The three top engineers are from DeepMind

Artificial Intelligence: Present Status, Future Directions, and Prospects in Zurich, Italy (The Big Interview in San Francisco, March 17)

Mira Murati says it will take decades, but an artificial intelligence system will perform a wide range of cognitive tasks as well as humans.

At The Big Interview in San Francisco on Tuesday, Murati said that it feels doable at the moment. In her first interview since quitting OpenAI, Murati told Steven Levy that she is not concerned about recent chatter in the field of Artificial Intelligence that is proving challenging.

She pointed to the growing investment in the computing infrastructure to power them and the work of producing synthetic data, as important areas to follow. She said that breakthrough in those areas will allow AGI someday. But it’s not all technological. “This technology is not intrinsically good or bad,” she said. “It comes with both sides.” It’s up to society, Murati said, to collectively keep steering the models toward good—so we’re well prepared for the day AGI comes.

Over the past few months, a number of key figures at OpenAI have left the company, either to join direct competitors like DeepMind and Anthropic or launch their own ventures. Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI cofounder and its former chief scientist, left to launch Safe Superintelligence, a startup focused on AI safety and existential risks. Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, announced she was leaving the company in September and is reportedly raising money for a new AI venture.

Zhai, Beyer, and Kolesnikov all live in Zurich, according to LinkedIn, which has become a relatively prominent tech hub in Europe. The city is home to ETH Zurich, a public research university with a globally renowned computer science department. Apple has also reportedly poached a number of AI experts from Google to work at “a secretive European laboratory in Zurich,” the Financial Times reported earlier this year.

In October the company said that it was working to expand. In addition to the new Zurich offices, the company plans to open new outposts in New York City, Seattle, Brussels, Paris, and Singapore, and already has outposts in London, Tokyo, and other cities, in addition to its San Francisco headquarters.

Tim Brooks, for example, who previously co-led the research direction of OpenAI’s unreleased video generator, recently departed to work at DeepMind. But the high-profile poaching spree extends well beyond DeepMind and OpenAI. Microsoft hired the leader of its Artificial Intelligence department in March along with most of the startup’s employees. According to reports, the company paid over 2 billion dollars to bring Character. AI founder Noam Shazeer back into the fold.

All three of the newly hired researchers are working closely together according to their personal website. OpenAI was involved in a number of public controversies and at one point had its CEO removed from office by the board.

Openai has long been at the forefront of multimodal intelligence and released the first version of a text-to-image platform in 2021. Its flagship chatbot ChatGPT, however, was initially only capable of interacting with text inputs. Multifunctional features became an important part of its product line and research as they later added voice and image features. The latest version of the software is available through the website. Sora is a generative artificial intelligence video product that Openai has yet to make widely available.

The Trend of Artificial Intelligence and the Challenges of China: A Conversation with Nvidia CEO and Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra

Huang was the only interviewee at the event who phoned in from outside the country. He was in Thailand, where Huang said he lived for five years as a kid and where, just today, he met with Paetongtarn Shinawatra, Thailand’s prime minister to talk about building “world-class AI infrastructure” in the country together.

The current stop of the tour is to persuade governments to build their ownAI infrastructure, processing their own data, have their own systems and, obviously, buy Nvidia chips for that purpose.

Jensen said that people are starting to realize that artificial intelligence is similar to the energy and communications infrastructure.

At The Big Interview in San Francisco on Tuesday, the author said the trend of artificial intelligence was like a reset of computing as we know it. The force of AI is, he said, “so incredible, it’s not as if you can compete against it. Either you are on this wave or you missed it.

The US and China, two powerhouses in technology, are vying for the first place in a wave of technological changes. When the countries collide, Nvidia is at the center of the storm.

Just this Monday, the Biden administration announced new restrictions that will ban the export of chip components and chip-making technologies to China. One of the restrictions is on high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, a memory component often used in customized AI chips. Nvidia’s H20 chips, which are designed to be sold to Chinese companies without violating the export controls, contain HBM chips. Nvidia has reportedly stopped taking Chinese orders for H20 chips as early as September, according to Chinese media reports, anticipating the restrictions this week.