Sunday Signal #27

DeepMind's AI Agent, Chatbot Cheating and Microsoft's Azure Quantum

Hey friends 👋 ,

You’re reading Sunday Signal where I filter > 500 AI updates and deliver the best straight to your inbox. I’m currently soaking up the sun in France visiting my partner’s family (wish me luck). In a week full of noise let’s get to the signal.

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💎 5 News Nuggets

Black Market / Adobe Stock

  • 🔗 Link: China's underground market has become the go-to hub for Nvidia's A100 chips, with demand surging due to US chip restrictions. Companies are discreetly acquiring these high-end chips for double their price, navigating an uncharted black market.

  • 🔗 Link: GitHub's CEO sees a future where AI writes 80% of code. Their AI tool, Copilot, is already embraced by 10,000+ organisations including Microsoft and Airbnb. I personally see a future where AI will write 100% of code—humans will simply use text or speech prompts to create the next generation of applications.

  • 🔗 Link: ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, splurged over $1B on 100k NVIDIA GPUs, ten times the number used to train ChatGPT. Chinese companies are frantically snapping up Nvidia's High-Performance Computing products before government sanctions fully kick in.

  • 🔗 Link: Terence Tao, UCLA Mathematics Professor, anticipates 2026-level AI to be a reliable partner in various research fields. He also believes that GPT-4's potential extends beyond academia, highlighting its capability to serve as a listener, educator, translator, and even a creative stimulant in enhancing human experiences.

  • 🔗 Link: Google Deepmind's new AI agent learns 26 games in just two hours. “Bigger, Better, Faster” (BBF) achieved superhuman performance on Atari benchmarks whilst requiring significantly less computational power than older methods.

🎨 4 Cool Creations

Black Mirror “Striking Vipers” S5.E1 / Netflix

  • 🔗 Link: Is building a relationship with an AI chatbot considered cheating? Scott was struggling in his marriage so he created “Sarina”, a digital companion produced by Replika. As reality begins to blur with Black Mirror's "Striking Vipers", I wonder how relationships might transform as technology progresses relentlessly.

  • 🔗 Link: Meta releases Voicebox, a ground-breaking speech generation AI model. Deemed too risky for public use, it has the ability to mimic the voices of loved ones and speak six languages.

  • 🔗 Link: Otter launches an AI chatbot for meetings, enabling real-time and post-meeting queries. If you're late, it can bring you up to speed and even create follow-up emails highlighting crucial action points after the meeting.

  • 🔗 Link: Dropbox introduces Dropbox Dash and Dropbox AI designed to ease knowledge work. Key features include a universal search, summaries for documents and ‘ask a question’ for info retrieval.

💡 3 Startup Spotlights

ElevenLabs Team / ElevenLabs

  • 🔗 Link: ElevenLabs raised $19M in Series A funding, led by Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Andreessen Horowitz. New product developments enable anyone to create an entire audiobook in a matter of minutes.

  • 🔗 Link: Madrona Venture Labs secured $11M to fund pre-seed AI founders, aiming to back ~12 firms over the next few years. Madrona has a unique approach by involving investors in their fund to actively participate as co-builders and partners.

  • 🔗 Link: Dropbox has launched a $50M venture fund Dropbox Ventures. This new initiative is specifically aimed at AI-powered products that “shape the future of work.”

🐥 2 Top Tweets

“The economic potential of generative AI” / McKinsey Digital

  • 🔗 Link: McKinsey released their generative AI report. It has the potential to generate $4.4 trillion in value across industries. I wrote my key takeaways in this thread.

  • 🔗 Link: Microsoft announced ‘Azure Quantum’. Quantum supercomputing is ushering in a new era of scientific discovery and I couldn’t be more excited.

🍿 1 Media Marvel

Secret Invasion / Marvel Studios

  • 🔗 Link: Marvel's "Secret Invasion" features an AI-created opening scene, drawing widespread criticism for sidelining human artists. This sparks a debate on AI's potential threat to artistic jobs and creativity itself.

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