For a few days, AI maker Nvidia sat on the throne as the world’s biggest company, but behind its stunning success lie questions about whether newcomers can claim AI.
Nvidia, which makes the processors that are the only choice for training models of large genetic artificial intelligence languages, is now the newest member of Big Tech, and its takeoff on the stock market has lifted the entire industry.
Even Wall Street’s tech second tier has jumped on Nvidia’s merits with Oracle, Broadcom, HP and a host of others seeing their stock valuations soar, despite often volatile earnings.
Amid the popping champagne, startups seeking the attention of Silicon Valley venture capital are being urged to innovate — but with no clear indication of where the next chapter of artificial intelligence will be written.
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When it comes to genetic AI, there are still doubts about what exactly will be left for companies that aren’t existing model makers, a field dominated by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
Most agree that going head-to-head with them could be a fool’s errand.
“I don’t think there’s a big opportunity to start a fundamental AI company right now,” Mike Myer, founder and CEO of technology company Quiq, said at the Collision Technology conference in Toronto.
Some have tried to create apps that use or mimic the strengths of existing large models, but this is being shot down by Silicon Valley’s biggest players.
“What I find annoying is that people don’t differentiate between those applications that are roadblocks for the models as they move into their capabilities, and those that really add value and will be here 10 years from now,” said the venture veteran. capital Vinod Khosla. .
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“I will not continue”
The hard-nosed Khosla is one of OpenAI’s early investors.
“Grammarly won’t keep up,” Khosla predicted of the spelling and grammar checking app and others like it.
He said those companies, which put only a “thin wrapper” around what AI models can deliver, are doomed.
One of the fields ripe for takeover is chip design, Khosla said, with artificial intelligence requiring increasingly specialized processors that provide very specific powers.
“If you look at the whole history of chips, we’ve really mostly focused on more generic brands,” Rebecca Parsons, CTO at technology consultancy Thoughtworks, told AFP.
Providing more specialized processing for the many demands of artificial intelligence is an opportunity seized by Groq, a hot startup that has built chips for developing artificial intelligence as opposed to training or inference — the specialty of Nvidia’s GPUs that dominate the world.
Groq CEO Jonathan Ross told AFP that Nvidia won’t be the best at everything, even if it is undisputed for AI training.
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“Nvidia and (its CEO) Jensen Huang are like Michael Jordan … the greatest of all time in basketball. But the bottom line is baseball, and we’re trying to forget the time when Michael Jordan tried to play baseball and he wasn’t very good at it,” he said.
Another opportunity will come from highly specialized artificial intelligence that will provide expertise and know-how based on proprietary data that will not be co-opted by voracious big tech.
“Open AI and Google are not going to build a structural engineer. They’re not going to build products like a primary care physician or a mental health therapist,” Khosla said.
Profiting from highly specialized data is the foundation of Cohere, another of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups that offers models tailor-made to businesses that think AI is getting out of their control.
“Businesses are skeptical of technology and averse to risk, so we have to earn their trust and prove to them that there is a way to adopt this technology that is reliable, trustworthy and secure,” its CEO told AFP. Cohere, Aidan Gomez. .
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When he was just 20 years old and working at Google, Gomez authored the seminal paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced Transformer, the architecture behind popular large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4.
The company has received funding from Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures and is valued at billions of dollars.
Source: AFP