😺 Safe Superintelligence

PLUS: I invested in Nvidia in 2018...and then sold :(

Welcome, humans.

On Tuesday, Nvidia officially surpassed Microsoft to become the most valuable company in the WORLD, with a market cap of $3.34T. That’s T for Trillion. That’s about the same as the entire GDP of India, home to 1.42B people.

Fun fact: I first bought Nvidia stock in 2018. It would be a humble brag if I hadn’t sold it less than a year later. I quickly realized I’m a better writer than a stock trader, and hopefully my future blood pressure will thank me!

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

Ex-OpenAI cofounder/CTO Ilya Sutskever is starting a new company.
Dell is building an AI factory for xAI’s Elon Musk’s Grok models.
ElevenLabs released a tool that creates sound effects for videos.
AI companies are tightening their hiring process to avoid Chinese espionage.

Ilya is back and bold.

Ilya Sutskever is kind of a big deal in AI, to put it lightly.

Part of OpenAI’s founding team, Ilya was Chief Data Scientist (read: genius) before being part of the coup that fired Sam Altman.

The details of the saga are still under wraps, but part of the disagreement likely stemmed from Ilya thinking not enough resources were dedicated to ensuring that OpenAI’s products were really safe.
Since then, we haven’t heard much from him, prompting endless “Where’s Ilya?” and “What did Ilya see?” memes on X and Reddit.

Yesterday, Ilya announced that he’s forming a new initiative called Safe Superintelligence.

If AGI = AI that can perform a wide range of tasks at our level, then Superintelligence = an even more advanced AI that surpasses human capabilities in all areas.

A sneak peak at future content :)

No one knows when this superintelligence will arrive, but when it does, it will have the power to impact humanity in massively positive or negative ways.

Safe Superintelligence (SSI) is being formed to, you guessed it, ensure that impact is positive.

“At the most basic level, safe superintelligence should have the property that it will not harm humanity at a large scale. After this, we can say we would like it to be a force for good.”

Bloomberg

Why it matters: We know little about SSI other than that it’s a research lab reminiscent of OpenAI’s early days, with the singular focus of building superintelligence with “no distraction by management overhead or product cycles.”

If the last part of that sentence sounded like a dig at OpenAI to you, you’re not alone. In part, the announcement post and Ilya’s Bloomberg interview read as, “We’re the ones who are actually going to build safe AI, not AI with a hint of ‘trust and safety’ like the rest of Big Tech.”

And while we believe SSI when it says its “business model means safety, security, and progress”, we wouldn’t be shocked to see a $1B+ fundraising announcement soon.

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Around the Horn.

Michael Dell announced a Dell AI factory with Nvidia that’ll power xAI’s Grok models.
AI companies, including Google and OpenAI, are intensifying their screening of new hires due to the threat of Chinese espionage.
Meanwhile, some Chinese AI startups are racing to launch their products in the US.

Treats To Try.

ElevenLabs Video to Sound Effects creates sound effects for videos that you upload, similar to Google DeepMind’s V2A.
Decagon builds AI customer support agents for enterprises (we’ve heard great things!) and just raised $35M.
Nemotron-4-340B is an open-source model from Nvidia that just passed Llama-3-70B on the LMSYS leaderboard.
Get your product in front of 450,000+ AI enthusiasts by filling out this form.
Notion AI connectors let you ask any question about apps you connect with Notion AI, like Google Drive.
Astrocade AI is a platform for creating games and interactive experiences using AI (raised $12M).

Thursday Trivia.

Some of the demos Luma AI is sharing from its AI video generator Dream Machine are absolutely blowing us away. Like *one* of these mansions we’re going to buy when The Neuron hits 1M subscribers. :)

One glance, everyone knows the rules: one image is shot from Luma, and the other is real.

Which is which?