welcome, humans.

Someone finally accomplished the impossible: giving The Polar Express's nightmare-inducing CGI a modern makeover via AI (and just in time for the holidays, too!):  

Tom Hanks' character still has mad uncanny valley vibesā€¦ some things even AI can't fixā€¦

Someone else did this with Spirited Away, and it turned out pretty awesome as well:

In case youā€™re wondering about the latest news in AI video land, looks like thereā€™s a new model called Vidu 1.5 thatā€™s worth checking out. The cat video on their landing page MIGHT be the cutest thing weā€™ve ever seenā€¦

Hereā€™s what you need to know about AI today:

  • AI giants pivot to agents while prepping for massive infrastructure builds.

  • Qwen2.5-Coder matched top AI models in coding tasks.

  • Perplexity began testing ad content.

  • OpenAI released student writing guidelines.

Data centers, computer use, and agents, oh my!

The biggest story of the past two weeks was the apparent plateau in AI scaling laws at OpenAI (basically not improving as fast). It turns out, itā€™s not just OpenAIā€”Googleā€™s feeling the pain, too.

As all the major AI companies are admitting to diminishing returns from bigger models, they're also planning some of the biggest computing builds in history. What gives? 

Refresher: this so-called plateau in the IQ of AI models is hitting against multiple limits simultaneously:

Yet somehow, OpenAI just pitched the White House on building a $100B data center that would:

  • Span 30 million square feet (520 football fields!).

  • Need 2 million GPUs.

  • Require 5GW of power (most data centers use ~100MW).

And Elon Musk just built Colossusā€”a supercomputer that freaked out his competitorsā€”in 122 days instead of the usual 4 years.

And when we say freaked out, we mean flying spy planes to gather intel-level freaked outā€¦

Now why would Sam Altman be so scared of Elonā€™s big build-out if scaling and compute arenā€™t still important?

The answer might be that today's plateau exists because the infrastructure isn't ready for what's needed next. They'll need gigawatts of power (Colossus only has 150MW), and Anthropic's CEO says AI clusters could cost $10B a pop by 2026.

NVIDIA's trying to help with their new Blackwell GPUs that promise 2.2x better performance. But at $70K per chip and a 12-month waitlist, even if Blackwell makes everything faster and more efficient, it doesn't address the core challenge of throwing more compute at the same architectural approaches that are yielding smaller improvements.

So what happens if scaling really has plateaued?

Ilya Sutskever (who just left OpenAI) thinks we're entering an "age of wonder and discovery." Instead of just bigger models, companies are exploring:

  • More processing time during use.

  • Multiple possibility generation in real-time.

  • Expert-curated data.

  • Multi-step reasoning (like in o1).

The ultimate confirmation? Everyone's building computer-controlling AI agents. In fact, OpenAI's planning to launch ā€œOperatorā€ in Januaryā€”an AI agent that controls your computer. Google's testing its own version for a potential December release, and Anthropic released its own in October. 

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Treats To Try.

  1. *Metronome helps you power your AI business with usage-based pricing (UBP)ā€”the revenue model behind industry giants like OpenAI. You can join Metronome's upcoming webinar to learn all about UBP best practices from top UBP experts. Sign up hereā€”even if you can't attend live, register anyway to get the recording!

  2. After a 13-year wait, Apple's new Final Cut Pro 11 uses AI to automatically isolate objects from videos without green screens, generate captions from speech, and enhance your footage with intelligent color adjustments.

  3. Vocera tests and monitors your voice agents by simulating thousands of customer conversations and alerting you when something goes wrong.

  4. Koncile extracts and organizes important details from your business docs so you can analyze your spending and spot billing errors.

  5. PearAI is an open-source code editor to ask questions about your code, make changes, and look up solutions inside VSCode.

  6. DeepL translates text instantly between 33 languages and helps you write better in your target languageā€¦and they just launched a voice version called DeepL Voice to translate conversations in real time.

  7. RambleFix converts your voice recordings into polished written content.

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Around the Horn.

Try a demo of it in action with Artifacts (to actually test your code in action) here.

  • Qwen2.5-Coder just launched as a new open-source coding assistant that matches Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o's performance on coding tasks.

  • Perplexity will begin to test ads in the U.S. this weekā€”theyā€™ll take the form of ā€œsponsored follow-upsā€, like ā€œHow can reading The Neuron improve my understanding of AI?ā€

  • The Wall Street Journal experimented with AI summaries called Key Points, which uses bullet points to summarize the piece.

  • OpenAI released a ā€œStudentā€™s Guideā€ to writing with ChatGPT without having GPT write the whole thing for them. Good luck with that!

Thursday Trivia

One is a real, and one is AI. Which is which? (vote below!)

A.

B.

Which is AI?

The answer is below, but place your vote to see how your guess compares to everyone else (no cheating now!)

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Here are the results from last weekā€™s trivia (A was AI):

Thatā€™s 1 point to the AI overlordsā€¦

A Cat's Commentary.

You know the ruuules, and sooo do Iā€¦ (technically it was GPT who RickRolled youā€¦and it wasnā€™t the first time, either).

Trivia Answer: B is AI, and A is real.

Thatā€™s all for today, for more AI treats, check out our website.

The best way to support us is by checking out our sponsorsā€”todayā€™s are Attention, Metronome, and D-ID.

See you cool cats on Twitter: @noahedelman02

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