A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

Hi! It’s time for another Datakami Bot Bulletin. As AI models become increasingly powerful and widespread, it becomes increasingly important to also consider the wider impact of this technology. This month, we feature efforts relating to interpreting the inner workings of LLMs, analyzing how AI is used at work, and the dangers and opportunities of AGI. I hope you enjoy the read and until next time!

—Alexander

Featured: Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude LLM, published an interesting paper on finding human-understandable concepts in the patterns of neuron activations inside language models. These patterns can not only be used to understand what is happening inside the model but also to change the model’s behaviour by boosting the importance of specific concepts.

Situational Awareness

In this series of essays, Leopold Aschenbrenner discusses his vision of the future of AI, focusing on artificial general intelligence, why it might be closer than you think, and what impact it might have on the economy and military powers. Although there is quite some speculation, the essays are also full of interesting observations and data and offer a unique view of what we can expect from the next decade. The whole thing is quite a long read, but each essay can be read on its own. Alternatively, you can check out Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast with Aschenbrenner, or Zvi Mowshowitz's summary.

Release of ChatGPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet

OpenAI recently released GPT-4o, a new multi-modal model that can understand text, pictures, audio, and video. In their release, OpenAI showed some impressive demos of real-time conversation, video interpretation, math tutoring, and more. One fun skill of GPT-4o I found is that it can quite consistently beat me at GeoGuessr, a game where you guess where in the world you are based on an image. However, I’m sure many more useful applications will be developed using this new model.

This month also saw the release of Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, a model that performs comparable to Claude 3 Opus, for only a fifth of the price.

AI at Work: A Large Survey

Through a large survey with over thirty thousand respondents from 31 countries, Microsoft researched if and how workers use AI at work. They found that an impressive 75% of knowledge workers use AI at work. Furthermore, AI skills are becoming increasingly relevant when getting hired or deciding on an employer. As the researchers say: “2024 is the year AI at work gets real”.

Sam Altman's investments

The Wall Street Journal published an article about Sam Altman's personal investments. The CEO of OpenAI has created a $2.8 billion investment portfolio of over 400 companies that is increasingly intertwined with his role at the AI company, raising concerns about potential conflicts of interest.

Video game: Slay the Spire

Judith had a week of vacation, so she took up one of her long-time video game favorites: Slay the Spire. In this roguelike deckbuilder game by Megacrit you play a mysterious character who tries to reach the top of The Spire by battling monsters. The game has a dark-fantasy theme, very satisfying animations and high replayability.

Slay the Spire strikes an excellent balance between randomness and strategy. Every run might get you different cards, so you are forced to experiment with different combinations to create a new strategy every time you play. As your character makes its way through the Spire, you can collect an assortment of "relics" that grant special powers, potentially altering your game plan and encouraging calculated risk-taking. It is a rogue-like, so you die easy and you die often, and it's all part of the fun. And if you like reading, you can puzzle together the game lore from card descriptions and random events.

Judith loves to play it during lazy Saturday mornings with a cup of coffee. Because it's turn-based, you can take as long as you like to ponder your next move, so the game feels very relaxing. Slay the Spire 2 has recently been announced for 2025 (hype!) but the original game is so good that it's hard to imagine how the developers and game writers will beat it. If you like deck-builders with lots of flavour, give Slay the Spire a try.

Datakami news

Judith on the radio!

Judith recently joined 3FM’s Lang Verhaal Kort (long story short) podcast to explain how Meta intends to use your data to train AI models.

EnginX project

We recently finished our project with EnginX, in which we explored how AI can be used to automatically analyse piping & instrumentation diagrams, a type of flow diagram. We investigated using state-of-the-art LLMs as well as more classical computer vision approaches. EnginX was very positive about the project outcomes and our collaboration.

Datakami at PyData Eindhoven 2024

Judith visited the Philips Stadium for PyData Eindhoven 2024. Jeroen Overschie gave a good general introduction to RAG, and there was a funny talk about someone doing (disastrous) automated betting on CS:GO matches. The talks will be uploaded to YouTube soon.