AI Edition - It's AI Time - 73 [26-06-2024]

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 73

Etched raises $120m Series A to build AI chips for transformers

Etched has announced a $120M round led by Primary Venture Partners and Positive Sum Ventures, as well as angel investors including Peter Thiel, Stanley Druckenmiller, and David Siegel. It is working directly with TSMC's Emerging Business Group to produce chips on their state-of-the-art, 4 nanometer node. Its chips can achieve 500K tokens/second. One 8xSohu can replace 160 H100s.

Apple intelligence and AI maximalism

Apple is segmenting its AI approach, differentiating between 'context' and 'world' models, with the latter, such as ChatGPT, being used for open-ended queries but without personal context. OpenAI's position is not highly defensible, given the lack of moats in large language models (LLMs) and the rise of competing models. Apple's strategy suggests a commoditization trend for LLMs that leverages on-device capabilities and private cloud to provide AI features while viewing services like ChatGPT as interchangeable components.

Imbue trains 70B that matches GPT-4

Imbue has trained and released an extremely powerful 70B language model. It uses Imbue's custom optimizer and some great data filtering techniques. The model was trained with zero loss spikes.

EvalAlign for Text-to-Image Evaluation

EvalAlign is a new metric designed to improve the evaluation of text-to-image generative models. Unlike existing metrics, EvalAlign offers fine-grained accuracy and stability. It focuses on image faithfulness and text-image alignment.

Nvidia shares, darling of investors trying to play the AI boom, fall sharply.

The chip design company that sits at the heart of the AI boom has seen almost $500 billion wiped off its market valuation in just three days, the largest ever loss for any company over such a short period. The reason for the decline is unclear, my Fortune colleague Christiaan Hetzner reports, although market watchers speculate that it is profit-taking ahead of Nvidia’s quarterly earnings announcement tomorrow, when it is possible the company might fall short of sky-high expectations. There is also mounting concern that data center spending may not expand as fast as some investors anticipate and in recent days a number of investment banks published reports noting just how insanely high Nvidia’s valuation had become, which might have convinced some investors that it was a good time to bail out of the stock.