🎂 ThursdAI BirthdAI March 14: Anthropic Haiku, Devin the new AI SWE, GPT4 gets hands, Cohere and Nous give us tool use models & more AI news

"...Happy birthday dear ThursdAIiiiiiiii, happy birthday to youuuuuu 🎂"

What a day! Today is π-day (March 14th), 2024. For some reason it's important, not only because it's GPT-4 anniversary, or Claude 1 anniversary, or even that Starship flew to space, but also 🥁 it's ThursdAI BirthdAI 🎉

Yeah, you heard that right, last year following GPT-4 release, I hopped into a twitter space with a few friends, and started chatting about AI, and while some friends came and went, I never stopped, in fact, I decided to leave my 15 year career in software, and focus on AI, learning publicly, sharing my learnings with as many people as possible and it's been glorious. And so today, I get to celebrate a little 💃

I also get to reminisce about the state of AI that we were at, back exactly a year ago. Context windows were tiny, GPT-4 came out with 8K (we casually now have models with 200K that cost $0.25/1M tokens), GPT-4 also showed unprecedented levels vision capabilities back then, and now, we have 1.3B parameters models that have similar level of visual understanding, open source was nascent (in fact, LLama.cpp only had it's first commit 4 days prior to GPT4 launch, Stanford released the first Alpaca finetune of Llama just a day prior.

Hell even the chatGPT API only came out a few days before, so there was barely any products built with AI out there. Not to mention that folks were only starting to figure out what vector DBs were, what RAG is, how to prompt, and that it's possible to run these things in a loop and create agents!

Other fields evolved as well, just hit play on this song I generated for ThursdAI with Suno V3 alpha, I can’t stop listening to it and imagining that this was NOT possible even a few months ago

It's all so crazy and happening so fast, that annual moments like these propose a great opportunity to pause the acceleration for a sec. and contextualize it, and bask in the techno-optimism glory of aren't we lucky to live in these times? I sure am, and for me it's the ThursdAI birthday gift to be able to share my excitement with all of you!

Thank you for being a subscriber, the best way you can support ThursdAI is to share this with a friend and tag us on socials 🫡

TL;DR of all topics covered:

* Open Source LLMs

* Together releases Sequoia speculative decoding (X, Blog)

* Hermes Pro from NousResearch - Tool use and function calling (X, HF, Github)

* Big CO LLMs + APIs

* Anthropic releases Claude 3 Haiku (Announcement, Blog)

* Cohere CMD+R (Announcement, HF)

* This weeks Buzz

* Early bird tickets for Fully Connected in SF are flying, come meet the Weights & Biases team. We're also going to be running a workshop a day before, come join us! (X)

* Vision & Video

* Deepseek VLM 1.3B and 7B (X,Announcement, HF)

* Voice & Audio

* Made a song with Suno v3 Alpha for ThursdAI, it's a banger (Song)

* Hardware & Robotics (New)

* OpenAI now powers Figure - the humanoid robot company (X)

* Cerebras announces the fastest AI chip on earth (X)

* Extropic made an announcement about their TPU - Thermodynamic Processing Unit

* Tools & Agents

* Devin from Cognition Labs (Announcement, 47 minute demo)

Agents for your house and your Github tasks

Say hello to Devin from Cognition Labs (Announcement, Real world demo)

By far the most excited I've seen my X feed be this week, was excitement about Cognition Labs new agent called Devin, which they call the first AI software engineer.

You should really watch the video, and then watch a few other videos, because, well, only a few folks are getting access, and yours truly is not one of them.

It seems like a very published launch, backed by tons of VC folks, and everybody kept highlighting not only the innovative UI that Devin has, and it has a very polished UX/UI/Dev experience with access to a browser (where you can authenticate and it can pick up doing tasks), terminal (where you can scroll back and forth in time to see what it did when), but also a chat window and a planning window + an IDE where it rights code and you can scrub through that as well.

Folks were also going crazy about the founder (and team) amount of math ability and IOI gold medals, this video went viral featuring Scott the founder of Cognition, in his youth obliterating this competition… poor Victoria 😅

Regardless of their incredible math abilities, Devin is actually pretty solid, specifically from the UI side, and again, like with he AutoGPT hype of yesteryear, we see the same issues, it's nice, but cognition hiring page is still looking for human software engineers. Tune into the last 30 minutes of the pod today as we had tons of folks discuss the implications of an AI "software engineer" and whether or not coding skills are still required/desired. Short answer is, yes, don't skip, learn coding. Devin is going to be there to assist but likely will not replace you.

🤖 OpenAI + Figure give GPT-4 hands (or give figure eyes/ears/mouth)

Ok this demo you must just see before reading the rest of it, OpenAI announced a partnership with Figure, a humanoid robotics company recently, and just this week they released a demo of this integration.

Using GPT4-Vision and Text to speech capabilities (with a new, somewhat raspy voice and human like intonations), the bot listens to the human giving it instructions, sees the world in front of it, and is able to perform tasks that the human has asked it to do via voice. This feels like a significant jump in capabilities for these bots, and while it was a given that the two technologies (Actuator based robotics and LLMs) will meet soon , this shows the first I Robot like moment.

It'll still be a while until you can have this one do your dishes or fold your laundry, but it does feel like it's an eventuality at this point, where as before, it just felt like sci-fi. Kudos on this integration, and can't wait until Optimus from Tesla will add Grok brains and it'll make you laugh nervously at it's cringe jokes 😅

This weeks Buzz

We're coming to SF in April, our annual Fully Connected conference will feature keynote speakers from foundational AI companies, industry, our founders and tons of Weights & Biases users. We'll also be running a workshop (I'm one of the workshop folks) a day before, so keep an eye on that, it'll be likely included in your ticket (which is still, 50% off for early bird)

Open Source LLMs

Nous Research gives us Tool Use with Hermes 2 Pro (Announcement)

Getting json structured output and giving models the ability to respond with not only text, but specific instructions for which functions to run (aka tool use) is paramount for developers. OpenAI first released this back in June, and since then I've been waiting for Open Source to catch up. And catch up they did, with Nous releasing their first attempt at continued training of the renown Hermes 7B Mistral based model, with tool use and structured output!

If you're building agents, or any type of RAG system with additional tools, you will definitely be very happy as well, give Hermes Pro a try!

This one is not a simple download and run, you have to do some coding, and luckily the folks at Nous provided us with plenty of examples in their Github.

Deepseek gives us a new Vision model - Deepseek VL 1.3B & 7B (Announcement)

Absolutely punching above it's weight, this very high quality vision model from the Deepseek folks is just a sign of what's coming, smaller models, performing incredibly better on several tasks.

While the top is getting crowded with Claude, GPT4-V and Gemini which are generic, on specific tasks, we're getting tiny models that can offload fully into memory and run hell fast and perform very well on narrow tasks, even in the browser

Big CO LLMs + APIs

Anthropic gives the smallest/fastest/cheapest Claude 3 - Haiku

After releasing Opus and Sonnet earlier, Anthropic has reclaimed their throne as the leading AI lab we always knew them to be. Many friends of the pod prefer Opus for many things now, and I keep seeing this sentiment online, folks are even considering cancelling chatGPT for the first time since... well ev…