 | Dec 20, 2024 | | | | | | TGIF! Google releases its own reasoning AI model. A senior OpenAI researcher who helped develop some of the company's most important AI models is leaving. Elon Musk unexpectedly joins Donald Trump's dinner with Jeff Bezos.
| | | | Google on Tuesday released a new artificial intelligence model that aims to automate more complex tasks by spending a longer time processing a person's instructions, known as reasoning. The launch comes several months after OpenAI pioneered a reasoning model of its own, o1, for which it charges $200 a month to customers that use it the most. Reasoning AI models have been most useful in applications such as coding and deep scientific research. Google's move comes as it is preparing to make chatbot-like answers prominently available in its search engine, The Information reported Thursday, a recognition of the progress OpenAI's ChatGPT has made in attracting people who use it to search for information across the web. Google's new Gemini "Thinking" model provides answers that include showing the steps it uses to arrive at the answers, known as chain of thought. That's somewhat different from OpenAI's approach to obscure its reasoning model's chain of thought by only providing a summary of it. OpenAI said it does so for security and competitive reasons. Google's decision to post the raw chain of thought could make it easier for other AI developers to find ways to develop their own models that emulate Google's. In a post on X, Noam Shazeer, the famed Google researcher who is co-leading Google's reasoning team, showed how the model could solve a probability problem. However, the model still struggles on a well-known question that has tripped up other AI models: how many R's are in the word "strawberry." Google's AI incorrectly said that there are only two R's. | | | | Alec Radford, an OpenAI researcher who helped develop some of its most important artificial intelligence, on Thursday told colleagues he was leaving to pursue research independently. Radford said he planned to collaborate with OpenAI as well as other AI developers, according to a person who saw Radford's message. "We have deep respect and appreciation for Alec and his contributions, and look forward to continuing projects with him as he explores independent research," Mark Chen, OpenAI's head of resarch, said in a statement. Radford had gained legendary status for being the lead author on the company's seminal research paper on generative pretrained models, GPT, a type of AI that now powers ChatGPT. He worked on future versions of GPT, a speech recognition model called Whisper, and the company's image-generating model, Dall-E. Radford joined OpenAI around 2016, making him among the most senior employees at a company that has exploded in size over the past two years. Employees at the company have sold more than $800 million worth of shares to new investors in the past year or so. Other senior OpenAI research leaders including Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, research chief Bob McGrew and co-founder and researcher John Schulman also left in recent months for various reasons. | | | | President-elect Donald Trump had dinner with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos at Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday, the New York Times reported. Musk wasn't expected to be part of the dinner but joined after it had already begun, according to the report. The Times did not report what the trio discussed. Earlier in December, Bezos said he was "very optimistic" about Trump and hopes to help him cut government regulation. It's not the first time Musk has unexpectedly joined one of Trump's meetings with a competitor. When Google CEO Sundar Pichai called Trump in November to congratulate him on his election victory, Musk unexpectedly joined the call, The Information has reported. | | | | Fintech banking startup Chime Financial has filed confidential paperwork for an initial public offering, Bloomberg reported. Chime declined to comment. The company, which has long been planning to go public next year, offers fee-free digital banking sources. The company was valued at $25 billion during the 2021 venture funding boom, although it more recently was valued at $9.5 billion in the secondary market for private tech stocks, according to Caplight. Chime has been honing its products ahead of a planned IPO, including by launching a new cash advance product in May that allows customers to access up to $500 of their wages before they are paid. Earlier this year, Chime CEO Chris Britt said that the company had 7 million active customers, and that it was profitable in the first quarter of 2024. | | | | OpenAI is currently prepping the next generation of its o1 reasoning model, which takes more time to "think" about questions users give it before responding, according to two people with knowledge of the effort. However, due to a potential copyright or trademark conflict with O2, a British telecommunications service provider, OpenAI has considered calling the next update "o3" and skipping "o2," these people said. Some leaders have referred to the model as o3 internally. The startup has poured resources into its reasoning AI research following a slowdown in the improvements it's gotten from using more compute and data during pretraining, the process of initially training models on tons of data to help them make sense of the world and the relationships between different concepts. Still, OpenAI intended to use a new pretrained model, Orion, to develop what became o3. (More on that here.) OpenAI launched a preview of o1 in September and has found paying customers for the model in coding, math and science fields, including fusion energy researchers. The company recently started charging $200 per month per person to use ChatGPT that's powered by an upgraded version of o1, or 10 times the regular subscription price for ChatGPT. Rivals have been racing to catch up; a Chinese firm released a comparable model last month, and Google on Thursday released its first reasoning model publicly. | | | | Apple has criticized Meta Platforms for making a large number of requests to access Apple's "sensitive technologies" within its mobile operating system iOS, warning that such requests could allow Meta to read iPhone owners' emails and messages. Meta made the requests under a rule introduced by Europe's Digital Markets Act, according to a report this week by Apple. The rule requires Apple to open access to its technologies to other companies and developers, so that their services can work with Apple's. According to Apple, Meta has made more interoperability requests than any company, and, in many cases, "Meta is seeking to alter functionality in a way that raises concerns about the privacy and security of users." In response to the report, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone stated that "What Apple is actually saying is they don't believe in interoperability." This week the European Commission also shared preliminary findings on how Apple should handle the interoperability issue, and set a deadline of January 9 for interested parties to provide feedback. | | | | Workers at seven U.S. Amazon facilities went on strike Thursday, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters said. The striking workers include some warehouse staff employed by Amazon, as well as delivery drivers that Amazon says are not its employees. The strikes affect Amazon facilities in New York, Georgia, California and Illinois, according to the Teamsters, though Amazon said that the strike hadn't had any impact on its operations. The facilites are delivery stations, where drivers employed by Amazon's delivery subcontractors have affiliated with the Teamsters recently. The Teamsters said they would also set up picket lines at hundreds of Amazon facilities. The Teamsters say they represent nearly 10,000 Amazon employees. Amazon disputes that figure because it says drivers are employed by subcontractors, though National Labor Relations Board prosecutors have moved toward classifying Amazon as a joint employer of delivery drivers in two cases this year. "For more than a year now, the Teamsters have continued to intentionally mislead the public—claiming that they represent 'thousands of Amazon employees and drivers'. They don't, and this is another attempt to push a false narrative," Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said. | | | | Apple is in early talks with Tencent and ByteDance about using its artificial intelligence models in iPhones sold in China, Reuters reported. China has tight rules over AI, making it challenging for foreign companies to operate their AI models in the country without regulatory approval. So far, no foreign models have been approved. It isn't clear what type of partnership Apple is seeking with Tencent and ByteDance. In the U.S., Apple uses its own AI models on iPhones but also offers OpenAI's ChatGPT as an option for more complicated user queries. Apple has said it wants to offer additional AI models made by companies such as Google. In China, however, Apple must substitute all its models for a Chinese partner's. The Information previously reported that Apple was working with Chinese search giant Baidu on this effort. The Financial Times previously reported that Apple held talks with ByteDance and the Chinese startup Moonshot over using their AI models as well. | | | | Apple is nearing a deal with the Indonesian government to lift a ban on sales of the iPhone 16 that went into effect in late October, Bloomberg reported. While Apple's sales in Indonesia are modest when compared with the U.S., Europe, and China, the Southeast Asian country's status as the fourth most populous nation makes it a promising market for future growth. Apple has proposed investing $1 billion in Indonesia to build factories that will produce AirTags and other accessories to get the ban lifted, Bloomberg reported. The Indonesian government previously said Apple had fallen short of hitting a 2023 investment target of $100 million after spending only around $90 million. To meet that previous target, Apple opened so-called application developer academies that taught courses in computer coding. That previously had fulfilled a requirement that smartphones sold in Indonesia comprise 40% of domestically made components. | | | | Ōura, the smart ring maker, raised $200 million in a series D funding round with participation from Fidelity Management & Research Company and Dexcom, the company said Thursday. The funding values the company at $5.2 billion, up from $2.55 billion in 2022. As part of the Series D, Ōura last month announced a $75 million investment from Dexcom, which develops glucose monitors to help people manage diabetes. Their partnership will allow their devices to share data, combining glucose measurements with Oura rings' data on sleep and exercise, according to a statement from the companies. Oura rings cost $249 to $549 and the company also charges $70 for an annual subscription. It said its members and revenue more than doubled over the last year, without disclosing more details. The company was on track to generate $500 million in revenue this year, Bloomberg previously reported. | | | Popular articles
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