The Daily Index — Friday, December 27, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

LEAKED DOCUMENTS SHOW OPENAI HAS A VERY CLEAR DEFINITION OF ‘AGI'

Microsoft and OpenAI's definition of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is 'a system that can generate at least $100 billion in profits'. The companies agreed on the definition in 2023 as part of an agreement which had a clause that stated that OpenAI would stop allowing Microsoft to use any new technology it develops after AGI is achieved. OpenAI and Microsoft have been on diverging paths for some time now. Microsoft needs its own proprietary tech and OpenAI needs more money.

gizmodo.com · 3 min

TLDR AI

GOOGLE GEMINI IS USING CLAUDE TO IMPROVE ITS AI

Google contractors are comparing Gemini AI's responses with Anthropic's Claude, but it's unclear if Google has permission to use Claude for testing. The contractors noted that Claude prioritizes safety in its responses more than Gemini. Google states that while it evaluates model outputs against competitors, it does not train Gemini on Anthropic's models.

techcrunch.com · 3 min

TLDR

DEEPSEEK-V3 IS NOW THE BEST OPEN SOURCE AI MODEL

DeepSeek, a Chinese AI research lab, has released DeepSeek-V3, a Mixture-of-Experts model that features a total of 671B parameters. The model was trained on 14.8 trillion tokens. It has been released on GitHub along with a detailed paper outlining its capabilities. The model outperformed Meta's flagship Llama 3.1 405B parameter model and many other closed-source models on benchmark scores.

analyticsindiamag.com · 3 min

TLDR

CHINA LAUNCHES 1ST SET OF SPACECRAFT FOR PLANNED 13,000-SATELLITE BROADBAND CONSTELLATION

China launched 10 internet satellites on a Long March 5B rocket earlier this month. The satellites entered their predetermined orbits smoothly and the mission was a complete success. They are the first batch for Guowang, a broadband megaconstellation in low earth orbit (LEO) that will eventually consist of nearly 13,000 spacecraft. Guowang will be one of two Chinese versions of SpaceX's Starlink LEO megaconstellation.

space.com · 3 min

TLDR

STARTUPS BEGIN GEOENGINEERING THE SEA

Captura is a company that plans to electrochemically strip carbon dioxide out of the ocean, store or use it, then return the water to the sea, where it will naturally absorb more carbon dioxide from the air. It will start pumping as much of the Pacific ocean as it can in a few months at Hawaii's Keāhole Point. Besides Captura, there are dozens of similar field trials and pilot projects that will start scaling up their facilities in 2025.

spectrum.ieee.org · 11 min

TLDR

THOUGHTS ON THE EVE OF AGI

The release of o3 suggests the next few years are going to be insane. This post details some predictions about how AI will change the world over the next few years. The predictions cover areas such as AI agents, the software engineering industry, science and research, war and societal chaos, what happens if AI goes rogue, and more.

threadreaderapp.com · 12 min

TLDR

WHY GOOGLE BOUGHT CHARACTER AI

Google may have bought Character AI because Character AI had figured out how to run its models without costing a fortune. Character AI was able to serve millions of users without bleeding money. Google is now giving away flash models for free on AI Studio - this wouldn't be possible without figuring out how to make inference really cheap. Pre-training has hit diminishing returns, so companies are shifting toward chain-of-thought prompting and inference-time optimizations.

manassaloi.com · 1 min

TLDR

CHATGPT SEARCH VS. GOOGLE: A DEEP DIVE ANALYSIS OF 62 QUERIES

ChatGPT search is surprisingly competitive when it comes to informational queries, but Google is better at almost all queries except content gap analysis.

searchengineland.com · 27 min

TLDR

EVEN APPLE WASN'T ABLE TO MAKE VR HEADSETS MAINSTREAM IN 2024

While Apple keeps adding cool new software features, there still isn't an immediate, obvious reason to buy a Vision Pro.

theverge.com · 5 min