Incredible week for AI (Feb 17, 2024)!

This week was a MONSTER week for anyone following the Artificial Intelligence developments.

It is truly amazing how fast everything is moving forward. Four pieces of significant news came out this week:

Last week renamed Bard as Gemini and provided 3 different levels for you to use it (Gemini Nano, Gemini Pro, Gemini Ultra). This week they released Gemini Pro 1.5 which is the *newest* AI model bringing not only efficiency, speed but also a much larger context window (1M instead of the regular 200,000 tokes) to end users. This is HUGE as it now opens the use of AI with for many more use cases! –
Out of nowhere, literally! OpenAI announced SORA, a text-to-video AI model that can create *incredibly realistic* and up to 1-minute scenes. Although it is only available to a few folks for testing and optimization (Red Team, they called it), it looks amazing! The launch was very interesting too! A few minutes after the announcement, Sam Altman went live on X and ask the audience to enter any scenes they want to see. After just a few minutes, he responded with a scene – It was AMAZING! Everyone is not only excited about the potential but AMAZED at the technology and its possibilities! Also everyone is very much discussing the implications!
For a few weeks now there has been reports that Sam Altman has been seeking dollars for something. We finally have clarity and WOW! – $7Trillion???
He plan to raise up to $7 trillion for building new chip factories to power AI, which in his view will be one of the two things needed to run the compute power to move the world forward. (the other is a breakthrough in energy creation). No one disagrees with the energy breakthrough piece, but Lots of conversation about the amount of compute power needed!)
In the USA, much of the Superbowl Sunday ads were about AI. Did you catch their Superbowl Ad?) — Yes, it is all about: Your everyday AI companion!
Microsoft increased the marketing on the Microsoft Copilot AI platform. This is very hot topic as last week, Microsoft also lifted the minimum of 300 seats licensing, which makes it available to every small business with a Microsoft 365 subscription. It is incredible how Microsoft is evangelizing and democratizing the use of AI (Copilot is now enabled by default with Microsoft Edge using GPT4!

Then on top of all of that the YouTube release of these 3 videos this week: —

Recursion x NVIDIA event at JPM2024 — Fireside Chat with Jensen Huang & Martin Chavez (youtube.com)
- This is is really up there / top of the must watch list…
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and H.E. Omar Sultan Al Olama Discuss AI at the World Governments Summit (youtube.com)
- general but very recent.
Generative AI in a Nutshell – how to survive and thrive in the age of AI (youtube.com)
- Whiteboard style explanation video – Very good! (added to my Learning about AI & Prompt Engineering!)
One last video I want to reference regarding Microsoft Copilot!
AI in Education – from Microsoft EDU — Mike Tholfsen provides a deep dive into AI for Education, including Copilot and new features in Microsoft Education.
I think this one is important because although there is a license for the use of Microsoft Copilot for faculty and staff, it is free for students!
Very interesting!

My focus lately has been on learning how to integrate different agents so they can talk to each other (multi-agent conversations). Microsoft’s AutoGen and all of the videos associated with it have been incredibly helpful… I have to say it is not super simple, definitely a learning curb!

Bottom line: Just wow! —