The Fastest LLM Ever (and It's Not Gemini or ChatGPT)

Plus SoftBank’s $100B AI Chip Plan

Author

Nathaniel Whittemore
February 20, 2024

The AI Breakdown First Five - Tuesday February 20, 2024

Today on the First Five:

  • 5. A New AI Chip That Uses Light Instead of Electricity

  • 4. Elon and Meta’s Yann LeCun Not Impressed with Sora

  • 3. Reddit Sells Training Data for $60M

  • 2. SoftBank’s $100B AI Chip Plan

  • 1. Groq: the Fastest LLM Yet?

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5. A New AI Chip That Uses Light Instead of Electricity

The race is on to figure out how to unlock more compute. Some (like Sam Altman) are trying to pour money on the problem. Others are trying scientific solutions, such as UPenn engineers who have developed a chip that uses light waves rather than electricity to power AI chips.

4. Elon and Meta’s Yann LeCun Not Impressed with Sora

Ever since OpenAI announced Sora, it’s dominated the AI conversation — even when the conversation has been unimpressed. Meta’s Yann LeCun said that if OpenAI’s goal is a world simulator, their approach with Sora is “wasteful and doomed to failure.” Elon said that Tesla’s video generation was better at physics.

3. Reddit Sells Training Data for $60M

Bloomberg reports that Reddit has signed a deal worth $60m/annually for a major AI lab to train its models using Reddit’s data. This happened about 10 months after CEO Steve Huffman announced plans to start charging companies for access to this data.

2. SoftBank’s $100B AI Chip Plan

SoftBank is looking to double down on AI after it’s stake in Arm has continued to grow in value. Founder Masayoshi Son is reportedly exploring a $100B chip venture, code-named Izanagi. At that size, the venture would represent about a fifth of the global seminconductor market.

1. Groq: the Fastest LLM Yet?

If you’ve been on AI Twitter at all over the last couple days, the WHOLE conversation is about the incredibly speedy Groq (which predates Elon’s “Grok” and isn’t happy about Musk using that name). The company is using an entirely new architecture, with big implications.

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