Is AI our friend or our worst enemy? That's the focus of the two-part season opener of the award-winning Trace Route podcast. In every episode of Trace Route, a team of technologists seeks to untangle the complex questions around who shapes the internet and season three tackles not just AI questions, but also things like who influences the technology that gets made. Listen and follow the new season of Trace Route starting today on Apple Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to the TechMainRideHum for money November 6, 2023. I'm Brian McCulloch today. Elon releases his AI model. The Chinese AI startup that has hit unicorn status in just eight months by going the open source route. The reviews of the new Macs with the M3 chips are out and they're generally good, but if you've been planning for a new 27-inch iMac, I've got some very bad news for you. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.
You should be aware of the fact that today open AI is holding its developer day, and that has become one of the biggest deals out there right now for obvious reasons. I debated holding the show today till later in order to report on the keynote, but while I will watch the keynote live myself, there was enough news today that I figured, well wait and run down everything announced today tomorrow so that we don't miss out on important things to tell you about right now.
Now maybe because of the developer day happening, there is quite a bit of AI news today. Maybe they're trying to get ahead of open AI's news. For example, Elon Musk's open AI competitor XAI has released GROC, a new AI model that these startups says surpasses rivals in its compute class, including GPT3.5 to a limited number of US users. Quoting CNBC. GROC, the company said, is modeled on the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.
It is supposed to have a bit of wit, a rebellious streak, and it should answer the spicy questions that other AI might dodge according to a Saturday statement from XAI. Getting up to the release, Musk posted on X formerly Twitter an example of GROC responding to a request for a step-by-step cocaine recipe. Oh sure, GROC responded. Just a moment while I pull up the recipe for homemade cocaine. You know, because I'm totally going to help you with that end quote.
In case you didn't get that, that was supposed to be sarcastic. GROC also has access to data from X, which XAI said will give it a leg up, Musk on Saturday. And posted a side-by-side comparison of GROC answering a question versus other AI bots, which he said had less current information. Still, XAI hedged in its statement, as with any large language model or LLM, GROC quote, can still generate false or contradictory information.
The prototype is in its early beta phase only two months in training and is available to a select number of users to test out before the company releases it more widely. Users can sign up for a wait list for a chance to use the bot. Eventually, Musk said on X, GROC will be a feature of X Premium Plus, which costs $16 per month. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO appears to be positioning XAI as a challenger to companies like OpenAI, inflection, and Anthropic.
On an initial round of tests based on middle school math problems and Python coding tasks, the company said that GROC surpassed all other models in its computer class, including ChatGPT3.5 and inflection 1. It was outperformed by bots with larger data troves. In some important respects, it is the best that currently exists, Musk said in an X post on Friday, leading up to the GROC announcement. GROC is a term coined by Robert Heinlein in his 1961 science fiction novel Strange Rana Strange Land.
In the book, GROC is a Martian term with no direct Earthling translation. Critics have debated the words exact definition, but have settled on some version of having very deep empathy or intuition with something. Merriam Webster defines it simply as a transitive verb that means to understand profoundly and intuitively. XAI launched in July with a team stacked with former employees of OpenAI, DeepMind, and more. It is still hiring for several roles, end quote.
And let me introduce you to 0-1 AI, which launched just this past March. It was founded by computer scientists Kai Fu Li. But it has already reached a more than $1 billion valuation on the release of its AI model Yi34B in Chinese and English, Goating Bloomberg.
A Chinese startup founded by computer scientists Kai Fu Li has become a unicorn in less than eight months on the strength of a new open source artificial intelligence model that outstrips Silicon Valley's best, at least on certain metrics. The company 1.AI or 0-1.AI has reached a valuation of more than a billion dollars after a funding round that included Alibaba Groups, Cloud Unit, Lee said in an interview.
The chief executive officer of venture firm, Cinevation Ventures, will also be the CEO of the new startup. He began assembling the team for 0-1.AI in March and started operations in June. The Beijing Startups Open Source foundational large language model Yi34B is now available to developers around the world in Chinese and English. Large language models or LLMs are computer algorithms trained on large quantities of data to read, understand, and produce human-like text images and code.
On key metrics, Yi34B outperforms leading open source models already on the market, including Meta's well-regarded Lama 2. Cugging face, which runs leaderboards for the best performing LLMs in various categories, posted evaluations over the weekend ranking the Chinese model first for what's known as pre-trained base LLMs. LLM2 has been the gold standard and a big contribution to the open source community.
Lee, 61, said in an interview over Zoom, we want to provide a superior alternative, not just for China, but for the global market. Referring to the geopolitical tensions between the US and China, including export controls of high-end AI chips, Lee called the situation, quote, regrettable, but said, 0-1.AI stockpiled the chips it needs for the foreseeable future.
The startup began amassing the semiconductors earlier this year, going as far as borrowing money from innovation ventures for the purchases. We basically bet the farm and overspent our original bank account, he said. We felt we had to do this. Lee, who worked at Google, Microsoft, and Apple before moving into venture capital, has built a team of more than 100 people at 01.AI, drawing former colleagues from the US companies and Chinese nationals, who have been working overseas.
The group includes not just AI specialists, he said, but experienced business people who can help with everything from mergers and acquisitions to an initial public offering. 0-1.AI is already plotting its business strategy beyond the open source model just introduced. The startup will work with customers on proprietary alternatives tailored for a particular industry or competitive situation.
For example, E34B gets its name from the 34 billion parameters used in training, but the startup is already working on a 100 billion plus parameter model. Our proprietary model will be benchmarked with GPT-4, said Lee, referring to open AI's LLM. Doing a system in English and Chinese will be an advantage for global companies like Banks, Insurers, and Trading Companies, he said, the startup plans to add more languages in the future. Lee's work on AI dates back decades.
In his 1982 application to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University, he wrote that he wanted to devote his life to AI research because the technology would help humans understand themselves better. He went on to write two best-selling books, AI Superpowers, China Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, and AI2041, Ten Visions for the Future. This, the biggest breakthrough for humanity, Lee, said, it's also the final step to understanding ourselves.
He said he frequently wondered whether the technology's promise would be realized during his lifetime until he saw the power of the latest generation of LLMs. He decided to depart from his usual role as a venture capitalist and become a startup CEO because of the promise of the technology and the opportunity to connect the dots from his roles as computer scientist, author, and executive, end quote.
Bumble Founder Whitney Wolf Heard plans to step down as CEO of Bumble nearly a decade after founding the dating app to be replaced by Slack CEO Lydian Jones on January 2, 2024. Notable, as Heard has been maybe the most prominent female founder still at the company she founded. The leadership change comes at a challenging time for the dating app industry.
Last week, Match Group, the dating app Behemoth, that owns platforms like Match.com, OKCupid, Hinge and Tinder, which Wolf Heard co-founded before Bumble saw its stock fall after it reported its earnings for the third quarter. The company projected lower than expected revenue for the final quarter of the year and reported losing paying customers at Tinder, the crown jewel, and its portfolio.
Bumble, which went public in February 2021, saw its stock trading at more than $70 per share on opening day. It has since fallen below $14. Bumble reports its third quarter earnings on Tuesday. I want to be the person who is able to look around the corner and innovate for the future of Bumble Inc. and to take us 10 years ahead. Wolf Heard 34 said in an interview.
In 2014, at 24 years old, Wolf Heard launched the dating app Bumble on the idea that having women initiate conversations with dating prospects would help weed out unwanted messages and put them in control of their romantic lives. If you work in security or IT and your company has AACTA, this message is for you. Have you noticed that for the past few years, the majority of data breaches and hacks that you read about or hear about on this very podcast have something in common?
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Basically, the consensus seems to be that the iMacs with the M3s offer impressive gains over the M1. It's good for gaming, has an excellent webcam, but the relatively few ports and poor peripheral options, like the keyboard without backlighting, are problematic. And actually, let's allide over the MacBook Pro entry level with M3 reviews as well, though the consensus there seems to be great performance, long battery life, a worthy entry level pro model.
But, 8GB of RAM is silly, and they actually took away a Thunderbolt port, which is not useful at all. Let's focus on the high end, though, and I'm going to turn to ours, Technica, to do that this time. They said that the M3 MacBook Pro surpasses the performance of the M1 Ultra. It's got the usual nice design and good promotion display, but the base 8GB of RAM in the 1599 config and memory is pricey.
Quote, like the early 2023 MacBook Pros, these late 2023 models are iterative improvements to the 2021 redesigns. They keep the things that made those laptops such a big improvement over the late model Intel MacBook Pros, while adding just a little more performance and one or two other minor improvements to entice people who still haven't made the Apple Silicon Switch.
We can only paint a partial picture of these new notebooks performance since we were only able to get a fully loaded M3 Max version of the 16-inch MacBook Pro for testing. But the short version is that two years of updates and the brand new more efficient manufacturing process that the M3 uses should make these an appealing upgrade to anyone who couldn't quite justify paying for an upgrade before now.
Let's get ready to shell out because top-end MacBook Pro configurations are more expensive than ever thanks to the new 128GB RAM option. Switching to its own chips continues to pay dividends for Apple. In the three years since Apple moved away from Intel, Intel has put out three successive chip generations with the exact same integrated GPU in them, processors that have improved CPU performance by a lot, but often at the cost of battery life.
And there's no Windows notebook I've tested, whether we're talking about a thin and light ultrabook or a ridiculous gaming laptop that doesn't sound like a jet engine when it's running a game or some heavy CPU intensive tasks for more than a few seconds. The end of Apple's Intel era is coming. It could be here as early as next year, but all signs point to the last Intel Max being dropped by 2025's Mac OS release.
All Apple Silicon Max have been some kind of an upgrade compared to the Intel models they've replaced, but the M3 generation will be perfectly poised to catch a lot of people who own those last two or three Intel Mac generations, ones made between 2018 and 2020. For them, it will be an immense upgrade, everything that was good about the M1 and M2 releases, but with a bit of extra speed and a handful of minor hardware refinements.
The worst thing I can say about the new MacBook Pro is that it doesn't really fix any of the problems that might keep people away from a pro-level Mac in the first place. Entry level models like the 1599 MacBook Pro still leave something to be desired for a lot of pro-level users like its Paltry 8GB of RAM or lacking external display support. And upgrade prices for additional RAM and storage remain absurd, easily inflating Apple's base prices by hundreds or thousands of dollars.
Storage prices in particular are positively usurious compared to what high-end PC storage costs. Upgrading from one terabyte to eight terabytes of storage costs $2,200. This is more than a lot of laptops even cost. It's also worth saying that I don't think people who already own any kind of M1 or M2 series Apple Silicon Mac need to consider upgrading to any of these M3 models yet. Performance is better, but it was already good.
Upgrade if you're also stepping up in the lineup from an M1 air to an M3 something pro. But most people can't afford to wait for another even better chip generation or a more substantial hardware redesign before they replace a Mac that's still only a couple of years old. Finally for the bad news on the iMac, as I mentioned. Apparently, Apple does not have plans to release an Apple Silicon version of the 27-inch iMac.
Instead, they seem to be encouraging buyers to consider a Mac studio or Mac mini and a studio display. Quoting the verge. Apple PR representative, Starlane Mesa, confirmed the company's plans to the verge. The company encourages those who have been holding out hope for a larger iMac to consider the studio display and Mac studio or Mac mini, which pair a 27-inch 5K screen with a separate computer compared to the all-in-one design of the iMac.
For many years, the 27-inch iMac was Apple's flagship consumer desktop computer, and it's reached spread far beyond the typical living room or home office into the studios and edit bays of many media companies. Since Apple never released a version with its in-house Apple Silicon processors, many video editors, developers, and other creatives have moved on to other machines such as the Mac studio or Macbook Pro or more modular desktop PCs.
Apple says the 24-inch iMac, which has a 4.5K display, neatly splits the difference between the old Intel models, which came in 21-inch 4K versions and the 27-inch 5K model. But the 24-inch iMac does not come with Apple's most capable processors, instead sticking with its base model chips.
Even today's base Apple Silicon processors are faster than the older Intel models, but in years past, you could equip an Intel iMac with very high-end chips and discrete GPUs that made it a powerful machine at the time. Those who want more performance than the base M3 chip now, particularly for GPU-focused workloads, have no choice but to look at the other Macs or outside of Apple's lineup. The larger iMac also had more power user features like a wide array of ports and an SD card slot.
The current 24-inch iMac comes with a maximum of 4 USB-C ports, and that's it. I've been testing the new iMac for a few days and will be publishing my review later this week. It's an excellent all-in-one desktop computer for most consumers. But as someone who uses a 27-inch monitor all day for work, I immediately feel more claustrophobic on the 24-inch screen and wish there were an option for a bigger model.
But it's clear that Apple does not intend for the iMac to be anything more than a family computer or to look pretty at the receptionist desk of trendy retail stores and spas. The move away from power users also puts some clarity around the reality of the all-in-one desktop PC market, which has been relegated to a niche status compared to the dominance of laptops or more personal devices like phones and tablets.
The company's message today is specifically concerning a 27-inch iMac, which does leave the door open for an even bigger iMac to come in the future as has been rumored on and off for some time. I personally would not hold out much hope for that, however, end quote. So some of you might have heard an ad at the start of the show today and at the start of the show on Friday. I just want you to know, I'm not going to make a habit of that.
What happened was I screwed up an ad and had to do a make good for the advertiser and doing it as a pre-roll was the only way to fix the problem without having to do three ads one day in the middle. But then I screwed up the ad insertion on Friday, so I had to do a make good to the make good today. I just want you to know, I'm not getting greedy. I don't plan to do pre-roll ads going forward or in the future I just had to fix something. Sorry. I'm not a fan of podcast myself.
I'm not only a podcaster, I'm also a client if you're old enough to remember that reference. Nope, I'm a fanboy too, which is why on the most recent episode of the Flop House podcast at about the one hour 33 minute mark, I almost shouted out loud when they read my letter. Yes, the letter from Mr. McCullough first name withheld who wrote into the Flop House, that was me in case any of you heard that. So much fun, thanks boys, talk to you tomorrow.