On December 11, 2020, Pfizer announced their first vaccine for SARS-CoV-2. The vaccine had been developed in less than a year, setting a new standard for vaccine development where vaccines under “normal” circumstances can take up to 10-15 years to make. Last week Google DeepMind announced AlphaProteo, a groundbreaking AI system that can design custom proteins to bind with specific molecular targets, greatly improving the speed for new drug discovery and cancer research. Independent tests showed some AlphaProteo designs could stop SARS-CoV-2 (Covid) from infecting cells and slash years of lab work down to days or weeks. This is an amazing achievement by Google DeepMind, and just shows the amazing speed at which things move right now.
THIS WEEK’S NEWS:
- Google DeepMind reveals AlphaProteo
- GPT-5 : 100 Times More Powerful than GPT-4 ?
- Replit Launches AI Agent
- Tesla Plans AI-Powered Full Self-Driving Cars in China & EU by Early 2025
- Anthropic Launches Claude for Enterprise
- Youtube to Launch Tools to Detect Face and Voice Deepfakes
- AI Creates Infinitely-long Super Mario Bros Game
- Michael Dell on AI: Talk of a Slowdown is Way Overblown
Google DeepMind reveals AlphaProteo
The News:
- Google DeepMind has just announced AlphaProteo, a groundbreaking AI system that designs custom proteins to bind with specific molecular targets, greatly improving the speed for new drug discovery and cancer research.
- AlphaProteo creates proteins that stick to specific targets like a biological lock and key, which is 3 to 300 times better at creating strong-binding proteins than current methods.
- Independent tests showed some AlphaProteo designs could stop SARS-CoV-2 (Covid) from infecting cells and slash years of lab work down to days or weeks.
My take: AlphaProteo has the potential to dramatically accelerate new drug discovery, saving R&D costs and bringing life-saving treatments to patients much faster than what is possible today. It’s exciting to see how many different ways researchers are able to apply AI in medtech today, and it is clear that the possibilities of tomorrow are things we can’t even imagine today.
GPT-5 : 100 Times More Powerful than GPT-4 ?
https://www.itmedia.co.jp/aiplus/articles/2409/03/news165.html
The News:
- OpenAI Japan’s CEO stated in a presentation that ‘GPT-Next’, OpenAI’s upcoming GPT-5, is expected to be 100 times more powerful than GPT-4, while also seemingly confirming a more advanced model named “Orion” slated for 2025.
- ‘GPT-Next’ is expected to achieve a 100x performance increase without wasting significantly more computing resources. The improvement comes from better architecture and learning efficiency, not just raw computing power.
- The slide mentions GPT Next 2024, which while unconfirmed, hints that GPT-5 will be released in the fall.
What you might have missed: An OpenAI spokesperson quickly reached out to Mashable clarifying that ‘GPT Next’ is merely a figurative placeholder, and that the line graph was ‘illustrative’, not an actual time plan.
My take: I still believe GPT-5 will be a true revolutionary leap in performance for LLMs when it is released later this year. Currently however Claude 3.5 is good enough for all my programming needs. I have written thousands of lines of software with very high quality the past week in Typescript using Cursor, but have not written a single line of code by hand.
Replit Launches AI Agent
https://docs.replit.com/replitai/agent
The News:
- Last week the main news was Cursor IDE + Claude 3.5 and all the amazing projects people have been created with it. This week Replit (a popular web-based IDE) has launched “Replit Agent”, an “AI-powered tool designed to assist users in building software projects”.
- Using Replit Agent, you can describe the app you want to build in natural language, and the AI will generate a customizable plan and start to code.
- The agent can choose appropriate technologies and frameworks for the project and create web-based apps from scratch. The agent will install frameworks and databases as needed, and create classes and configuration files.
- Replit Agent is available for both web and mobile.
My take: While Cursor IDE + Claude helps you produce code, Replit Agent goes further by helping you choose frameworks and software stacks, helps you organize and structure your application, and guides you through the process by making a customizable plan. It’s still too early to say if Replit Agents are good enough for most programming like Cursor + Claude, and there is no information about what underlying model Replit is using. Myself I’ll wait a bit with testing Replit Agent but I am definitely keeping an eye out to see how people use it.
Read more:
Tesla Plans AI-Powered Full Self-Driving Cars in China & EU by Early 2025
https://www.investors.com/news/tesla-stock-china-fsd-ai-roadmap
The News:
- Tesla plans for fully self-driving cars (FSD) to be available in China and Europe in the first quarter of 2025, pending regulatory approval, according to a “roadmap” their Artificial Intelligence team released early Thursday last week.
- This aligns with their Q2 earnings call in July, where Elon Musk said that Tesla would likely receive regulatory approval to launch FSD outside the U.S., including Europe and China, by the end of 2024.
- The roadmap posted by Tesla AI team does not include any mention of the robotaxi, which is scheduled to be unveiled on October 10.
My take: This will be very interesting to follow. If Tesla could get OK to launch FSD in just one or two European countries by early 2025, considering the launch goes well we might see many more countries in EU to follow shortly!
Anthropic Launches Claude for Enterprise
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-enterprise
The News:
- Anthropic just announced their Claude Enterprise Plan, offering an expanded 500K context window, more usage capacity, and a native GitHub integration. It also includes enterprise-grade security features, like
- Single sign-on (SSO) and domain capture: Securely manage user access and centralize provisioning control.
- Role-based access with fine-grained permissioning: Designate a primary owner for your workspace to enhance security and information management.
- Audit logs: Trace system activities for security and compliance monitoring. Audit logs will be available in the coming weeks.
- System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM): Automate user provisioning and access controls. SCIM will also be available in the coming weeks.
My take: A 500K context window is very welcome, being equivalent to “hundreds of sales transcripts, dozens of 100+ page documents, or medium-sized codebases” according to Anthropic. The native GitHub integration is interesting, however I’m not totally sure of the benefit of integrating directly to GitHub compared to using something like Cursor IDE. Claude is currently the #1 LLM for coding, and it will be interesting to see if GPT-5 can push it back to a second place later this year.
Youtube to Launch Tools to Detect Face and Voice Deepfakes
The News:
- Youtube has announced new tools to protect artists and creators from the unauthorized use of their likenesses.
- Youtube said that new tech to detect AI-generated content using a person’s face or singing voice is in the pipeline, with pilot programs starting early next year.
- “As AI evolves, we believe it should enhance human creativity, not replace it,” Amjad Hanif, YouTube’s vice president of creator products, wrote in a blog post. “We’re committed to working with our partners to ensure future advancements amplify their voices, and we’ll continue to develop guardrails to address concerns and achieve our common goals.”
My take: And the race is on! It will be very interesting to see how Youtube will implement this. I guess videos where people behave in a way they have never done before is a good start. Youtube has access extreme amounts of data, and if there any site that can identify “odd behavior” and not only try to identify technical artifacts in the generated videos, it’s them.
AI Creates Infinitely-long Super Mario Bros Game
https://virtual-protocol.github.io/mario-videogamegen/static/pdfs/VideoGameGen.pdf
The News:
- Last week I wrote about researchers at Google and Tel Aviv that developed an AI engine that could generate the game Doom in real-time, without a game engine.
- This week, researchers have published a paper where they developed an AI called MarioVGG to generate an infinitely playable Super Mario Bros game entirely through video, without using a traditional game engine.
- MarioVGG is a text-to-video AI model trained specifically on Super Mario Bros gameplay with a single consumer-grade GPU in just 48 hours.
- It can generate continuous, infinite game footage based on simple text commands like “run” or “jump” and simulates game physics, mimics character movements, and even creates new levels on demand.
My take: This approach to game development is quite intriguing, however it’s one thing to train an AI from an existing game and another to create a completely new game. But who knows, maybe this is where we are indeed heading in the future?
Michael Dell on AI: Talk of a Slowdown is Way Overblown
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/michael-dell-on-ai-talk-of-a-slowdown-is-way-overblown-231351649.html
The News:
- In just one year the Dell stock has increased over 45% year-to-date, and is now seen as a key player in the build-out of America’s AI infrastructure.
- The company said it secured $3.1 billion of AI server sales in the quarter, almost double the $1.7 billion netted in the preceding quarter.
- “What organizations are seeing is this is a historic opportunity to make their businesses way more productive and efficient, while at the same time, kind of reimagining them given all this capability,” Michael Dell said.
My take: I think the idea of an “AI slowdown” comes from most people not really understanding that the next-generation AI models have been cooking for quite some time and will be released shortly. In just a few months we will see a major leap in performance across all AI models, similarly to what we saw when GPT-4 was released early last year, and by then no-one will describe it as a slowdown any more.