The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - OpenAI's Next Big Model is Called Orion

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

In this episode, explore the latest developments at OpenAI, including the upcoming AI model codenamed Orion and the much-anticipated Strawberry reasoning AI. Uncover details from exclusive reports about these advancements, their potential impact on the AI industry, and how they might shape the future of AI-driven technologies. With insights into OpenAI’s strategic moves and connections to national security, this episode offers a deep dive into what’s next in the world of AI. Concerned about being spied on? Tired of censored responses? AI Daily Brief listeners receive a 20% discount on Venice Pro. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://venice.ai/nlw ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠and enter the discount code NLWDAILYBRIEF. Learn how to use AI with the world's biggest library of fun and useful tutorials: https://besuper.ai/ Use code 'podcast' for 50% off your first month. The AI Daily Brief helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI. Subscribe to the podcast version of The AI Daily Brief wherever you listen: https://pod.link/1680633614 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://aidailybrief.beehiiv.com/ Join our Discord: https://bit.ly/aibreakdown

Today on the AI Daily Brief, new reports about OpenAI Strawberry and what it means for a new model that they're codenaming Orion. Before that in the headlines, Elon Musk has come out in favor of SB 1047. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in our show notes. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief headlines, all the daily AI headlines you need in around five minutes. We kick off today with the latest development in the conversation around California AI Safety Legislation SB 1047, where Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter and XAI, has come out in favor of the bill. Last night he tweeted, this is a tough call and will make some people upset, but all things considered,

I think California should probably pass the SB 1047 AI safety bill. For over 20 years, I have been an advocate for AI regulation, just as we regulate any product or technology that is a potential risk to the public. So this sends shockwaves through the community, both good and bad. safety advocate Eliasur Yudkowski writes, Honestly, I haven't studied SB 1047 hard enough. I don't think it saves the world by itself, so the main impact is political consequences on which I'm not expert.

But given how it selectively hits big AI companies like yours, this looks to me like an act of integrity by you. Dan Hendricks, the director of the Center for AI Safety, who is one of the voices most influential in drafting the legislation, wrote, you're the best, Elon, and used it as a chance to provide a TLDR of the bill. The much more common response, though, was one of incredulity and accusations of hippocations of hypocrisy. hypocrisy. Box CEO, Aaron Levy, writes,

The unintended consequences of this bill in many years from now would likely be quite bad. The amount of risk that model providers take on would almost necessarily slow down the rate of AI progress and reduce competition overall. And as we know with regulation, it's often a one-way door. If this bill had been written two years ago with the same relative numbers, we likely would have stalled the major breakthroughs we've seen since. Bindu Ready, writes, it's premature to pass a bill when we don't understand exactly how AI can be dangerous. We don't have any proof that it has been dangerous so far. Ari Paul writes, yeah, we get it. You finish the data center and now want a regulatory moat

so you can extract rents without facing competition. As always, the principles go out the window as soon as the grift is ready. Developer Nick Dobos said something similar. Someone finished building a data center and now wants regulatory capture. The other common theme was Elon setting fire to the door on his way out of California. Martin Casado from A16Z writes, step one, move out of California. Step two, support legislation that will hurt California. Well played, Mr. Musk. Well played. Beth Jaisos writes, one, move X and XAI out of California. Two, build AI superclusters in Texas and Tennessee. Three, support California build at Nukes' competition.

Four, profit. Clemda-Lang from Hugging Face writes, is Elon Musk replicating the OpenAI Playbook? From open source, GROC 1 to closed-source, groc 2, from pro-startups to regulatory capture. If you can't beat them, join them, I guess. Ha-ha. Anyways, for now, it is just one more data point,

and we will see how it all shakes out when the vote finally happens. Now, it's not the only legislation that's being considered right now. In fact, a group of companies, including some that have come out against SB 1047, have come out in favor of something else. OpenAI, Adobe, and Microsoft are among the companies supporting AB3211, which requires watermarks and the metadata of AI-generated photos, videos, and audio. Interestingly, back in April, a trade group that represented Adobe and Microsoft, among others, had opposed AB3211, calling it unworkable and overly burdensome, but amendments to the bill seemed to have changed the situation, as they are now in support.

This certainly feels, at least in part, a way for these companies to show that they're not against any regulation, they just don't want what SB 1047 has to offer. Staying on the big company theme for a minute, Amazon is finally getting set to release an update to a new AI version of Alexa. According to internal documents obtained by the Washington Post, the company is preparing to release AI Alexa in October, but it will require a paid subscription to have access to it.

According to the documents, classic Alexa, the non-AI version will remain free to use, but the new assistant could cost as much as $10 a month for things like AI features that help customers curate, summarize, and explore current events, which they say was rated as one of the top customer requests. I could be completely wrong here, but I am extraordinarily skeptical that Amazon is going to be able to get people to pay $10 a month if the primary value proposition being advertised is new summaries. It's hard not to feel that Amazon continues to be a little bit behind the eight ball when it comes to their AI strategy. And frankly, if the big launch of Alexa in October,

more than a year after they announced these updates, is a news summarizer, that is going to be painful. Moving on, you might remember that most of the inflection team went over to Microsoft, with inflection CEO Mustafa Sullyman now running AI internal to Microsoft, but the remainder of inflection is still cooking and had a bit of news today, the most interesting piece of which is an attempt to develop a new mechanism for exporting data from chatbots that could be standardized, that could lead the way to an eventual industry standard. Starting from right away, users of the chatbot pie will be able to export their previous conversation history,

and they're hoping that this becomes more normalized in the future. Finally, it appears that we have a date for the next big iPhone launch, which, of course, for those of you listening to this podcast, is much more notable as a platform for Apple's new Apple Intelligence AI, rather than just as a new piece of hardware. September 9th at 10 a.m. Pacific time, you can tune in at Apple.com, although rumor is that the Apple intelligence,

features won't be shipping right away, and so we may still have a little while to wait after that. For now, though, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief headlines. Next up, the main episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Fractional. When we wanted to build an AI-powered feature of Superintelligent, our AI tool finder, I went straight to Fractional. The Fractional team is a group of senior engineers in San Francisco working on some of the most exciting projects in applied AI. Working with them is basically like hiring an absolutely

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Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. A few weeks ago, there were serious rumors flying around about OpenAI and their strawberry reasoning model. The quick TLDR on all of this goes all the way back to around Sam Altman's firing when there was speculation that part of the reason that people had gotten spooked internally was a new technical breakthrough around a reasoning AI that they were calling Q Star. A few months later, Q Star was reported to be renamed Strawberry, and at some point over the last month and a half or so, Sam Altman and others from OpenAI started posting pictures of strawberries on Twitter. There was also a new theoretical leaker who emerged, making all sorts of prognostications around

forthcoming information, which, by the way, never materialized. Ultimately, all of that dissipated, but now we have some actual sourced information in an exclusive report from the information. The piece reads, Open AI races to launch Strawberry Reasoning AI to boost chatbot business. So what is going on here? First of all, let's talk about the new information we have about Strawberry. The examples that the information gives, which are sourced from two people who have been involved in the effort with Strawberry, are that it can do things like solving math problems that it hasn't seen before, solving complex problems involving programming, solve the New York Times connections, a complex word puzzle, or reason to create more

comprehensive answers around subjective topics, such as product marketing strategy. The next bit of information from this report is that Strawberry could be coming as soon as this fall, that it appears that the race is on to release this, possibly within ChatGBT. A third interesting piece of information is that it appears that part of the reason that they're so eager to get Strawberry Online is in order to improve upon GPT4. We have a new codename for a new OpenAI flagship LLM, and that codename is Orion. One of the people who talked with the information said that OpenAI is using a big version of Strawberry to generate data for training Orion.

In other words, if OpenAI is facing limitations and obtaining enough high-quality data to train Orion, they're looking to synthetically created data from Strawberry to fill in that gap. Strawberry is also seen as a potential aid for upcoming OpenAI agents, according to these sources. Of course, this is another frontier that is opening up in this battle, with agents widely expected to at some point represent another phase change when it comes to what generative AI can do. Now, another interesting part of the framing of this piece is that they set up a certain urgency around how this could help with a new fundraising process. Despite OpenAI being the most

monetarily successful generative AI product in ChatGPT, it's still widely suspected to be operating at a loss. The tone throughout this piece is very different than something we've seen around OpenAI before, which is a recognition that expectations are exceedingly high on whatever they call their post-GPT4 model, and that the company's destiny could actually be tied up in how successful it is or not. For example, OpenAI's prospects rest in part on the eventual launch of a new flagship LLM. That model seeks to improve upon its existing flagship LLM, GPT4. By now, other rivals have launched LLMs that perform roughly as well as GPT4. Later in the piece, they write, expectations are running high for Orion as OpenAI looks to stay ahead of its rivals and

continue its remarkable revenue growth. Earlier this month, for instance, Google beat OpenAI to launch an AI-powered voice assistant flexible enough to handle interruptions and sudden topic changes from users, despite OpenAI first announcing its version in May. Now, nothing in this piece says explicitly that OpenAI is actually out fundraising. And it's entirely possible that the tone of urgency comes just from the reporters, not from their sources. However, it is also possible that the sources themselves express the sort of nervousness that might be more emblematic of what's going on behind the scenes at OpenAI. Now, one more piece of the story that was interesting, in a separate post on the information, the publication reported that the company had shown strawberry to the federal

government. From the post, this summer, Sam Altman's team demonstrated strawberry to American national security officials set a person with direct knowledge of those meetings. As the information notes, quote, by demonstrating an unreleased technology to government officials, open AI could be setting a new standard for AI developers, especially as advanced AI increasingly becomes a national security concern. The demonstration could be part of OpenAI's push to be more transparent with policymakers who could cause the company problems if they feel threatened by its technology. However, they also point out, quote, the demonstrations also likely have another purpose, starting a conversation with officials about how the company can secure the technology so that foreign adversaries like China can't steal it,

and maybe also take a shot at meta platforms for releasing open-weight AI that China and everyone else can access. This is obviously extra interesting in the context of the larger debate around SB 1047 and what the appropriate relationship is between regulators and models. Is it also possible that part of open AI's logic is to show that, if the big frontier labs are engaged in this way with the government, particularly around concerns around national security, does it buy the whole industry time for everyone to learn a little bit more about AI before we go off and regulate it? Not sure, but it's an interesting point of speculation. Last note, for those of you who are keeping track of who the real leakers are out there,

AI for success on Twitter, reposted a tweet from leaker Jimmy Apples from back in November with a picture of the Orion constellation and the caption, Let's Conquer the Cosmos. Ashtosh writes, It's wild that Jimmy gave us a hint about OpenAI Orion last November. Jimmy is probably the only person I trust with OpenAI leaks. Anyways, friends, it seems like, as fall is right around the corner, we may finally get more real information about strawberry and even potentially the chance to get our hands on it. But for now, that is the story from here.

Appreciate you listening, as always, and until next time, peace.