😺 Ultimate 6-month highlights

Welcome, humans.

6 months. 100,000 subscribers. Thank you all for being a part of this incredible journey with us. Onward and upward!

Today, we’re serving a full rundown of the most significant AI happenings in the last six months. Enjoy! 😸

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Well, Those Were A Crazy 6 Months In AI. Here’s what happened… 📈

Imagine waking up from a coma in July 2023. The two most bafflings things would be:

1. Elon & Zuck agreeing to fight in a cage.
2. Generative Artificial Intelligence.

We can’t squeeze six months of AI updates into 750 words, but here’s the context you need to truly contextualize WTF just happened and why it matters.

The fastest-growing technology, ever

We just took one step to the right. Creds: Wait But Why

First off, congrats on surviving the quickest emergence of any technology in human history. Congrats. You didn’t die.

ChatGPT ignited this boom when it released GPT-3 (translation: Generative Pre-trained Transformer) on November 30, 2022.

The model can generate human-like text/code in seconds, so it naturally reached 100 million users in two months:

The gold rush

Usage = opportunity = money. Within months, big companies hopped on the rocketship racing to embed AI into every part of our lives (read: work):

• Microsoft invested $10 billion into OpenAI, launching AI assistants across 365 and in Windows.
• Google released a 540-parameter AI model called “PaLM” (then PaLM 2) and is rethinking the entire search experience.

BUT, training these models require high-end GPUs and piles of cash, so naturally Nvidia saw an avalanche of demand for its AI chips (which made the stock market go brrrrr).

So big tech has a huge lead, but Silicon Valley hasn’t lost faith in startups: AI funding was 3x higher in the first six months of 2023 than in all of 2022.

Who secured the bag? Mostly application layer startups like Inflection, Anthropic, Midjourney, and more.

So it’s big tech vs. startups vs. … open-source???

Meta’s Facebook’s foundational model LLaMA was leaked in March. Devs went bananas for it, refining new models as good as GPT-3.5 that could run locally on your phone and laptop.

So good that a Google employee said closed-source (aka keep our models private) has “no moat”.

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Now back to our crash course…

AI is everywhere. ⅓ of US adults are already using it and most have heard of it.

The Verge

So what are they using it for?! Some for experimentation: art, poems, and haikus.

And other for work, using it to draft emails, debug code, and transcribe interviews. This area is what we focus on.

We also started seeing AI in our daily lives: viral deepfakes of The Pope & Trump, lawyers citing bogus cases, and way too many thought leaders.

The craziness of it all has raised some important ethical and societal questions, like how we regulate AI and who owns what data.

What’s next? More AI, everywhere you look. More funding, more startups, more tools. And it’ll come fast.

As for us?

We’ve been on the cutting edge every day, sifting through the (way too large amount of) noise. A few highlights:

• 134 newsletters.
• 100,763 subscribers.
• 2,640,193 views.
• 1 sleek new website.
• 27 vetted tool reviews.
• top 5 largest daily AI newsletter worldwide.

And 100% pure fun.

Thanks for sticking with us and spreading the word. Your feedback fuels The Neuron, so keep sending your thoughts and suggestions.

Stay tuned for some major plans in the second half of 2023!

Wrapping up

That's all we have for today! We’ll catch you again on Wednesday - enjoy your July 4th if you celebrate!

See you cool cats on Twitter if you're there: @nonmayorpete & @noahedelman02.