The Neuron
Posts
😺 Microsoft sends a warning

😺 Microsoft sends a warning

PLUS: Levi's diversity blunder

Noah Edelman
March 27, 2023

Welcome, humans.

The Elon and Sam Altman feud is like gladiator times, except instead of swords, they're fighting with drunk tweets and ferocious podcast appearances. Speaking of podcasts ...

Here’s what’s going on in the world of AI today:

🗣 Sam Altman spends 144 minutes on the Lex Fridman Podcast
⏳ Microsoft draws a hard line on Bing search data
👗 Levi's DEI effort (using AI)
🐶 How GPT-4 saved a dog's life

We're now accepting sponsors for Q2. Secure your spot in front of 32,000+ professionals from Microsoft, OpenAI, & Google here.

Microsoft Draws Battle Lines ⚔️

Microsoft just issued a polite warning to some of its search engine rivals: stop using Bing's search data to power your competing AI models, or else...

For context, some search engines pay to use Microsoft Bing's massive search data to generate outputs for their own search engines. Now, Microsoft is telling them to back the f*** off.

The tech giant believes leveraging Bing's data for competing AI models could breach its contracts. And no one wants to get sued by Microsoft.

Among those at risk are DuckDuckGo, You.com, and Neeva.

With Bing data as just one component of their search outputs, these startups are hardly dead in the water. But the situation makes it clear: AI models are battlegrounds.

Just ask OpenAI: While Microsoft is working to defend Bing Chat from piggybackers, the jury's still out on whether OpenAI can do the same with GPT-4.

Remember, Stanford researchers easily used ChatGPT data to turn Meta's LLaMA model into their own competing ChatGPT called Alpaca.

FROM OUR PARTNERS

Create 1,000 Stable Diffusion Images For $1 💸

We might be in a bear market, but $1 can still buy you:

A dollar slice from New York’s finest.
80% of a standard Dollar Tree item.
1,000 Stable Diffusion images from Salad.

That’s right: Salad makes it easy and cheap to deploy AI models without needing infrastructure coding. We’ll take 1,000 orange cat portraits, please!

It’s no wonder why companies are choosing Salad over other cloud providers:

It’s easy: no infrastructure config is needed … just use their API.
It’s flexible: scale up to 10,000 images/hour, down to 0, then back up to 10,000 again. No problem.
And yeah, it’s freaking affordable: its Inference Endpoints API generates 4X more inferences per dollar spent than AWS.

Deploying on Salad is straightforward: Sign up for a SaladCloud Portal account, send a request to their API, and start generating results.

Don’t miss out on savings: start generating images using Salad today.

AI Models Making AI Models 💫

Levi's is tapping AI startup Lalaland to create hyper-realistic fashion models of "every body type, age, size and skin tone."

It's part of the brand's wider diversity push to include models from underrepresented groups. Yet, some perceive it as sidestepping its actual responsibility to hire diverse human models.

Either way, we're pretty sure the real losers in all of this are the (human) fashion models themselves.

The photography we've seen created on Midjourney, and now Lalaland, is completely indistinguishable from models IRL. And it can be created within minutes.

Bottom line: As much as this move could make Levi's customer experience more inclusive, it's also an automation play where fewer models get paid at all.

Around the Horn 🦄

A user exploited a bug in ChatGPT's system that allowed them to view the titles of other users' chat histories.
Some built a reverse Turing test in which GPT-4 created 10 questions to determine if ChatGPt was AI or human. Spoiler: GPT-4 thinks ChatGPT is an AI.
GPT-4 saved a dog's life.
Stability AI CEO thinks it'd take about $200-300 million to create an open-source version of GPT-4.
Lex Fridman interviews Sam Altman. In typical Lex form, it's 2.5 hours long, so here are some notes we found.
From Wharton associate professor Ethan MollicK: What can an AI do in 30 minutes?
Databricks created a ChatGPT alternative with a two-year-old model for $30 and 3 hours.

Treats To Try 🍿

Safurai is a coding assistant that optimizes your code through shortcuts.
Use GPT to research your company's leads with Use Double.
Create guided meditations with human-like voices using guided.rest.
Baseten, a ChatGPT-like chatbot built on the 7 billion parameter Alpaca dataset.
Cool demo: We're not that far off from "text-to-website".
A quick & smart holiday planner powered by AI (Amblr).