Weekly Big Future in AI, Week 2, August 14, 2024

By Brian Wang

There are huge developments in AI this week. Major developments in AI, AI startups, AI research and AI funding.

1. Google launches Gemini Live for advanced voice conversations

2. XAI launches Grok 2

3. Sakana AI makes a powerful AI Scientist

4. Cosine Genie launches a superior AI Software Engineer

5. Major AI funding including the Six China AI Little Dragons

   

   1.

   Google launches Gemini Live for advanced voice conversations

   Gemini Live is a mobile conversational experience that lets you have free-flowing conversations with Gemini. Want to brainstorm potential jobs that are well-suited to your skillset or degree? You can even interrupt mid-response to dive deeper on a particular point, or pause a conversation and come back to it later. You can verbally chat with it about new ideas or practice with for an important conversation.

   2.

   XAI Launches Grok 2

   Grok-2, a significant step forward from the previous model Grok-1.5, featuring frontier capabilities in chat, coding, and reasoning. XAI is also introducing Grok-2 mini, a small but capable sibling of Grok-2. An early version of Grok-2 has been tested on the LMSYS leaderboard under the name "sus-column-r." At the time of this blog post, it is outperforming both Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4-Turbo.

   Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini are currently in beta on 𝕏, and we are also making both models available through our enterprise API later this month.

3. Sakana AI makes a powerful AI Scientist

   One of the grand challenges of artificial general intelligence is developing agents capable of conducting scientific research and discovering new knowledge.

   • It's an AI system for automating scientific research

   • Can ideate, write code and run experiments

   • Can summarize results and write papers

   • Can even conduct its own peer review!

   Future Directions. Direct enhancements to The AI Scientist could include integrating vision capabilities for better plot and figure handling, incorporating human feedback and interaction to refine the AI’s outputs, and enabling The AI Scientist to automatically expand the scope of its experiments by pulling in new data and models from the internet, provided this can be done safely.

4. Cosine Genie launches a superior AI Software Engineer

   They built the world's most capable AI software engineer, achieving 30.08% on SWE-Bench – ahead of Amazon and Cognition. It was trained from the start to think and behave like a human SWE.

   

5. Major AI funding

• Moonshot (a Chinese AI startup): Raised over $300M at a $3.3B valuation on August 5, 2024. Investors included Tencent, Gaorong Capital and existing backer Alibaba. Alibaba in February led a record $1 billion round for Moonshot. Recently Alibaba together with Tencent provided fresh funding for Moonshot’s Chinese peer Baichuan, which is valued at 20 billion yuan ($2.8 billion).