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This week, billionaire Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, launched its newest flagship AI mannequin, Grok 3, which powers the corporate’s Grok chatbot apps. Skilled on round 200,000 GPUs, the mannequin beats quite a lot of different main fashions, together with from OpenAI, on benchmarks for arithmetic, programming, and extra.
However what do these benchmarks actually inform us?
Right here at TC, we frequently reluctantly report benchmark figures as a result of they’re one of many few (comparatively) standardized methods the AI business measures mannequin enhancements. Common AI benchmarks have a tendency to check for esoteric knowledge, and give aggregate scores that correlate poorly to proficiency on the duties that most individuals care about.
As Wharton professor Ethan Mollick identified in a series of posts on X after Grok 3’s unveiling Monday, there’s an “pressing want for higher batteries of checks and impartial testing authorities.” AI firms self-report benchmark outcomes as a rule, as Mollick alluded to, making these outcomes even more durable to simply accept at face worth.
“Public benchmarks are each ‘meh’ and saturated, leaving lots of AI testing to be like meals evaluations, based mostly on style,” Mollick wrote. “If AI is important to work, we’d like extra.”
There’s no scarcity of independent tests and organizations proposing new benchmarks for AI, however their relative advantage is much from a settled matter inside the business. Some AI commentators and specialists suggest aligning benchmarks with economic impact to make sure their usefulness, whereas others argue that adoption and utility are the last word benchmarks.
This debate could rage till the tip of time. Maybe we must always as an alternative, as X user Roon prescribes, merely pay much less consideration to new fashions and benchmarks barring main AI technical breakthroughs. For our collective sanity, that is probably not the worst concept, even when it does induce some degree of AI FOMO.
As talked about above, This Week in AI is happening hiatus. Thanks for sticking with us, readers, by way of this curler coaster of a journey. Till subsequent time.
Information
OpenAI tries to “uncensor” ChatGPT: Max wrote about how OpenAI is altering its AI improvement method to explicitly embrace “mental freedom,” irrespective of how difficult or controversial a subject could also be.
Mira’s new startup: Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s new startup, Thinking Machines Lab, intends to construct instruments to “make AI work for [people’s] distinctive wants and targets.”
Grok 3 cometh: Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, has launched its newest flagship AI mannequin, Grok 3, and unveiled new capabilities for the Grok apps for iOS and the online.
A very Llama conference: Meta will host its first developer convention devoted to generative AI this spring. Known as LlamaCon after Meta’s Llama household of generative AI fashions, the convention is scheduled for April 29.
AI and Europe’s digital sovereignty: Paul profiled OpenEuroLLM, a collaboration between some 20 organizations to construct “a collection of basis fashions for clear AI in Europe” that preserves the “linguistic and cultural range” of all EU languages.
Analysis paper of the week
OpenAI researchers have created a brand new AI benchmark, SWE-Lancer, that goals to guage the coding prowess of highly effective AI methods. The benchmark consists of over 1,400 freelance software program engineering duties that vary from bug fixes and have deployments to “manager-level” technical implementation proposals.
Based on OpenAI, the best-performing AI mannequin, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, scores 40.3% on the complete SWE-Lancer benchmark — suggesting that AI has fairly a methods to go. It’s value noting that the researchers didn’t benchmark newer fashions like OpenAI’s o3-mini or Chinese language AI firm DeepSeek’s R1.
Mannequin of the week
A Chinese language AI firm named Stepfun has launched an “open” AI mannequin, Step-Audio, that may perceive and generate speech in a number of languages. Step-Audio helps Chinese language, English, and Japanese and lets customers regulate the emotion and even dialect of the artificial audio it creates, together with singing.
Stepfun is one in all a number of well-funded Chinese language AI startups releasing fashions underneath a permissive license. Based in 2023, Stepfun reportedly recently closed a funding spherical value a number of hundred million {dollars} from a bunch of buyers that embrace Chinese language state-owned personal fairness companies.
Seize bag
Nous Analysis, an AI analysis group, has released what it claims is without doubt one of the first AI fashions that unifies reasoning and “intuitive language mannequin capabilities.”
The mannequin, DeepHermes-3 Preview, can toggle on and off lengthy “chains of thought” for improved accuracy at the price of some computational heft. In “reasoning” mode, DeepHermes-3 Preview, just like different reasoning AI fashions, “thinks” longer for more durable issues and reveals its thought course of to reach on the reply.
Anthropic reportedly plans to release an architecturally similar model soon, and OpenAI has stated such a mannequin is on its near-term roadmap.
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