Machine Learning Research
The transformer architecture is astonishingly powerful but notoriously slow. Researchers have developed numerous tweaks to accelerate it — enough to warrant a look at how these alternatives work, their strengths, and their weaknesses.
Data Points
This week's top AI news and research stories featured OpenAI's leadership turmoil, the AI-filled Argentinian elections, a cloud-computing company that will offer GPUs at competitive prices, and new research that aims to accelerate the transformer architecture.
Hardware
A new cloud-computing company promises to provide scarce AI processing power to startups and researchers. Voltage Park, a nonprofit north of Silicon Valley, will offer processing power from 24,000 top-of-the-line Nvidia H100 graphics processing units (GPUs)...
Tech & Society
Argentina’s recent presidential race was a battleground of AI-generated imagery. Candidates Javier Milei and Sergio Massa flooded social media with generated images of themselves and each other, The New York Times reported. On Sunday, Milei won the election’s final round.
Business
OpenAI abruptly fired and rehired its CEO Sam Altman, capping five days of chaos within the company. On Friday, the OpenAI board of directors — whose membership since has changed — ousted CEO and co-founder Sam Altman from his leadership position and his seat on the board.
Letters
I’m delighted that the crisis at OpenAI, which you can read about below, seems to have been resolved with an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return as CEO after his sudden firing last week.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch - AI News & Insights: This week, I’m speaking at the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings in San Francisco, where leaders in business and government have convened to discuss AI and other topics.
Machine Learning Research
Online sorting algorithms run trillions of times a day to organize lists according to users’ interests. New work found faster alternatives. Daniel J. Mankowitz and colleagues at Google developed AlphaDev, a system that learned to generate algorithms that sort three...
Business
Weeks after it announced a huge partnership deal with Amazon, Anthropic doubled down on its earlier relationship with Alphabet.
Tech & Society
ChatGPT suffered a cyberattack apparently tied to the Kremlin. A ChatGPT outage on November 8 most likely was caused by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, OpenAI revealed.
Tech & Society
The longest actors’ strike in Hollywood history ended as actors and studios reached an accord on the use of generative AI in making movies.
Letters
This week, I’m speaking at the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings in San Francisco, where leaders in business and government have convened to discuss AI and other topics.