Summary of the State of AI Report 2023

Part I, 📊 coverage with my commentary up to slide 69.

Hey Everyone,

So on October 12th, Airstreet Capital put out their widely celebrated State of AI Report 2023.

So let’s get into it:

🔸Now in its sixth year, the State of AI Report 2023 is reviewed by leading AI practioners in industry and research.

🔹It considers the following key dimensions, including a new Safety section:

1. Research: Technology breakthroughs and their capabilities.

2. Industry: Areas of commercial application for AI and its business impact.

3. Politics: Regulation of AI, its economic implications and the evolving geopolitics of AI.

4. Safety: Identifying and mitigating catastrophic risks that highly-capable future AI systems could pose to us.

5. Predictions: What we believe will happen and a performance review to keep us honest.

In its 6th (and possibly most dramatic) year our report condenses what you *need* to know in AI research, industry, safety, and politics. This open-access report is our contribution to the AI ecosystem. Many thanks to Othmane Sebbouh, Corina Gurau, and Alex Chalmers for their incredible support producing it. - Nathan Benaich

Key takeaways:

1. GPT-4 is the master of all it surveys (for now), beating every other LLM on both classic benchmarks and exams designed to evaluate humans, validating the power of proprietary architectures and reinforcement learning from human feedback.

2. Efforts are growing to try to clone or surpass proprietary performance, through smaller models, better datasets, and longer context. These could gain new urgency, amid concerns that human-generated data may only be able to sustain AI scaling trends for a few more years.

3. LLMs and diffusion models continue to drive real-world breakthroughs, especially in the life sciences, with meaningful steps forward in both molecular biology and drug discovery.

4. Compute is the new oil, with NVIDIA printing record earnings and startups wielding their GPUs as a competitive edge. As the US tightens its restrictions on trade restrictions on China and mobilizes its allies in the chip wars, NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD have started to sell export-control proof chips at scale.

5. GenAI saves the VC world, as amid a slump in tech valuations, AI startups focused on generative AI applications (including video, text, and coding), raised over $18 billion from VC and corporate investors.

6. The safety debate has exploded into the mainstream, prompting action from governments and regulators around the world. However, this flurry of activity conceals profound divisions within the AI community and a lack of concrete progress towards global governance, as governments around the world pursue conflicting approaches.

7. Challenges mount in evaluating state of the art models, as standard LLMs often struggle with robustness. Considering the stakes, as “vibes-based” approach isn’t good enough.

In case you don’t have time to go through 163 slides and try to find the key parts, this might be useful for you.

You can start a free trial to get my deep dives.

I will at times include my own commentary.

The folks at Air Street Capital write this report to compile the most interesting things we’ve seen, with the aim of provoking an informed conversation about the state of AI. Which is right up my alley.

Nathan Benaich, Founder and General Partner, on 6 September 2023 announced Air Street Capital’s second fund of $121,212,121. Check out their Portfolio here. Also Essays and Previous Editions (worth looking into frankly).

Air Street also it should be noticed have angels from OpenAI, Google, DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs, Spotify, Recursion, Exscientia, InstaDeep/BioNTech, Hugging Face, Flexport, Wayve and many others. Their Newsletter, Guide to AI has been around since 2015.