Daily Tech News 5 September 2024

• Ilya Sutskever, former chief scientist at OpenAI, has raised $1 billion for his new company, Safe Superintelligence. (Reuters) (archive site)
  
  What is the company planning?

  "It's important for us to be surrounded by investors who understand, respect and support our mission, which is to make a straight shot to safe superintelligence and in particular to spend a couple of years doing R&D on our product before bringing it to market," [CEO Daniel] Gross said in an interview.

  Okay, but what is the company planning?

  Sutskever said his new venture made sense because he "identified a mountain that's a bit different from what I was working on."

  Okay, but what-

  Gross said they spend hours vetting if candidates have "good character", and are looking for people with extraordinary capabilities rather than overemphasizing credentials and experience in the field.

  What-

  "One thing that excites us is when you find people that are interested in the work, that are not interested in the scene, in the hype," he added.

  Yes, but-

  Sutskever was an early advocate of scaling, a hypothesis that AI models would improve in performance given vast amounts of computing power. The idea and its execution kicked off a wave of AI investment in chips, data centers and energy, laying the groundwork for generative AI advances like ChatGPT.

  Okay, but-

  Sutskever said he will approach scaling in a different way than his former employer, without sharing details.

  Great.

  "Everyone just says scaling hypothesis. Everyone neglects to ask, what are we scaling?" he said.

  WHAT ARE YOU SCALING?

  "Some people can work really long hours and they'll just go down the same path faster. It's not so much our style. But if you do something different, then it becomes possible for you to do something special."

  Scaling investors' money into your pockets, apparently.    

• Elon Musk says he's a free speech absolutist, but he obeys the law. (The Verge)
  
  What a villain.
  
  
  
• In a remarkably stupid decision, NaNoWriMo - the National Novel Writing Month, where participants try to complete a novel in a month as an exercise to get into the habit of writing - has embraced generative AI. (Ars Technica)
  
  It's like practicing sewing by buying clothes at Walmart.
  
  
  
• Intel has scrapped its 20A (2nm) process for Arrow Lake. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel has just announced Lunar Lake, manufactured at TSMC. But that's a single design with 8 cores (4P/4E) and only suitable for thin-and-light laptops.
  
  Arrow Lake will be the matching desktop lineup, and high-end and low-end laptop chips as well. The desktop chips are likely still on track - those were planned to make made at TSMC - but the laptop chips are probably derailed into next year.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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