AI's next biggest challenge is energy

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Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

👉 OpenAI o3 model consumes crazy amounts of energy

👉 AI hallucination is used for treating cancer

👉 Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, is getting its own iOS app

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Read time: 4.7 minutes

What’s going on: OpenAI has introduced its new AI model, o3, which shows impressive improvements over its predecessor, o1. The o3 model scored 87.5% on a tough test called ARC-AGI, which measures general intelligence, surpassing the human benchmark of 85%. It also excelled in math, achieving a score of 25% on a difficult math test where previous models scored only 2% or less. However, o3 consumes too much energy.

What does it mean: This suggests that AI is still advancing and not hitting a limit as some had feared. But, the costs of building new AI models are rising exponentially.

More details: The success of o3 comes at a high cost. It requires much more computing power than earlier models (each o3 task consumes about 1,785 kWh of energy, or 5 full tanks of gas). For example, the high-performing version of o3 needed over $10,000 worth of resources for some tasks.

What’s going on: AI is often criticized for making up information, which is called "hallucinating." This can cause problems in many areas (like spreading misinformation), but scientists are finding that these AI hallucinations can actually be very useful. They are using AI to explore new ideas in fields like medicine and weather prediction. AI has helped scientists like David Baker of the University of Washington (winner of 2024’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry) design new medicines, understand how diseases work, and even invent new ways to fight cancer.

What does it mean: By allowing AI to generate unexpected ideas (like generating 100s of artificial protein structures), scientists can explore possibilities they might not have considered otherwise. Moreover, generating that many ideas would have taken them years (if not decades), but with state-of-the-art AI tools, it is possible to hallucinate thousands of ideas in a couple of minutes.

More details: 

• 100 patents: Number of patents obtained by Dr. Baker's lab, many for medical care, all assisted by AI.

• 10 million: Number of brand-new proteins designed by Dr. Baker's lab.

• 129: Number of entirely new proteins created by Dr. Baker's team in their 2021 experiment which eventually led him to win 2024’s Nobel Prize.

💰 Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has raised another $6 billion. The new cash brings xAI’s total raised to $12 billion. xAI is aiming for a $50 billion valuation doubling its valuation of 6 months prior.

📃 Google posted a new post on their official blog with the title “60 of our biggest AI announcements in 2024“. Read what Google was up to this year, including Gemini launches, NotebookLM updates and more.

📱 xAI, is testing out a standalone iOS app for its chatbot, Grok, which was available only to X users until now. The grok iOS beta app is currently available to Australian users and users in some other countries and can access real-time data from the web and X.

🩺🦠 Wadhwani AI, Indian non-profit AI institute, has developed a suite of AI-powered tools to assist health workers detect undiagnosed Tuberculosis cases, decide on treatment plans, and prevent people from dropping out of treatment.

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Summarizing an article

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OpenAI - Data Scientist, Product

Anthropic - Software Engineer

Nvidia - Senior Software Engineer - Conversational AI

Palantir - Forward Deployed AI Engineer

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