Essential AI News From 6/17-6/21

Lots of "essential" AI news this week for leaders in the AI community. Anthropic demonstrated that it continues to be a real competitor with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, a new frontier model, that beats many Chat-GPT 4o benchmarks. Other articles look at the second and third-order effects of the AI boom. John Sviokla provides a framework for thinking about this in his article.

1. Claude 3.5 Sonnet Lots of excitement in the community about this upgrade to Anthropic's middle-of-the-road model which is available to try for free. It is not only surpassing OpenAI's 4o on some benchmarks, but is also already getting rave reviews from users. The new UX on this is great, featuring an editable workspace on the right where you can update your AI-generated content. Anthropic's press release clearly shows their pivot to the enterprise and we think this new offering is going to help them gain traction there.
2. State of the Cloud 2024 This latest article from Bessemer Venture Partners is actually all about AI given its growing presence and outsized mindshare in cloud. Lots of great market maps and insights in this one as the VC team walks you through the 5 trends they are seeing in cloud. A must read over the weekend.
3. MISQE Insight on Leveraging Computability for Competitive Advantage This article is a piece by our own John Sviokla that discusses how GenAI is making intelligence more computable and explains what the implications of this are for management and competitive advantage. We understand the appearances of rating our own work as "essential" but the framework provided here is one that AI leaders will certainly find useful.
4. Giant Chips Give Supercomputers a Run for Their Money This article talks about the latest advance in compute by Cerebras, a company we've covered before. It now offers a wafer that wires processors together on-chip, bypassing "many of the computational speed losses that come from many GPUs talking to each other." The company says this helps beat the performance of Frontier, the world's largest supercomputer, and can reduce energy requirements by two thirds. Time to start tuning into this Nvidia competitor.
5. Former NSA head joins OpenAI board and safety committee General Paul Nakasone has been brought in as a cybersecurity expert, but we worry that this has more to do with OpenAI continuing to signal it's up for doing business with the government - and potentially helping unlock all their data (ie, YOUR data) for government surveillance. Remember that you can turn off data sharing in Settings whether you're a paying user or tapping the free version of ChatGPT. However, it still stores your chats for 30 days unless you use Temporary Chats.
6. ‘Devastating’ potential impact of Google AI Overviews on publisher visibility revealed The UK's Press Gazette and other publishers commissioned an SEO agency to plug 3,300 search terms that typically drive traffic to publishers into Google to see how AI Overviews are affecting their position. AI Overviews were presented nearly 25% of the time and, when they were, links to the publisher from which an article originated moved about a full page-scroll down. Google, however, notes that citations in the overviews (when they're present) drive a lot of clicks. Every brand should be conducting these experiments, and the AI leader will want to help marketers understand what's going on technologically here.