March madness... I know for some folks this means basketball or something, but since this is an AI newsletter, and this March was indeed mad, I am claiming it. This week seemed madder from one day to another. And the ai announcements kept coming throughout the recording, I used the "breaking news" button a few times during this week's show! This week we covered tons of corporate AI drama in the BigCO segment, from Inflection → Microsoft move, to Apple Gemini rumors, to Nvidia GTC conference, but we also had a bunch of OpenSource to go over, including an exciting glimpse into the O1 from Open Interpreter, which the founder Killian (of the ThursdAI mafia haha) joined to chat about briefly after an all nighter release push! Another returning FOTP (friend of the pod) Matt Shumer joined as we did a little deep dive into prompting Claude, and how he went viral (seems to happen a lot to Matt) with a project of his to make Claude write prompts for itself! Definitely worth a listen, it's the first segment post the TL'DR on the pod 👂 this week. Btw, did you already check out fully connected? It's the annual Weights & Biases conference in SF next month, and tickets are flying, I'm going to be there and actually do a workshop one day prior, would love to invite you to join as well! TL;DR of all topics covered: * Open Source LLMs * Xai open sources Grok (X, Blog, HF, Github) * Sakana AI releases a new paper + 2 JP merged SOTA models (X, Paper, Blogpost) * Open Interpreter announces O1 - the Linux for AI devices (X, Project) * LM studio new modes (X) * Big CO LLMs + APIs * Nvidia GTC conference - Blackwell platform, NIMs and Gr00t robotics * Jensen interviewed transformers authors * Apple rumored to look at a deal including GEMINI * Apple releases a multi modal MM1 paper (X) * Inflection founders leave to head Microsoft AI * Google opens up Gemini 1.5 with 1M context access to all (X) * Vision & Video * NVIDIA + MIT release VILA (13B, 7B and 2.7B) (X, HuggingFace, Paper) * This week's BUZZ * Fully Connected is coming, sign up here, get tickets, join us. * I'm running a workshop in SF a day before on improving your LLM step by step including exciting announcements (same link) * Voice & Audio * Suno V3 launched officially (X, Blog, Play with it) * Distil-whisper-v3 - more accurate, and 6x version of whisper large (X, Code) * AI Art & Diffusion & 3D * Stability presents SD3 TURBO - 4 steps to get same high quality generation (Paper) * Stability open sources Stable Video 3D (Blog, Models) * Tools & Others * Neuralink interview with the first Human NeuroNaut - Nolan (X) * Lex & Sama released a podcast, barely any news * Matt Shumer releases his Claude Prompt engineer (X, Metaprompt, Matt's Collab) Open Source LLMs Xai open sources Grok (X, Blog, HF, Github) Well, Space Uncle Elon has a huge week, from sending starship into orbit successfully to open sourcing an LLM for us, and a huge one at that. Grok is a 314B parameter behemoth, with a mixture of experts architecture of 80B per expert and two active at the same time. It's released as a base model, and maybe that's why it was received with initial excitement but then, nobody in the GPU poor compute category has the ability to run/finetune it! In terms of performance, it barely beats out Mixtral, while being almost 10x larger, which just shows that.... data is important, maybe more important than Github stars as Arthur (CEO Mistral) helpfully pointed out to Igor (founder of Xai). Still big props to the team for training and releasing this model under apache 2 license. Sakana AI launches 2 new models using evolutionary algo merging Yeah, that's a mouthful, i've been following Hardmaru (David Ha) for a while before he joined Sakana, and only when the founder (and a co-author on transformers) LLion Jones talked about it on stage at GTC the things connected. Sakana means fish in Japanese, and the idea behind this lab is to create things with using nature like evolutionary algorit