Commentary and a selection of the most important recent news, articles, and papers about AI.
Today’s Brief Commentary
As is often the case, NVIDIA is the center of attention today in the AI world. The company announced Q3 2024 earnings and other financials on Wednesday. The stock was “only” up 94% from a year ago. While this would make most mortals happy, the stock slipped a bit the next day. From news and analysis, I gather this is because their results were merely extraordinary and not supergalactic extraordinary. It’s also not uncommon for stocks to run up before an expected strong result only to drop afterward.
Other links today concern how IBM, AMD, Sam Altman, and startup Sageance are making moves to compete with NVIDIA. Sageance is working on analog processors for AI accelerators. Ignore analog tech for classical and quantum computing at your peril.
While AMD makes semiconductor processors, including CPUs and GPUs, it also provides the open-source ROCm software stack that competes with NVIDIA’s CUDA. CUDA is a fantastic platform that has driven the applications and ecosystem of NVIDIA’s hardware. It will face as much competition as NVIDIA’s chips.
The last linked article discusses whether GenAI is hitting the wall. Are we really getting continued significant improvements as we train on more data and throw more and more processors at problems? Evidently not. Some people who predicted this were loudly labeled as absurd skeptics. I think it’s rather apparent that this would happen if we continued to use the same underlying tech. So, people are looking at new algorithms, hardware accelerators, and architectures, and even when we apply significant computation.
What we will see in GenAI in ten years will look very different from what we have now. Skip past the marketing hype and the tech arrogance about current methods.
AI Chipsets and Infrastructure
Analog AI Startup Aims to Lower the Power of Gen AI | IEEE Spectrum
https://spectrum.ieee.org/analog-ai-2669898661
Author: Samuel K. Moore
(Tuesday, November 19, 2024) “Machine learning chips that use analog circuits instead of digital ones have long promised huge energy savings. But in practice they’ve mostly delivered modest savings, and only for modest-sized neural networks. Silicon Valley startup Sageance says it has the technology to bring the promised power savings to tasks suited for massive generative AI models. The startup claims that its systems will be able to run the large language model Llama 2-70B at one-tenth the power of an Nvidia H100 GPU-based system, at one-twentieth the cost and in one-twentieth the space.”
Altman Raises Funds for Rain AI in Push to Rival Nvidia
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/altman-raises-funds-rain-ai-191128862.html
Author: Faizan Farooque
(Tuesday, November 19, 2024) “Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, backed by Microsoft (MSFT, Financials), is pursuing a $150 million funding round for Rain AI, a semiconductor startup aiming to compete with Nvidia (NVDA, Financials), the New York Post reported, citing a source familiar with the matter.”
IBM Partners With AMD; Expands AI Accelerator Offerings
https://aibusiness.com/generative-ai/ibm-partners-with-amd-expands-ai-accelerator-offerings
Author: Berenice Baker
(Thursday, November 21, 2024) “The companies plan to make AMD Instinct MI300X accelerators available as a service to enterprise clients on IBM Cloud in the first half of 2025 for generative AI inferencing workloads.”
Company Earnings and Financial Announcements
NVIDIA Announces Financial Results for Third Quarter Fiscal 2025 | NVIDIA Newsroom
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financial-results-for-third-quarter-fiscal-2025
(Wednesday, November 20, 2024) “NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) today reported revenue for the third quarter ended October 27, 2024, of $35.1 billion, up 17% from the previous quarter and up 94% from a year ago.
For the quarter, GAAP earnings per diluted share was $0.78, up 16% from the previous quarter and up 111% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share was $0.81, up 19% from the previous quarter and up 103% from a year ago.”
Nvidia’s Q3 profit and revenue surge on AI chip demand | AP News
https://apnews.com/article/nvidia-ai-earnings-report-adc942aa0e0c5d1a550b7bad486b942a
(Wednesday, November 20, 2024) “Nvidia has reported a surge in third-quarter profit and sales as demand for its specialized computer chips that power artificial intelligence systems remains robust.”
Games
Advancements in AI Video Generation & Consistent Characters | Geeky Gadgets
https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/consistent-characters-in-ai-video-games/
Author: Julian Horsey
(Tuesday, November 19, 2024) “Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the landscape of videos and game development, with a particular focus on enhancing character consistency to create more immersive and engaging gameplay experiences. Imagine diving into a video game where every character you encounter feels as real and consistent as your favorite movie protagonist. It’s not just a dream anymore—thanks to recent advancements in AI video generation, this level of immersion is becoming a reality.”
Artificial Intelligence in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.5 Documentation | Epic Developer Community
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/artificial-intelligence-in-unreal-engine
“Describes the systems available within Unreal Engine that can be used to create believable AI entities in your projects.”
Generative AI and Models
The US Patent and Trademark Office Banned Staff From Using Generative AI | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/us-patent-trademark-office-internally-banned-generative-ai/
Author: Reece Rogers
(Tuesday, November 19, 2024) “The US Patent and Trademark Office banned the use of generative artificial intelligence for any purpose last year, citing security concerns with the technology as well as the propensity of some tools to exhibit “bias, unpredictability, and malicious behavior,” according to an April 2023 internal guidance memo obtained by WIRED through a public records request. Jamie Holcombe, the chief information officer of the USPTO, wrote that the office is “committed to pursuing innovation within our agency” but are still “working to bring these capabilities to the office in a responsible way.””
Current AI scaling laws are showing diminishing returns, forcing AI labs to change course | TechCrunch
Author: Maxwell Zeff
(Wednesday, November 20, 2024) “Everyone now seems to be admitting you can’t just use more compute and more data while pretraining large language models, and expect them to turn into some sort of all-knowing digital god. Maybe that sounds obvious, but these scaling laws were a key factor in developing ChatGPT, making it better, and likely influencing many CEOs to make bold predictions about AGI arriving in just a few years.”
