Open AI, Apple and Microsoft: When Will Open Source AI Be Compatible with Open Source? Commentary on Pesenti, Mistral, and Llama 3

Meta isn’t the only tech giant releasing open source AI. Apple and Microsoft released language models this week that can be run on a phone.

“The release last Friday really feels like a game-changer,” Pesenti says. His new company, Sizzle, an AI tutor, currently uses GPT-4 and other AI models, both closed and open, to craft problem sets and curricula for students. his engineers are evaluating if llama 3 could replace openai’s model

A shift in the balance of power in AI may be possible, thanks to the Sizzle story. If open source is competitive, developers and entrepreneurs will stop paying for access to the latest OpenAI model, or use more powerful open source models like Llama 3, so that they can build even more innovative products.

Open models appear to be coming down. The final stages of a language model that was briefly the best open one around was seen by me a couple of weeks ago at Databricks. The crown is now llama 3’s. The larger model is approaching the quality of GPT 4, which will level out the playing field between open and closed-source LLMs.

Running Llama 3 on a cloud platform costs less than accessing GPT-4 through an app. He adds that Llama 3 can be configured to respond to queries extremely quickly, a key consideration for developers at companies like his that rely on tapping into models from different providers. “It’s an equation between latency, cost, and accuracy,” he says.

Llama 3 also showcases the potential for making AI models smaller, so they can be run on less powerful hardware. A model with 70 billion parameters was released by Meta, as well as a model with 8 billion parameters. The smaller model is compact enough to run on a laptop but is remarkably capable, at least in WIRED’s testing.

Two days before Meta’s release, Mistral, a French AI company founded by alumni of Pesenti’s team at Meta, open sourced Mixtral 8x22B. A mixture of experts has 141 billion parameters, but only 39 billion of them at any one time. The model is more capable than some larger models because of the trick.

All this openness is not altruistic. The CEO of Meta believes that by opening up its artificial intelligence models the company will benefit from lowering the cost of technologies it uses for itself. He left unsaid that it may also be to Meta’s benefit to prevent OpenAI, Microsoft, or Google from dominating the field.

Alphabet’s Pichai’s had milestones to boast about too. In a call with analysts, he told them that over one million developers are using the generative AI tools on the cloud and 60 percent of the generative artificial intelligence startups backed by investors are located on the cloud. The ad campaigns of advertising clients are being increased byrative artificial intelligence.

The companies reported sales and profit that were better than expected. And the stock prices of both soared on the results, with Alphabet further buoyed by its new plans to buy back more shares and issue its first-ever dividend.

Microsoft Is Already Earning More Using Generative AI: A Call with Technicolor Analyser David Nadella

In a call with financial analysts on Thursday, Nadella touted that Microsoft now has 1.8 million customers for GitHub Copilot, a generative AI tool that helps engineers write software code. The number of customers has increased from 1.3 million a quarter ago.

Among Fortune 500 companies, 60 percent are using Copilot for Microsoft Office 365, a virtual assistant that uses generative AI to help workers write emails and documents, and 65 percent are using a Microsoft Azure Cloud service that enables them to access generative AI software from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. “Azure has become a port of call for pretty much anybody who is doing an AI project,” Nadella said. Microsoft invested $13billion in Openai, which has certainly helped win some clients.

The buzz of interest in AI services helped drive revenue for Microsoft’s biggest unit–cloud services–up by seven percentage points compared to a year ago, and Microsoft’s overall sales rose 17 percent to nearly $62 billion. It also gained cloud market share, Nadella added. There were over one hundred million cloud deals landed by Microsoft in the third quarter of this year, an 80 percent increase from the same period a year ago.

But Pichai didn’t say how many signups Google had drawn to Gemini Advanced, a $20 per month subscription plan announced in February that provides access to the company’s most advanced AI chatbot.

Although tests show that users exposed to generative Artificial Intelligence are doing more searches, it is possible that the underlying technology is not as efficient as it could be.

He expressed little concern on either front. “We are very, very confident we can manage the cost of how to serve these queries,” he said. I am confident that we can manage the monetization transition here as well. It will play out over time.”

Source: Google Thinks It Can Cash In on Generative AI. Microsoft Already Has

Microsoft is Taking a $Delta$ Seriously Towards More Scalable Infrastructure, But Not as Fast as Microsoft Earlier This Year

It spent about the same about the same amount—-around $12 billion—as Microsoft investing in infrastructure like servers and datacenters last quarter. The results and comments suggest that Microsoft is closer to delivering a payoff.