The Beatles get a new Grammy nod, while the US braces for Trump's AI policy
what to know for now
🎶 Beatles' AI-revived song gets Grammy nod. Nearly 50 years post-breakup, The Beatles' "Now and Then," revived with AI, contends for record of the year and best rock performance Grammys against top contemporary artists. Machine learning tech separated John Lennon’s 1970s demo vocals, enabling Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr to complete the song. Read more
🔍 U.S. halts TSMC's AI chip exports. The U.S. Commerce Department ordered TSMC to stop shipments of advanced AI processors to China, targeting chips made on 7nm-class technology or better. This follows the discovery of Huawei using TSMC-made chiplets in its AI servers, bypassing U.S. export controls. Read more
🎨 AI artwork breaks auction record. Ai-Da Robot’s portrait of Alan Turing, "A.I. God," sold for $1,084,800, surpassing initial estimates by over eight times. Sotheby’s called the sale a milestone, marking Ai-Da as the first humanoid robot to auction an artwork, merging art and AI in unprecedented ways. Read more
🌌 AI enhances St. Peter’s Basilica tours. AI-driven experiences, crafted with Microsoft and Iconem, bring immersive virtual access to the Basilica's Renaissance architecture and bolster preservation. A digital twin, built from 400,000 drone images, supports detailed touring and restoration. Read more
🧪 AI Research of the Week
OpenCoder: The Open Cookbook for Top-Tier Code Large Language Models
From INF and M-A-PJake’s Take: The paper introduces OpenCoder, an open-source, high-performance model tailored for code generation, comprehension, and completion tasks. Unlike most code-specific LLMs, OpenCoder provides an open-access "cookbook" for the research community, including detailed training datasets, processing pipelines, and reproducible results. OpenCoder achieves benchmark-leading results across various coding tasks.
This model’s comprehensive transparency could help shift the AI industry’s approach to collaborative LLM research in general.
what to know for later
🗳️ Trump targets AI order repeal. President-elect Trump plans to dismantle Biden’s AI executive order, aiming to remove anti-bias guidelines and streamline federal AI adoption. Critics warn this shift could strip crucial protections around AI use, impacting safety and civil rights.
🧠 AGI may arrive sooner than expected. Sam Altman of OpenAI predicts that AGI could become a reality within five years, with a gradual and subtle societal impact rather than a disruptive one. Altman mentions substantial hardware investments, estimating $7 trillion, needed to bring AGI to fruition. Read more
💰 OpenAI’s $35M chat.com domain bet. OpenAI secured “chat.com” in a high-stakes deal, possibly exceeding $35 million. The domain redirects to ChatGPT, hinting at a branding shift to a broader, more accessible identity. Read more
📚 Tencent unveils Hunyuan-large model milestone. Tencent released Hunyuan-large, an open-source MoE model with 398 billion parameters, marking it as the industry’s largest. Hunyuan-large excels in CMMLU, MMLU, and NLP tasks in English and Chinese, outperforming models like Llama3.1. Read more