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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 trade measures mannequin enhancements. Fashionable AI benchmarks have a tendency to check for esoteric data, and provides combination scores that correlate poorly to proficiency on the duties that most individuals care about.
As Wharton professor Ethan Mollick identified in a sequence of posts on X after Grok 3’s unveiling Monday, there’s an “urgent need for better batteries of tests and independent testing authorities.” AI corporations self-report benchmark outcomes as a rule, as Mollick alluded to, making these outcomes even harder to simply accept at face worth.
“Public benchmarks are both ‘meh’ and saturated, leaving a lot of AI testing to be like food reviews, based on taste,” Mollick wrote. “If AI is critical to work, we need more.”
There’s no scarcity of impartial checks and organizations proposing new benchmarks for AI, however their relative advantage is much from a settled matter inside the trade. Some AI commentators and specialists suggest aligning benchmarks with financial affect to make sure their usefulness, whereas others argue that adoption and utility are the final word benchmarks.
This debate might rage till the tip of time. Maybe we must always as a substitute, as X person Roon prescribes, merely pay much less consideration to new fashions and benchmarks barring main AI technical breakthroughs. For our collective sanity, that might not be 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 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 strategy to explicitly embrace “intellectual freedom,” regardless of how difficult or controversial a subject could also be.
Mira’s new startup: Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s new startup, Considering Machines Lab, intends to construct instruments to “make AI work for [people’s] unique needs and goals.”
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 net.
A really Llama convention: 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 series of foundation models for transparent AI in Europe” that preserves the “linguistic and cultural diversity” of all EU languages.
Analysis paper of the week
OpenAI researchers have created a brand new AI benchmark, SWE-Lancer, that goals to judge the coding prowess of highly effective AI programs. 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 among a number of well-funded Chinese language AI startups releasing fashions below a permissive license. Based in 2023, Stepfun reportedly not too long ago closed a funding spherical value a number of hundred million {dollars} from a bunch of buyers that embody Chinese language state-owned personal fairness companies.
Seize bag
Nous Analysis, an AI analysis group, has launched what it claims is among the first AI fashions that unifies reasoning and “intuitive language model 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 tougher issues and reveals its thought course of to reach on the reply.
Anthropic reportedly plans to launch an architecturally related mannequin quickly, and OpenAI has mentioned such a mannequin is on its near-term roadmap.
