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Now, since today is Halloween: here’s the scariest thing we found on the internet this week…

Why yes, it’s *~exactly~* what you think.

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

• Big tech’s had a big week of revenue wins…we share what that means.
• Meta’s AI chatbot hit 500M monthly active users.
• Musk asked X users for medical scans to train Grok.
• AI now writes 25% of Google’s new code.

Advertise in The Neuron here.

Big Tech's AI gold rush gets real(ly) expensive.

Looks like big tech’s having a good quarter, revenue wise. Google Cloud's crushing it, Microsoft’s mid, and Meta's making bank—aaand Wall Street just got a reality check on what all this AI progress actually costs.

Deja vu, anyone? I mean, is this going to happen every earnings call for the foreseeable future?! Until the bubble pops, anyway…

The reason this keeps happening is because there’s two sides of the AI boom: killer revenue growth and killer infrastructure costs. Let’s call it the good, the bad, and the ugly future of AI:  

The good:

• Google reported a huge 35% jump in Google Cloud revenue—its fastest growth in two years and way above Wall Street's expected 29%.
• Meta had a stellar quarter too, with revenue up 19%.
• Microsoft’s revenue grew 16% and its Azure cloud growth hit 33%.

Source: Reuters

The bad:

• Meta's stock dropped 2.9% after hours.
• Microsoft’s stock also fell by 3.6%.
• Azure growth will likely slow next quarter.

Why? Because building AI infrastructure is getting really expensive. Which brings us to…

The ugly (future):

• Microsoft now spends more in one quarter on AI infrastructure than it used to spend in an entire year (pre-2020)—and same with Meta (pre-2017).
• Both companies warned of “significant acceleration” in AI costs for 2025…
• Microsoft ALREADY has $108B in future commitments for AI data centers.

That’s like, a lot of money guys!

That’s how the companies are doing—now here’s how the models are doing. Based on the rankings, leaderboards, and personal anecdotes, here’s what we’ve found:

• Coding: It’s neck and neck between Claude 3.5 Sonnet and o1, but Claude’s ahead.
• Data Analysis: Gemini 1.5 Pro (2M token context window)
• Content: Claude 3.5 Sonnet (hands down best creative writer)
• Vision: GPT-4o (best at complex visual tasks)
• Speed: Llama 3.2 1B (555 tokens/second)
• Budget: Ministral 3B ($0.04/million tokens)
• Math, science, and complicated reasoning: o1-mini, and then o1-preview.

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Want to banish your cloud AI fears?

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Treats To Try.

1. *Calling all mission-first founders: Turn your early tech solution into a powerful tool for driving economic mobility with Robin Hood's BRL Catalyst accelerator. Get $90K in funding, expert coaching, and feedback from New Yorkers with lived experience. Join 51 alumni who've helped 5M+ Americans build better lives. Apply today.
2. OmniGen helps you create and edit images specifically to maintain consistent character appearances across multiple generations (unlike other image models).
3. Prelude sends login verification codes for less by selecting the cheapest SMS provider in each country.
4. Wand turns your sketches into finished artwork instantly on your iPhone or iPad (iOS only rn).
5. Bolt.new turns text descriptions into web apps without code—describe what you want, and watch your app come to life in your browser (like GitHub Spark).
6. Jobright matches you with relevant jobs, tailors your resume, and finds insider connections at target companies while providing 24/7 career coaching support.
7. Renamify scans your photo library and automatically renames files so you can actually find them (just launched).

See our top 51 AI Tools for Business here!

*This is sponsored content. Advertise in The Neuron here.

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Here’s why we at The Neuron like Attention…

Need an AI notetaker for your sales calls?

Attention listens to your calls in real-time and helps you find relevant data when it’s over. Once it’s done, you can go back and watch the relevant sections (like above, feat. Noah!).

Attention can do much more, too—book a demo and try it out for yourself here.

Around the Horn.

Introducing Wonder Animation: Powered by Video to 3D Scene Technology

• Meta AI now has 500 monthly active users, almost a year after it launched the AI assistant last fall.
• Elon Musk put out a call on X for people to share their x-ray, PET, MRI, and other medical images with his Grok AI for analysis, claiming “this is still already stage, but it is already quite accurate, and will become extremely good.”
• Toyota will invest $3.3B (alongside NTT) to develop automotive AI software that can achieve Level 4 or 5 autonomy (actual full self driving) by 2028.
• Google CEO Sundar Pichai said 25% of Google’s new code is written by AI…and we’re not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.

Thursday Trivia

One is a still from a real Hollywood creature flick, and one is AI. Which is which? (vote below!)

A.

B.

Which is AI?

The answer is below, but place your vote to see how your guess compares to everyone else (no cheating now!)

A.

B.

Here are the results from last week’s trivia:

The lemurs were a little more obvious than the mall photos.

A Cat's Commentary.