The LLM Wars 🤖🪖

OPENAI HAS SERIOUS RIVALS TO GPT-4’s SUPREMACY

👀 TLDR:

In this week’s What’s Appening, we take a look at the rival large language models that are throwing down the gauntlet to OpenAI’s GPT-4. The latter is clearly the dominant player in the market, powering OpenAI’s suite of tools, yet rivals, such as Claude, Gemini, and Mistral have been outperforming GPT-4, putting OpenAI’s hegemony in danger. That competition is good for us all, and it will eventually filter down the AI services and tools that enter the market. Elsewhere, we have news on TikTok potentially taking on Instagram, Worldcoin being banned in Spain, and the latest update for Vision Pro’s software. Our Stat deals with Bitcoin’s inexorable rise, and What’s dAppening looks at PlayStation embracing tokenization for its games. And don’t forget our GPT of the Week, which offers a cheat sheet on just about any topic.

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Our Top Take 🎬

🤖🥊LLMs – GPT-4 Barrier Broken as ChatGPT Rivals Emerge

It’s widely accepted that GPT-4 – the large language model that powers ChatGPT – is the industry’s benchmark, at least commercially speaking. Yet, serious rivals have emerged in recent weeks, with Claude Opus (the LLM behind Anthropic’s Claude 3) the most impressive. OpenAI is enjoying a kind of first-mover advantage, as well as benefiting from the fallout of Google Gemini tying itself in knots, but that market dominance is coming under pressure. Claude Opus, Gemini 1.5, Mistral Large, and Inflection have all either surpassed or matched GPT-4 in some measurements. We wouldn’t even rule out a bright future for Elon Musk’s Grok, which goes open source this week. A good way to think about it is that these LLMs are the engines powering suites of AI “cars”. OpenAI has the most popular “chassis”, but that could all change once people start looking underneath the hood. Competition is, of course, healthy: We want to see OpenAI’s dominance challenged and usurped, then watch it rebound. Some of this is reminiscent of the browser wars in the early days of the web, and hopefully, it will be us, the users, who ultimately benefit. #LLMWars Read more here.

🦾 GPT of the Week: Universal Primer📝

This week’s Custom GPT is Universal Primer. As the name suggests, Universal Primer GPT is a tool for giving you the 101 on just about any subject. The GPT will break down any topic, generating cheat notes, stats, explainers, and so on. Created by Siqi Chen, the GPT is useful for anyone needing to brush up before a presentation, generate simple notes on a complex subject, or generally bluff their way through a conversation on anything from football to finance to Finland to Fortnite. Check it out here.

Other Stories 🗞️

📸📱ByteDance – Empire-Building Continues with TikTok Photos Plans

Fresh off conquering short-form video and music, TikTok may be looking to muscle in on Instagram’s dominance in the photo-sharing market. Tech sleuths found new code in TikTok’s APK File, naming the new app as TikTok Photos. While ByteDance (TikTok’s owner) has yet to comment, the code makes it clear that it is planning something. For Americans, of course, there could be a sting in the tail – the potential banning of TikTok here. It remains a remote possibility, but a possibility nonetheless, particularly if Republicans win both houses of Congress in November. #TikTokPhotos Read more here.

🎂 Happy 35th Birthday, World Wide Web. The exact birthday of the internet is a matter of contention, but we do know that it was March 12th, 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee submitted an “Information Management Proposal” to his boss, who was reportedly underwhelmed by the sketches of the nascent web. The rest, as they say, is history. Full story here.

🪙 Sam Altman’s Worldcoin Banned in Spain. It’s all been a bit quiet on the Worldcoin front, although we maintain that proof of personhood is an important goal in the AI age. Spain doesn’t think so, though, and it has banned the project on privacy grounds. Details here.

🥽 Apple Rolls Out VisionOS 1.1. Apple has released the first major software update for Vision Pro, with the most notable new feature being an improvement of “Personas”, i.e., the digital versions of the user. Full details here.

🧐 Stat of the Week: $1.4T

🪙📈 Bitcoin – Price Surge Sees It Overtake Market Value of Silver

They talk about Bitcoin being digital gold, but silver was the word of the day yesterday as Bitcoin surged to become the world’s 8th most valuable asset by market cap. To do so, it hit $1.4 trillion and overtook silver’s $1.3 trillion market cap. What else is there to say? Bitcoin’s critics have been proven wrong – for now. #DigitalSilver Read more here.

🕸️ What’s dAppening?

🎮⛓️ PlayStation – Rumors Swirl of Games with Blockchain-Based Digital Assets

Having blockchain-based AAA games is one of the principal ambitions of web3, so there was much excitement when Sony created a patent for gaming “Super-Fungible Tokens”. Like NFTs, these “SFTs” would be based on the blockchain, allowing players to own and trade digital assets (skins). Yet, before we get too excited about this, we note that companies like Sony file patents all the time, and it doesn’t always lead to something concrete. Still, these SFTs – they are essentially bundles of NFTs – signal that the top dog in the gaming world is at least interested in the technology. That’s a big win for web3 gaming. #SuperFungibleTokens. Read more here.

Meanwhile at 3Advance...

This past weekend, our team was thrilled to be in Austin for #SXSW2024 - most especially, to experience the 1A House, hosted by the Freedom Forum (whose mission it is to foster First Amendment freedoms for all). It was a significant moment for us as the Freedom Forum also unveiled a preview of the all-new, AI-powered "Today’s Front Pages", developed by the team here at 3Advance. Built from the ground up, the new cloud platform, the website and mobile app will be released to the public next month. The app displays 100s of daily newspaper front pages from around the world, and now we’re using generative AI to highlight US stories that relate to the First Amendment, and linking global stories by topic to get unique insights on how news events are perceived and reported on all over the world. Back at the 1A house, the 3Advance team got to check out the immersive production hosted by the Freedom Forum, which we supported by designing much of the dynamic visuals on the streets of Austin. Check out the reel for more, and of course, get in touch to learn how generative AI can be used in your digital presence.

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