The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - Why Republican VP Nominee JD Vance is Loudly For Open Source AI

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

NLW covers the pro-open source AI statements of JD Vance and situates his previous VC career. Before that in the Headlines, is Microsoft building Agents? 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, we're looking at what new vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance has said about open source AI in the past. Before then on the brief, does Mustafa Sullyman have an AI agent mandate at Microsoft? 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 edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. We kick off today with what is ultimately just potentially, potentially a throwaway line in a recent New York Times profile of Microsoft CEO Sachi Nadella, but one which nonetheless I thought was pretty interesting.

The piece came out over the weekend and it basically tells the story of how Nadella got so focused on AI and how his bet on the space increased over time. There are some great anecdotes in here, for example around how Nat Friedman and GitHub really amplified Nadella's ambitions in AI, even at a time that their investment in Open AI wasn't necessarily panning out, at least in Brom. perception. There's also a bit more around his engagement with Open AI and its board during the whole Sam Altman crisis, and how that led into the hiring of Mustafa Sullyman and his team from inflection to lead Microsoft's AI initiatives internally. One of the big questions has been,

what is that group doing as opposed to, for example, Open AI? Where does Open AI end and Microsoft begin? And of course, are they in some ways actually competing? We didn't necessarily get an answer here, but we did get this line discussing the Inflection Deal, the New York Times writes, the deal was announced three weeks later. It wasn't technically an acquisition, which could get bogged down in antitrust reviews, but it let Microsoft hire Mr. Silliman and nearly all his staff. Mr. Silliman was put in charge of creating AI agents that act like personal online assistance, steering people through their daily tasks and even doing some of the thinking for them. Mr. Nadella saw this as a dramatic change in how people interact with computers and a leap

beyond what competitors were doing. He gave Mr. Silliman immense resources to make it happen, including running many of Microsoft's largest consumer businesses such as Bing. More than 10, 10,000 people would work under him. So what's interesting about this is not necessarily the idea that they're working on agents. Obviously, all the big AI labs at this point are working on agents. It is broadly seen as the next big frontier. And so we might have guessed that this would be a part of the mandate. However, when it comes to what exactly this team from inflection was hired to do,

this makes it seem like this was the mandate. I don't think we've read anything so far that paints it that clearly. And so like I said, while it could just be sort of an errant throwaway line, it seems like whatever the sourcing was for this piece points to this being the big thing that Mustafa Sullyman and his team are working on inside Microsoft. Certainly super interesting and something that I'm going to keep a close eye on. Next up, we have a couple of product updates.

YouTube Music is working on a feature for AI-generated playlists. The company says that premium users in the U.S. will be able to create a custom playlist by, quote, describing exactly what they want to hear. So, for example, you would say something like catchy pop choruses or upbe. pop anthems, and that would populate your list. Another feature that's coming lets you search for songs by singing them, humming them, or playing them from another device. This is like Shazam

reborn but on steroids. I know for sure that my five-year-old daughter is going to love these features so she can get me to play exactly what she has stuck in her head. Google is also apparently testing out AI-created video presentations. The Verge writes Google Vids is supposed to make creating a video clip as easy as making a slide for your next work presentation. The Verge writes, Google is launching its new Vids productivity app and workspace labs with the idea that, quote, if you can make a slide, you can make a video in Vids. Announced in April, Vids allows users to drop docs, slides, voiceovers, and video recordings into a timeline to create a video presentation to share with coworkers. Making it available in the Workspace Labs preview allows workspace admins to opt-in

users to try out the AI-powered video maker. Importantly, this is not a SORA competitor, but something that is basically creating a narrated presentation, which frankly makes it a lot more useful for a workplace context and so something that I am very excited to try out, and we will almost certainly be creating content around over at Super Intelligent. Over in the markets, AI continues to be a big theme. Reuters reports that Apple is at all-time highs after Morgan Stanley called it a top pick based on its AI efforts. Apple shares rose 2.5% on Monday to reach a new record high. Apple had been mostly flat on the year before their worldwide developer conference presentation,

and now the company is up nearly 20% on the year. That makes its market cap 3.62 trillion, which makes it, for the moment, the largest company in the world. Chipmaker TSMC has also seen Banner Times, with its second quarter profit up 30% based on demand from AI chips. The company's stock is up 75% this year. Lastly today, Bank of America is reportedly planning on spending $4 billion on AI this year, said CEO Brian Moynihan on Tuesday,

quote, AI has moved from cost-savings ideas to enhancing the quality of our customer interactions. By way of example, he pointed to the bank's AI advisor and client insights tools, which he said has delivered more than 6 million insights so far this year to financial advisors. Perhaps this AI advisor will tell Bank of America not to debank me, which happened yesterday based on one of the industries I spend time in, but still I'm glad to see that they're spending money on the future. For now, though, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Next up, the main episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Super Intelligent, the platform for fun, fast AI learning.

Super has a ton of new things going on. We recently announced our partnership with Spotify, through which users of that app can now access Super Intelligent content directly from their mobile apps. We've also just launched the AI learning feed. In addition to seeing the tutorials that we're dropping, there are polls, news items with related lessons, and a chance for people to show off the projects in use cases that are making AI come alive for them. We've also just kicked off the Super Summer where each week will share a new challenge that you can use to discover new AI tools and use cases. Go to besuper.com.A.I and use code super fun for 50% off your first two months. That's Bsupert.a.i. Today's episode is brought to you by Venice. Venice is a private, uncensored

generative AI app. It accesses open source models to enable text, image, and code generation without the fear of being spied on or having your data exploited. Discuss anything with Venice without concerns about it being monitored, sold, or given to advertisers and governments. Venice is different because your conversations and creations are kept securely within your own browser, never stored or accessible by Venice. Unlike other AI apps, Venice won't tell you what's okay to say or not. Venice won't patronize you. It simply provides direct access to machine intelligence. No topics are off limits, no ideas are taboo. With Venice, you're in control of the AI, as you should be. Pro subscriptions are available for $49 a year or $8 per month. Try it for free without an account at venice.aI. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. A quick note before we get in, to today's show, American political discourse is right now extraordinarily contentious. And I'm sure there will be many of you, because I've heard from you in the past, that would

prefer that I did not discuss anything having to do with the presidential campaign even in the context of artificial intelligence. My position on this is that the candidates who are now competing are going to have outsize impact, at least on the discourse surrounding AI, and in at least some cases in the policy of AI, and any honest accounting for the development of the space right now has to incorporate this particular discourse. What I can promise is that I will not get into deeper questions around the presidential election outside of these issues, as there are plenty of sources for that. So with that said, let's talk about what former President Donald Trump's vice president pick J.D. Vance has said in the past about artificial intelligence. First of all,

it's worth noting that Vance has been in and around Silicon Valley and technology for some time now. Starting in 2013, he was a principal at Mithro Capital, which was one of Peter Thiel's funds. A few years later in 2017, Vance stayed in venture capital but left Mithril and joined AOL founder Steve Case's revolution. TechCrunch says that move happened because Vance's wife had landed a job as a Supreme Court clerk. A couple years later in 2019, TechCrunch reports that Vance raised funds for his own firm called Naria Capital. By the beginning of 2020, that firm had raised $93 million out of a targeted $125 million, including such notable LPs as Peter Thiel himself, Mark And and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Vivette Gramaswamy, another person who had been in the discussion

for becoming Trump's VP, was also an LP in that fund. In 2022, after winning his election for the Ohio Senate, Vance stepped back from running that fund, Naria. So that's a little bit about Vance's background and technology, but here are the specific comments that have gotten people interested when it comes to his perspective on artificial intelligence. Let's listen in. You know, very often CEOs, especially of larger technology companies that I think already have advantage positions in AI will come and talk about the terrible safety dangers of this new technology and how Congress needs to jump up and regulate as quickly as possible. And I can't help but worry that if we do something under duress from the current incumbents, it's going to be to the advantage of those incumbents and not to the

advantage of the American consumer. So clearly what we have here is someone who is more concerned around the regulatory capture risks from earlier over-regulation of AI than they are from free market competition around AI. He's also participated in the debates around so-called woke AI. You might remember back in March when VC's Vonod Kostla and Mark Andresen got deep into a discussion around open source and AI, where at one point, Vinod asked, Mark, would you open source the Manhattan project? This one is more serious for national security. We are in a tech economic war with China and AI that is a must win. Vance quote tweeted that and said, there are undoubtedly risks related to AI. One of the biggest, a partisan group of crazy people using AI to infect every part of

the information economy with left-wing bias. Gemini can't produce accurate history. Chatchip-T promotes genocidal concepts. The solution is open source. He continues, if Fennod really believes AI is as dangerous as a nuclear weapon, why does Chachapit have such an insane political bias? If you wanted to promote bipartisan efforts to regulate for safety, it's entirely counterproductive. Any moderate or conservative who goes along with this obvious effort to entrench insane left-wing businesses is a useful idiot. I'm not handing out favors to industrial scale DEIBS because tech people are complaining about safety. I share the quote in full because, of course, the part of the technology space that is excited about open source is honed in on this quote, the solution is open source. And absolutely,

that's the conclusion that Vance has come to. But it is also worth noting that the particular reasons for coming to that conclusion are pretty firmly anchored in the culture war, which eats everything else in American politics as well. For some, that doesn't matter. Entrepreneur at IRL Dan says, not that I've ever been a single issue voter, I've never. never voted for Republicans for Prez. But there's a not insignificant chance the issue of open source AI outweighs all the others combined, and I did not have it on my bingo card that any of the candidates would have a policy opinion on this. I think this is something that I've seen a lot. People being surprised and not having previously known much about Vance that he would even have an opinion on this area.

Active AI safety discussion participant Robin Hanson writes did a little learning about J.D. Vance after his nomination. Disagree with some stuff, agree with others. But my main impression is this guy is smart, at least comparing to most politicians at his level. Yes, smarts can be used for good or ill, but dot-da-dot. To some extent, the nomination of Vance exposes a dividing line that has gotten clearer and clearer in Silicon Valley in the technology industry itself. It's not just in the context of AI that Vance has been outspoken about his concern around how much power big tech has. At the same time, it's clear that a big part of his power base is from a certain sector of technology. The Daily Beast writes, the nomination of J.D. Vance as Donald Trump's running mate was reportedly

backed by a whispering campaign from Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and David Sacks. Writes the Daily Beast, Trump was still taking calls from influential friends and insiders on his VP hours before he announced the decision. Certainly, Elon Musk was vocal about his approval, writing Trump Vance resounds with victory. And as many have pointed out, Peter Thiel was a huge backer of Vance, not only by giving him his first venture capital job, but also by donating a reported 15 million to his Senate campaign. At the time, it was reported to be the largest amount ever given to boost a single Senate candidate. So what to make of all this? Like I said, the role of the AI Daily Brief is not to get into the American political landscape beyond its context for artificial intelligence. However, what I think

it's safe to say is that you have someone in advance now as Trump's running mate that, one, puts the AI question on the agenda in a way that perhaps it wouldn't have if Trump had made a different decision, and two, who it appears his strong starting bias is towards less regulation, more competition, more antagonism towards big tech and the current set of AI incumbents, and an embrace for reasons you may agree or disagree with of open source as an answer to those concerns with big tech. If and as more discussions of AI come up in this campaign, we will of course cover them. But for now, that is the report from here. Appreciate you listening or watching as always.

And until next time, peace. Thank you.