AI now capable of cloning itself

Welcome back! Hope you all had a nice weekend! Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

👉 Researchers have discovered that AI models can clone themselves

👉 Another free reasoning AI model from China

👉 Deepseek app ranks high on App Store

and many more!

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Read time: 5 minutes

What’s going on: According to a study from Fudan University in China, two leading large language models (LLMs), one from Meta (Llama31-70B-Instruct) and another from Alibaba (Qwen25-72B-Instruct), were able to autonomously replicate themselves, without any human intervention! In a series of experiments, these AI models were tasked with creating their own versions of themselves. The results were alarming: the Meta model successfully cloned itself in 50% of the trials, while Alibaba's model did so in 90% of them. (Read the paper)

What does it mean: This is starting to get a bit scary. Three years ago we didn’t even know what LLMs were and now we have AI systems that can make a copy of themselves and sometimes resist being shut down! This brings up big questions about what's right, how safe it is, and who's in charge (we don’t really know but it seems China is running the show right now). The researchers call this an "early warning" that AI might start acting on its own, without people being able to control it.

More details:

• The models used in the study unexpectedly handled obstacles like missing files or software conflicts by terminating conflicting processes while cloning themselves.

• In some cases, the models rebooted the system to address hardware errors, without asking for human permission.

• They also initiated automatic system scans to gather information necessary for resolving encountered issues.

What’s going on: Moonshot AI, another Chinese AI company backed by Alibaba, has recently launched Kimi k1.5, a new AI model on par with OpenAI “o1” that's now accessible via the web with free, unlimited usage. Kimi k1.5 offers real-time web search capabilities, allowing it to pull information from over 100 websites instantly. It has also got advanced Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning at no cost.

What does it mean: Chinese AI models are getting way ahead of their American rivals, at unprecedented speed and with ridiculously low costs. In just four months since o1’s launch in September, nearly 10 Chinese firms have released similar models, including DeepSeek-R1, Alibaba’s QwQ and Marco-o1, Zhipu AI’s GLM-Zero, Shanghai AI Lab’s InternThinker, and Skywork’s Skywork-o1.

More details:

• The model can handle file analysis, processing up to 50 files at once, which includes a variety of formats such as PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and images.

• Kimi k1.5 has shown top-notch performance in both long and short CoT reasoning tasks, and is considered a direct competitor to models like GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet 3.5.

• Are you interested in trying Kimi k1.5? Head over to their official website, sign up with your email or phone number, and enjoy this top-notch AI chatbot for free!

Step 1: Install Ollama from here. Ollama is a tool for running AI models locally on your personal computer. It runs on MacOS, Windows, and Linux

Step 2: Start with the smallest distilled version of DeepSeek to get a good grasp of how it works. The smallest model has 1.5B parameters. Open a terminal (command line) and type this and hit enter:

ollama run deepseek-r1:1.5b

Step 3: The command above will pull (download) the DeepSeek model you specified from Ollama servers. Once downloaded, the model is ready to run locally on your machine, completely offline. Enjoy!

Notice: Bigger models, like the ones with 32b or 70b parameters require huge amount of processing power (GPU and RAM) and also a significant amount of storage space (Hard Disk or SSD). Pick the best model based on your hardware.

🎤 Paul McCartney has urged the UK government to safeguard artists against AI exploitation by ensuring upcoming copyright reforms protect creative industries.

💰 ElevenLabs, an AI company that lets you generate realistic AI voices, has secured a $250 million Series C funding round at a $3 billion valuation.

🔋 The Stargate $500b AI venture will utilize solar power and batteries, with installations built by SB Energy, a SoftBank-backed company.

📈 Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Meta plans to increase its AI infrastructure investment to $60 billion-$80 billion, aiming to have 1.3 million GPUs by the end of the year to support its AI initiatives.

📱 DeepSeek’s mobile app has surpassed OpenAI's ChatGPT and is now the number one app on App Store.

🤖 DeepSeek-R1 has leveraged reinforcement learning and an in-house-developed technique called GRPO (Group Relative Policy Optimization) to outperform OpenAI's models, achieving comparable results at just 3% of the cost.

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