ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week

Look these crazy weeks don't seem to stop, and though this week started out a bit slower (while folks were waiting to see how the speculation about certain red berry flavored conspiracies are shaking out) the big labs are shipping! We've got space uncle Elon dropping an "almost-gpt4" level Grok-2, that's uncensored, has access to real time data on X and can draw all kinds of images with Flux, Open...

Hold on tight, folks, because THIS week on ThursdAI felt like riding a roller coaster through the wild world of open-source AI - extreme highs, mind-bending twists, and a sprinkle of "wtf is happening?" conspiracy theories for good measure. 😂 Theme of this week is, Open Source keeps beating GPT-4, while we're inching towards intelligence too cheap to meter on the API fronts. We even had a live de...

Starting Monday, Apple released iOS 18.1 with Apple Intelligence , then Meta dropped SAM-2 (Segment Anything Model) and then Google first open sourced Gemma 2B and now (just literally 2 hours ago, during the live show) released Gemini 1.5 0801 experimental that takes #1 on LMsys arena across multiple categories, to top it all off we also got a new SOTA image diffusion model called FLUX.1 from ex-s...

Holy s**t, folks! I was off for two weeks, last week OpenAI released GPT-4o-mini and everyone was in my mentions saying, Alex, how are you missing this?? and I'm so glad I missed that last week and not this one, because while GPT-4o-mini is incredible (GPT-4o level distill with incredible speed and almost 99% cost reduction from 2 years ago?) it's not open source. So welcome back to ThursdAI, and...

Hey all, Alex here… well, not actually here, I’m scheduling this post in advance, which I haven’t yet done, because I'm going on vacation! That’s right, next week is my birthday 🎉 and a much needed break, somewhere with a beach is awaiting, but I didn’t want to leave you hanging for too long, so posting this episode with some amazing un-released before material. Mixture of Agents x2 Back in the f...

Hey everyone! Happy 4th of July to everyone who celebrates! I celebrated today by having an intimate conversation with 600 of my closest X friends 😂 Joking aside, today is a celebratory episode, 52nd consecutive weekly ThursdAI show! I've been doing this as a podcast for a year now! Which means, there are some of you, who've been subscribed for a year 😮 Thank you! Couldn't have done this without...

Hey everyone, sending a quick one today, no deep dive, as I'm still in the middle of AI Engineer World's Fair 2024 in San Francisco (in fact, I'm writing this from the incredible floor 32 presidential suite, that the team here got for interviews, media and podcasting, and hey to all new folks who I’ve just met during the last two days!) It's been an incredible few days meeting so many ThursdAI com...

Hey, this is Alex. Don't you just love when assumptions about LLMs hitting a wall just get shattered left and right and we get new incredible tools released that leapfrog previous state of the art models, that we barely got used to, from just a few months ago? I SURE DO! Today is one such day, this week was already busy enough, I had a whole 2 hour show packed with releases, and then Anthropic dec...

Happy Apple AI week everyone (well, those of us who celebrate, some don't) as this week we finally got told what Apple is planning to do with this whole generative AI wave and presented Apple Intelligence (which is AI, get it? they are trying to rebrand AI!) This weeks pod and newsletter main focus will be Apple Intelligence of course, as it was for most people compared to how the market reacted (...

Hey hey! This is Alex! 👋 Some podcasts have 1 or maaaybe 2 guests an episode, we had 6! guests today, each has had an announcement, an open source release, or a breaking news story that we've covered! (PS, this edition is very multimodal so click into the Substack as videos don't play in your inbox) As you know my favorite thing is to host the folks who make the news to let them do their own anno...

Hey everyone, Alex here! Can you believe it's already end of May? And that 2 huge AI companies conferences are behind us (Google IO, MSFT Build) and Apple's WWDC is just ahead in 10 days! Exciting! I was really looking forward to today's show, had quite a few guests today, I'll add all their socials below the TL;DR so please give them a follow and if you're only in reading mode of the newsletter,...

Hello hello everyone, this is Alex, typing these words from beautiful Seattle (really, it only rained once while I was here!) where I'm attending Microsoft biggest developer conference BUILD. This week we saw OpenAI get in the news from multiple angles, none of them positive and Microsoft clapped back at Google from last week with tons of new AI product announcements (CoPilot vs Gemini) and a few...

Wow, holy s**t, insane, overwhelming, incredible, the future is here!, "still not there", there are many more words to describe this past week. (TL;DR at the end of the blogpost) I had a feeling it's going to be a big week, and the companies did NOT disappoint, so this is going to be a very big newsletter as well. As you may have read last week, I was very lucky to be in San Francisco the weekend...

Hey 👋 (show notes and links a bit below) This week has been a great AI week, however, it does feel like a bit "quiet before the storm" with Google I/O on Tuesday next week (which I'll be covering from the ground in Shoreline!) and rumors that OpenAI is not just going to let Google have all the spotlight! Early this week, we got 2 new models on LMsys, im-a-good-gpt2-chatbot and im-also-a-good-gpt2...

Hey 👋 Look it May or May not be the first AI newsletter you get in May, but it's for sure going to be a very information dense one. As we had an amazing conversation on the live recording today, over 1K folks joined to listen to the first May updates from ThursdAI. As you May know by now, I just love giving the stage to folks who are the creators of the actual news I get to cover from week to wee...

Hey hey folks, happy ThursdAI 🎉 Not a lot of house-keeping here, just a reminder that if you're listening or reading from Europe, our European fullyconnected.com conference is happening in May 15 in London, and you're more than welcome to join us there. I will have quite a few event updates in the upcoming show as well. Besides this, this week has been a very exciting one for smaller models, as M...

Happy LLama 3 day folks! After a lot of rumors, speculations, and apparently pressure from the big Zuck himself, we finally can call April 18th, 2024, LLaMa 3 day ! I am writing this, from a lobby of the Mariott hotel in SF, where our annual conference is happening called Fully Connected, and I recorded today's episode from my hotel room. I really wanna shout out how awesome it was to meet folks w...

this week was absolutely bonkers. For starters, for the first time ever, we got an Open Weights model (Command R+) to jump over GPT-4 in human rankings on LMsys, this is huge! Then on Tuesday, it seems that all the companies just wanted to one up one another, first Gemini 1.5 released with updates, made it available in 180 countries, added audio mode + tons of API improvements and system prompts,...

Happy first ThursdAI of April folks, did you have fun on April Fools? 👀 I hope you did, I made a poll on my feed and 70% did not participate in April Fools, which makes me a bit sad! Well all-right, time to dive into the news of this week, and of course there are TONS of news, but I want to start with our own breaking news! That's right, we at Weights & Biases have breaking new of our own today,...

Hey everyone, this is Alex and can you believe that we're almost done with Q1 2024? March 2024 was kind of crazy of course, so I'm of course excited to see what April brings (besides Weights & Biases conference in SF called Fully Connected , which I encourage you to attend and say Hi to me and the team!) This week we have tons of exciting stuff on the leaderboards, say hello to the new best AI in...

March madness... I know for some folks this means basketball or something, but since this is an AI newsletter, and this March was indeed mad, I am claiming it. This week seemed madder from one day to another. And the ai announcements kept coming throughout the recording, I used the "breaking news" button a few times during this week's show! This week we covered tons of corporate AI drama in the Bi...

"...Happy birthday dear ThursdAIiiiiiiii, happy birthday to youuuuuu 🎂" What a day! Today is π-day (March 14th), 2024. For some reason it's important, not only because it's GPT-4 anniversary, or Claude 1 anniversary, or even that Starship flew to space, but also 🥁 it's ThursdAI BirthdAI 🎉 Yeah, you heard that right, last year following GPT-4 release, I hopped into a twitter space with a few fri...

Hello hello everyone, happy spring! Can you believe it? It's already spring! We have tons of AI news for you to cover, starting with the most impactful one, did you already use Claude 3? Anthropic decided to celebrate Claude 1's birthday early (which btw is also ThursdAI's birthday and GPT4 release date, March 14th, 2023) and gave us 3 new Clauds! Opus, Sonnet and Haiku. TL;DR of all topics covere...

Happy leap year day everyone, very excited to bring you a special once-in-a-4 year edition of ThursdAI 👏 (Today is also Dune 2 day (am going to see the movie right after I write these here words) and well.. to some folks, this is the bull market ₿ days as well. So congrats to all who weathered the bear market!) This week we had another great show, with many updates, and a deep dive, and again, I...

Hey, this is Alex, Ok let's start with the big news, holy crap this week was a breakthrough week for speed! We had both Groq explode in popularity, and ByteDance release an updated SDXL model called Lightning, able to generate full blown SDXL 1024 images in 300ms. I've been excited about seeing what real time LLM/Diffusion can bring, and with both of these news release the same week, I just had to...