AI

They Grow Up So Fast

In December 2015, Silicon Valley's original Hype House was formed. Elon Musk, Y Combinator's Sam Altman, Stripe's Greg Brockman, and others created the nonprofit research lab OpenAI.

• The mission? “Advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” 

Fast-forward five years and OpenAI, now a research and deployment company, has come a long way. In an effort to fund its mission, it added a capped profit arm last year and a major partnership with Microsoft this year. 

• The new mission: “Ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” 

We chatted with Brockman—OpenAI’s chairman and CTO—about where the organization’s been, and where it’s going. 

Biggest milestone? 

Developing and launching the GPT-3 model and API this past summer. 

“GPT-3, and the API on top of it, is the first time that [OpenAI has] had a general-purpose AI system that’s immediately commercially valuable—it’s actually useful,” he says. 

• Brockman says he’s most excited about use cases involving accessibility, like summarizing legal docs for tenants without access to lawyers. 

The flip side: Large language models like GPT-3 hold a lot of promise but, by their very nature, they can also propagate existing biases. OpenAI's own researchers have noted as much, and Brockman says it’s a multifaceted problem that’s been “a conversation since GPT-2 and earlier.” 

One top obstacle? 

The idea that making all of OpenAI’s work public wasn’t necessarily a good thing. The “canonical moment,” he says, was their decision not to open-source GPT-2. 

“We realized that as these things get powerful, they’re dual-use...and that we as technology developers have a responsibility to not just say, ‘Hey, we built this thing, it’s up to the world to decide how to use it,’” he says. “There’s no undo button for open source.” 

Shaping up  

In November 2015, just before OpenAI’s launch, Brockman recalls writing down the team’s three-point technical plan: Solve reinforcement learning. Solve unsupervised learning. Gradually learn more complicated things. 

After advancing in the first two areas, the team is now focusing on the third. “Systems like GPT-3...are starting to get a lot of world knowledge,” says Brockman. “The criticism that I think people rightly point to is that they don't really, deeply understand the world.” 

But alongside systems like DeepMind’s AlphaFold—which could help unravel a 50-year-old computational biology mystery—we’re “starting to see the shape of it,” says Brockman. 

5G

Apple Is Making Another Chip

Apple told employees Thursday that it kicked off in-house development of cellular modems, Bloomberg reports. The component will enable 5G connectivity for future Apple devices—and more control over the iPhone supply chain.

We knew this was coming. In July 2019, Apple acquired the majority of Intel’s struggling smartphone-modem chip unit. A few months before that, Apple settled a litigious beef with Qualcomm and agreed to license 5G technology from the chipmaker for six years. 

Now, the Qualcomm-Apple storyline returns

Apple will still have to pay a licensing fee to Qualcomm. But it’s clearly embarking on a path toward building its own cellular chips, rather than buying them from someone else. Qualcomm, which gets 11% of its revenue from Apple, doesn’t love that. On Friday, the chipmaker’s stock dropped as much as 9%.

Big picture: Memorize the Tim Cook doctrine. The CEO says Apple has a "long-term strategy of owning and controlling the primary technologies behind the products that we make.”

SPONSORED BY CISCO

The Future of Work Looks Different

While some of us are embracing remote work permanently (yay sweatpants), and others are returning to the office (yay free coffee), the future of work will look a little different for us all. But no matter what the “office” looks like, Cisco has the tools to help businesses thrive. 

Cisco has the technology that connects your workforce, secures your workplace, and automates your processes. They’re helping offices all over the world reimagine resilience. From helping businesses develop IT and cyber resilience to automating processes for the modern workforce, Cisco has the tools you need for the future of work. 

So whether you are empowering your remote workforce or working to ensure safety and wellness as your team returns to the workplace, Cisco has the solutions that best suit the needs of your organization. 

See how you can build a more resilient business with Cisco, today.

AI

Your Wingrobot

Last week, the Japanese government said it would invest in AI matchmaking for single citizens. 

Why? Tokyo isn’t creating a new Tinder for the thrill of it. It wants to reverse Japan’s flagging birth rate, which hit a record low in 2019. 

Many local governments offer matchmaking services. Japan will subsidize those that incorporate machine learning into the mix. The hope is that these data-intensive methods will produce better pairings.

AI dating services may sound like sci-fi to you—like Her meets Brave New World. But check out the above graph. As more singles turn to dating apps, algorithms are already playing a bigger role in romance. 

Zoom out: Japan’s population is projected to fall from a peak of 128 million in 2017 to under 53 million by 2100. The government is heavily investing in automation as a hedge against its rapidly shrinking workforce.  

BITS & BYTES

Stat: How much would it cost to go “all-out” on Apple products by buying every device, accessory, and service? An estimated $79,875.26, according to CNN—excluding shipping costs, taxes, and carrier fees, of course. 

Quote: “By dispersing tools to millions, Roblox has made money for independent developers and created a flywheel for its own future growth.”—NYU Prof. Scott Galloway, on Roblox and the Dispersal of Creativity. 

Read: One Arizona college student has taken over five dozen rides in driverless Waymos. 

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WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Google had a massive outage this morning. 
• Roblox and point-of-sale lender Affirm are delaying their IPOs until next year, per the WSJ, so they can more accurately price their shares during these frothy times. 
• Reddit is acquiring Dubsmash, a short-form video app. 
• Virgin Galactic’s latest spacecraft test ended in a rocket motor failure. 
• Tesla will shut down Model S and X production for 18 days, CNBC reports. 
• Oracle is relocating its HQ from Redwood City, CA, to Austin, TX.
• Researchers discovered a “superhighway” network of routes through the solar system that would allow spacecraft to travel much quicker. 

THREE THINGS WE'RE WATCHING

All week: Russian government hackers reportedly breached an IT provider for the U.S. government, the Treasury and Commerce Departments, and top cybersecurity firm FireEye. Watch for more details on the extent of the breach, who else may have been compromised, and how Washington responds. 

Today: A U.S. federal appeals court hears oral arguments on the (blocked) TikTok download ban. The White House prevented TikTok from being downloaded in September, but a judge issued an injunction, which the U.S. government has appealed. This is separate from the lapsed deadline for TikTok to sell itself to a U.S. company.

Thursday: FedEx reports earnings. Amid the pandemic’s e-commerce boom, the shipping giant has invested more in robotic arms, self-driving vehicles for warehouse use, and an autonomous mobility management platform. Have these technologies meaningfully boosted capacity? Will FedEx invest in more e-commerce technology? 

PATENTS ARE A VIRTUE

Some housekeeping: We’re shuffling up this section of the newsletter. In “Patents Are a Virtue,” we’ll present new inventions that caught our eye. 

Apple filed patent applications for a laser-textured glass trackpad and a matte black Macbook finish. We’re only including the latter because we saw it flagged in Hypebeast, of all places. 

Microsoft filed patents for “Meeting Insight Computing System” a few weeks back. The AI/sensor system system sounds a bit creepy, because it would give out “quality scores” for meetings based on body language, facial expressions, and other data. 

ICYMI

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions: 

• Facebook antitrust lawsuits 
• Uber offloads self-driving and flying taxi units
• New research: bringing AI to IoT