Episodes
Hey everyone, Alex here!
Can you believe it's already end of May? And that 2 huge AI companies conferences are behind us (Google IO, MSFT Build) and Apple's WWDC is just ahead in 10 days! Exciting!
I was really looking forward to today's show, had quite a few guests today, I'll add all their socials below the TL;DR so please give them a follow and if you're only in reading mode of the newsletter, why don't you give the podcast a try π It's impossible for me to add the density of knowledge...
Published 05/31/24
Hello hello everyone, this is Alex, typing these words from beautiful Seattle (really, it only rained once while I was here!) where I'm attending Microsoft biggest developer conference BUILD.
This week we saw OpenAI get in the news from multiple angles, none of them positive and Microsoft clapped back at Google from last week with tons of new AI product announcements (CoPilot vs Gemini) and a few new PCs with NPU (Neural Processing Chips) that run alongside CPU/GPU combo we're familiar with....
Published 05/23/24
Wow, holy s**t, insane, overwhelming, incredible, the future is here!, "still not there", there are many more words to describe this past week. (TL;DR at the end of the blogpost)
I had a feeling it's going to be a big week, and the companies did NOT disappoint, so this is going to be a very big newsletter as well.
As you may have read last week, I was very lucky to be in San Francisco the weekend before Google IO, to co-host a hackathon with Meta LLama-3 team, and it was a blast, I will add...
Published 05/17/24
Hey π (show notes and links a bit below)
This week has been a great AI week, however, it does feel like a bit "quiet before the storm" with Google I/O on Tuesday next week (which I'll be covering from the ground in Shoreline!) and rumors that OpenAI is not just going to let Google have all the spotlight!
Early this week, we got 2 new models on LMsys, im-a-good-gpt2-chatbot and im-also-a-good-gpt2-chatbot, and we've now confirmed that they are from OpenAI, and folks have been testing them with...
Published 05/10/24
Hey π Look it May or May not be the first AI newsletter you get in May, but it's for sure going to be a very information dense one. As we had an amazing conversation on the live recording today, over 1K folks joined to listen to the first May updates from ThursdAI.
As you May know by now, I just love giving the stage to folks who are the creators of the actual news I get to cover from week to week, and this week, we had again, 2 of those conversations.
First we chatted with Piotr Padlewski...
Published 05/03/24
Hey hey folks, happy ThursdAI π
Not a lot of house-keeping here, just a reminder that if you're listening or reading from Europe, our European fullyconnected.com conference is happening in May 15 in London, and you're more than welcome to join us there. I will have quite a few event updates in the upcoming show as well.
Besides this, this week has been a very exciting one for smaller models, as Microsoft teased and than released Phi-3 with MIT license, a tiny model that can run on most...
Published 04/26/24
Happy LLama 3 day folks! After a lot of rumors, speculations, and apparently pressure from the big Zuck himself, we finally can call April 18th, 2024, LLaMa 3 day!
I am writing this, from a lobby of the Mariott hotel in SF, where our annual conference is happening called Fully Connected, and I recorded today's episode from my hotel room. I really wanna shout out how awesome it was to meet folks who are listeners of the ThursdAI pod and newsletter subscribers, participate in the events, and...
Published 04/19/24
this week was absolutely bonkers. For starters, for the first time ever, we got an Open Weights model (Command R+) to jump over GPT-4 in human rankings on LMsys, this is huge!
Then on Tuesday, it seems that all the companies just wanted to one up one another, first Gemini 1.5 released with updates, made it available in 180 countries, added audio mode + tons of API improvements and system prompts, then less than an hour later, OpenAI has given us a "majorly improved" GPT-4 Turbo version...
Published 04/12/24
Happy first ThursdAI of April folks, did you have fun on April Fools? π I hope you did, I made a poll on my feed and 70% did not participate in April Fools, which makes me a bit sad!
Well all-right, time to dive into the news of this week, and of course there are TONS of news, but I want to start with our own breaking news! That's right, we at Weights & Biases have breaking new of our own today, we've launched our new product today called Weave!
Weave is our new toolkit to track,...
Published 04/05/24
Hey everyone, this is Alex and can you believe that we're almost done with Q1 2024? March 2024 was kind of crazy of course, so I'm of course excited to see what April brings (besides Weights & Biases conference in SF called Fully Connected, which I encourage you to attend and say Hi to me and the team!)
This week we have tons of exciting stuff on the leaderboards, say hello to the new best AI in the world Opus (+ some other surprises), in the open source we had new MoEs (one from...
Published 03/28/24
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 β Microsoft move, to Apple Gemini rumors, to Nvidia GTC conference,...
Published 03/22/24
"...Happy birthday dear ThursdAIiiiiiiii, happy birthday to youuuuuu π"
What a day! Today is Ο-day (March 14th), 2024. For some reason it's important, not only because it's GPT-4 anniversary, or Claude 1 anniversary, or even that Starship flew to space, but also π₯ it's ThursdAI BirthdAI π
Yeah, you heard that right, last year following GPT-4 release, I hopped into a twitter space with a few friends, and started chatting about AI, and while some friends came and went, I never stopped, in...
Published 03/15/24
Hello hello everyone, happy spring! Can you believe it? It's already spring!
We have tons of AI news for you to cover, starting with the most impactful one, did you already use Claude 3? Anthropic decided to celebrate Claude 1's birthday early (which btw is also ThursdAI's birthday and GPT4 release date, March 14th, 2023) and gave us 3 new Clauds! Opus, Sonnet and Haiku.
TL;DR of all topics covered:
* Big CO LLMs + APIs
* π₯ Anthropic releases Claude Opus, Sonnet, Haiku (Announcement, try...
Published 03/08/24
Happy leap year day everyone, very excited to bring you a special once-in-a-4 year edition of ThursdAI π
(Today is also Dune 2 day (am going to see the movie right after I write these here words) and well.. to some folks, this is the bull market βΏ days as well. So congrats to all who weathered the bear market!)
This week we had another great show, with many updates, and a deep dive, and again, I was able to cover most of the news AND bring you a little bit of a deep dive into a very...
Published 03/01/24
Hey, this is Alex,
Ok let's start with the big news, holy crap this week was a breakthrough week for speed!
We had both Groq explode in popularity, and ByteDance release an updated SDXL model called Lightning, able to generate full blown SDXL 1024 images in 300ms.
I've been excited about seeing what real time LLM/Diffusion can bring, and with both of these news release the same week, I just had to go and test them out together:
Additionally, we had Google step into a big open weights role,...
Published 02/23/24
Holy SH*T,
These two words have been said on this episode multiple times, way more than ever before I want to say, and it's because we got 2 incredible exciting breaking news announcements in a very very short amount of time (in the span of 3 hours) and the OpenAI announcement came as we were recording the space, so you'll get to hear a live reaction of ours to this insanity.
We also had 3 deep-dives, which I am posting on this weeks episode, we chatted with Yi Tay and Max Bane from Reka,...
Published 02/16/24
Hihi, this is Alex, from Weights & Biases, coming to you live, from Yosemite! Well, actually Iβm writing these words from a fake virtual yosemite that appears above my kitchen counter as Iβm not a Vision Pro user and I will force myself to work inside this thing and tell you if itβs worth it. I will also be on the lookout on anything AI related in this new spatial computing paradigm, like THIS for example!
But back to rfeality for a second, we had quite the show today! We had the awesome...
Published 02/09/24
Hello hello everyone, welcome to another special episode (some podcasts call them just.. episodes I guess, but here you get AI news every ThurdsdAI, and on Sunday you get the deeper dives)
BTW, I'm writing these words, looking at a 300 inch monitor that's hovering above my usual workstation in the Apple Vision Pro, and while this is an AI newsletter, and I've yet to find a connecting link (there's like 3 AI apps in there right now, one fairly boring chatbot, and Siri... don't get me started...
Published 02/05/24
TL;DR of all topics covered + Show notes
* Open Source LLMs
* Meta releases Code-LLama 70B - 67.8% HumanEval (Announcement, HF instruct version, HuggingChat, Perplexity)
* Together added function calling + JSON mode to Mixtral, Mistral and CodeLLama
* RWKV (non transformer based) Eagle-7B - (Announcement, Demo, Yam's Thread)
* Someone leaks Miqu, Mistral confirms it's an old version of their model
* Olmo from Allen Institute - fully open source 7B model (Data, Weights, Checkpoints, Training...
Published 02/02/24
Hey everyone, we have an exciting interview today with Maxime Labonne.
Maxime is a senior Machine Learning Scientist at JPMorgan, the author of Hands on GNNs book and his own ML Blog, creator of LazyMergeKit (which we cover on the pod) and holds a PHD in Artificial Intelligence from the Institut Polytechnique de Paris.
Maxime has been mentioned on ThursdAI a couple of times before, as he released the first Phi mixture-of-experts, and has previously finetuned OpenHermes using DPO techniques...
Published 01/28/24
What A SHOW folks, I almost don't want to write anything in the newsletter to MAKE you listen haha but I will I know many of you don't like listening to be babble.
But if you chose one episode to listen to instead of just skimming the show-notes, make it this one.
We've had 2 deep dives, one into the exciting world of multi-modalilty, we chatted with the creator of Moondream1, Vik and the co-founders of Prophetic, Wes and Eric about their EEG/fMRI multimodal transformer (that's right!) and...
Published 01/26/24
π Hey there, been quite a week, started slow and whoah, the last two days were jam-packed with news, I was able to barely keep up! But thankfully, the motto of ThursdAI is, we stay up to date so you donβt have to!
We had a milestone, 1.1K listeners tuned into the live show recording, itβs quite the number, and Iβm humbled to present the conversation and updates to that many people, if youβre reading this but never joined live, welcome! Weβre going live every week on ThursdAI, 8:30AM pacific...
Published 01/19/24
ThursdAI - Sunday special deep dive, interviews with Joao, and Jon, AI agent Crews and Bagel Merges.
Happy Sunday dear reader,
As you know by now, ThursdAI pod is not a standard interview based podcast, we don't focus on a 1:1 guest/host conversation, but from time to time we do! And this week I was very lucky to have one invited guest and one surprise guest, and I'm very happy to bring you both these conversations today.
Get your Crew together - interview with JoΓ£o Moura, creator of...
Published 01/15/24
Hey hey everyone, how are you this fine ThursdAI? π Iβm gud thanks for asking!
Iβm continuing my experiment of spilling the beans, and telling you about everything we talked about in advance, both on the pod and in the newsletter, so let me know if this is the right way to go or not, for the busy ones it seems that it is. If you donβt have an hour 15, hereβs a short video recap of everything we chatted about:
ThursdAI - Jan 11 2024 TL;DR
TL;DR of all topics covered + Show notes
* Open Source...
Published 01/12/24
Hereβs a TL;DR and show notes links
* Open Source LLMs
* New WizardCoder 33B V1.1 - 79% on HumanEval (X, HF)
* Tekniums Hermes 2 on SOLAR 10.7B (X, HF)
* Microsoft - E5 SOTA text embeddings w/ Mistral (X, HF, Paper, Yams Thread)
* Big CO LLMs + APIs
* Samsung is about to announce some AI stuff
* OpenAI GPT store to come next week
* Perplexity announces a $73.6 Series B round
* Vision
* Alibaba - QWEN-VL PLUS was updated to 14B (X, Demo)
* OCU SeeAct - GPT4V as a generalist web agent if...
Published 01/05/24