Hey there,

At AI Academy we’re finalizing the last steps of AI Career Compass: the first program to help you figure out your ideal career path in the world of AI. I’ll be one of the coaches together with Léonard Van Rompaey, an AI lawyer expert in the Life Design methodology that he’ll teach you in the program.

The course will be out on the 20th of March but is on pre-launch sale right now. If you are excited about the future of AI and want to explore your career opportunities, this is your chance to join it saving a bunch of 💵.

Join AI Career Compass

This week’s news:

• The race to Zero: how AI will become a zero-cost commodity
• Pizza Bytes 🍕: Spotify releases AI DJ, Binance's implementation of AI to NFT, a 335k/yr Prompt engineer job.
• Tiramisù 😋: New OpenAI job.

🍕 The race to Zero: how AI will become a zero-cost commodity

Meta released LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI), an open source Large Language Model for research.

Let me translate that: Meta built a better copy of OpenAI’s models and gave it out for free. It beats GPT-3 (OpenAI’s flagship model, the basis for ChatGPT) at several benchmarks and it’s much smaller which means it’s easier and cheaper to use. It could even be run on a single GPU chip.

Why did Meta do that?

1. To attract new talents. AI talent is scarce, and being seen as “cool” is really important to attract it. OpenAI has poached hundreds of people from other tech companies.
2. To speed up research. Instead of finding issues by themselves, now they can count on the entire AI research community.
3. Because they can. Meta has to develop this kind of technology anyway and doesn’t have a cloud business to protect like Microsoft or Google.

The last point is the most interesting to me. AI is the next technological revolution and there’s obviously a ton of money to be made from building the “foundational models” that will power it.

But…

These models are…foundational. They’re like electricity or steam power. Can you patent and protect electricity? I don’t think so. This means two things:

1. Companies that want to make money through the commercialization of foundational AI models will have little differentiation. At some point they’ll all get so good that they won’t be able to claim “buy mine, it’s better”. Exactly how no one has “better electricity”
2. Companies who don’t want to make money selling foundational AI models will release them for free because they can. Others will take them and put them into products or services to use them easily.

The only possible outcome from 1 and 2 is that competition + open source will turn AI into an almost free commodity.

We are already seeing this phenomenon. The “AI news” section of this week’s edition of my Tech Pizza newsletter features:

• 3 new major products leveraging conversational AI (Spotify, Snapchat, Notion)
• A new generative AI product team at Meta (expect to add Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and Whatsapp to the list above)
• Coca-Cola is integrating generative AI through the Bain x OpenAI partnership both for internal use and external customer engagement.

Bear in mind: Tech Pizza is a weekly newsletter. All of this happened in one week.

Andrew NG famously said some years ago that “AI is the new electricity”. It was and still is an exciting message that inspired many (me included). Let’s remember that electricity is a commodity we take for granted today. My bet is that we’ll take for granted generative AI in less time than we’d think.

Pizza bytes 🍕

AI

• OpenAI releases the API for ChatGPT and Whisper (their transcription algorithm). This means that from now on anyone will be able to integrate these technologies into their products.
• Spotify releases AI DJ. They already have a very powerful song recommendation engine called “Discover Weekly”, but they added this AI layer on top that will generate a commentary on the songs like a radio DJ would. I love this, a great example of using generative AI to add value to existing products.
• Snapchat releases its own version of ChatGPT. It’s called “My AI”, it will be next to the conversations with friends. The CEO said: “The big idea is that in addition to talking to our friends and family every day, we’re going to talk to AI every day”. I strongly believe this is very dangerous as people tend to develop unhealthy relationships with these bots (I talked about it here).
• Notion AI is out of beta and available to everyone.
• Anthropic released its model to a selected group of companies. Anthropic is a spin-off of OpenAI.
• The NBA demoed a new app that uses AI to place you INTO an NBA game.
• Tome raises $43M for their “storytelling” AI startup. It’s basically PowerPoint with AI steroids.
• The founders of Instagram opened their new product “Artifakt” to everyone. It’s their new “AI for news” app, which interestingly is how TikTok started.
• Meta is starting a new team focused on turning generative AI into products. Meta already has a research lab working on technology like ChatGPT, this team will work on its integrations within Meta’s products.
• Last week we talked about the partnership between Bain and OpenAI. This week we found out that Coca-Cola is the first company to announce working together with Bain x OpenAI. It looks like the main two applications will be for internal productivity and external customer engagement.
• JPMorgan restricts staff from using ChatGPT. I said that multiple times: don’t tell your secrets to ChatGPT. OpenAI will re-train models with your conversations and you may find them in GPT-4’s answers.
• Someone studied if people were more likely to buy products that mentioned AI. The answer: yes (specifically, using AI in sales/marketing copy boosts willingness to pay 17%).
• Anthropic (a spinoff of OpenAI) is hiring a Prompt Engineer with a salary of $250k-$335k/yr + equity. Wild 💸💸💸.
• Feel like learning prompt engineering?
• Prompt Vibes is a cool collection of interesting ChatGPT prompts.
• Collection of resources on prompt engineering.
• Coming out soon: AI Academy’s course on building with ChatGPT

Crypto

• An NFT collector dumped more than 1.000 NFTs. Obviously, some prices crashed.
• Coinbase released its earnings. Interesting: the company is suffering from the crypto winter (revenue is down 75% from last year), but less than expected.
• Coinbase also announced its own blockchain Base. Built on top of Ethereum, it will help developers
• Binance announced Bicasso, a tool that uses AI to generate art you can turn into an NFT and sell. Didn’t know if putting it in the AI or crypto section this week.

Tiramisù 😋

The sweet part of the newsletter: fun news from the crazy world of tech.

1. New OpenAI job
2. We had a meme design competition at AI Academy to promote AI Career Compass and this is one of the things we came up with, hope you like it.

You reached the end of this edition 😢

I’ll talk to you next week.

Ciao 👋

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