AI Reading for Wednesday December 4

Dec 04, 2024

Insane amount of news today: big Amazon updates, US and China AI war heats up. Buckle up!

Amazon's new foundation model. - Amazon Web Services

30% cheaper than Gemini Pro, and faster, a notch behind on the quality benchmarks.

The lite model is same price as Gemini Flash (practically free) but not better or faster.

These look like are extremely legit competitors to OpenAI. I kind of locked myself into OpenAI for the AI agent that researches this Substack, by using o1-preview and the gpt-4o structured output JSON schema feature, which I don’t think any other models support. I would have to use the instructor module or equivalent. My OpenAI bill is like $100 a month, mostly o1-preview, could save a bit of money by switching to Gemini. The mini / light models are getting ridiculously fast and cheap, it’s perfectly reasonable to fire thousands of requests and get quick and good responses.

Amazon details Trainium 2 clusters it will deploy to train Anthropic models. - WSJ

Amazon says Trainium3 in 2025 will 4x performance, also building a supercluster of 20k Nvidia Blackwell GPUs. - The Register

Nvidia is still the king but Amazon and AMD, and a slew of AI chip startups, others, are racing furiously to catch up. - NY Times

Amazon also updated SageMaker to compete better with Snowflake, with lakehouse, data and AI features - Amazon Web Services

AWS adds a multi-agent framework. - VentureBeat

AWS Bedrock adds automatic model distillation to reduce sizes of models it trains, reasoning to reduce hallucinations - TechCrunch

China bans exports of key minerals to US - Ars Technica

Tim Cook struggles with China over Apple Intelligence - Jason Deegan

Baidu and China want more access to iPhone data, Tim Cook resists - AppleInsider

Hugging Face CEO has predictions. - Business Insider

Notes that Chinese ‘open source’ models are leading, but censor a lot of stuff China is sensitive about. David Mayer unavailable for comment.

Ted Cruz has thoughts. A lot of this globalization stuff only works if people play more or less by the same rules. (Rules-based order ring a bell?). It breaks down with stuff like China’s Great Firewall and the crazy cross-border propaganda we get subject to and he who must not be named (thinking of multiple people). Without agreement on rules, you get the distinct likelihood of a tech Chernobyl that leads to backlash and overregulation, and balkanization / mercantilism, which is not growth-friendly. With Xi and Trump, prospects for enlightened policy seem slim.

Future story of AI chips in China, probably similar to UK’s attempts to impede US industrialization - HISTORY

Departing Biden tech advisor talks about AI risks - MIT Technology Review

Wall Street’s AI-powered rally risks ‘correction’, Vanguard warns - FT

AQR’s Cliff Asness Says AI Has Now Taken Over Parts of His Job - Bloomberg

SpaceX looks to sell shares at $350b valuation. Musk owns 42%. - Yahoo Finance

If he were to generate similar hype for all his ventures like xAI and Neuralink, neuter competitors, trillionaire does not seem out of reach. Welcome to the oligarchy. BTW Boeing has an EV of ~$150b, Toyota ~$400b.

GenAI comes for jobs once considered 'safe' from automation, possibly disproportionaely women's jobs. - The Register