This Week's Most Read: Anthropic, Musk Take on OpenAI

Here are this week's top trending stories:

1. Anthropic Unveils Business Friendly Claude 3 AI Models

OpenAI rival Anthropic unveiled its Claude 3 family of models, which is the startup’s first multimodal versions and geared towards addressing companies’ biggest generative AI concerns: cost, performance and hallucinations.

The startup, which boasts multi-billion dollar investments from Amazon and Google to take on the Microsoft-OpenAI juggernaut, unveiled three new models in its Claude 3 family: Haiku, Sonnet and Opus. These accept text and image inputs and return text.

The models show ascending levels of capability – Haiku, then Sonnet and Opus – as well as pricing. Notably, Anthropic’s technical paper on Claude 3 shows all three models beating OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and Gemini 1.0 Pro in knowledge, reasoning, math, problem solving, coding and multilingual math.

Opus beats even GPT-4 and Gemini Ultra – OpenAI’s and Google’s most advanced models, respectively - according to Anthropic. Opus exhibits “near-human levels of comprehension and fluency on complex tasks, leading the frontier of general intelligence,” Anthropic researchers wrote in a blog post.

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2. OpenAI to Musk: You're Upset We Succeeded Without You

OpenAI came out fighting as it seeks a dismissal of the lawsuit brought by co-founder Elon Musk.

The ChatGPT maker published a series of emails between Musk and senior company executives in which he appears to have backed plans for the startup to pivot to a for-profit entity. Musk is suing OpenAI over claims its deal with Microsoft breached the startup’s founding agreement to remain an AI research nonprofit.

Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 to become a nonprofit counterweight to Google, which at the time had unparalleled AI staff and resources after buying DeepMind. Musk was worried that AI was dangerous to humanity and should not be left in the hands of a for-profit behemoth like Google.

OpenAI rebutted Musk's claims that it violated its nonprofit founding pledge, saying that Musk knew of their plans and actually was “supportive” of OpenAI finding its own path.

An email from Musk to OpenAI saw him acknowledge the need for more money to survive. Another email showed Musk proposed merging OpenAI into Tesla – which would have given him control over the startup.

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3. This Virus Steals Your Data from Generative AI Tools

A group of researchers has created a computer virus capable of exploiting generative AI systems including Gemini Pro and the GPT-4-powered version of ChatGPT.

Morris II is a worm that manipulates generative AI models to carry out malicious tasks, including spamming and stealing confidential data. It was created by scientists from Cornell Tech, a research center of the Ivy League university, Intuit and Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.

Morris II crafts inputs that when processed by models like Gemini, replicate themselves and perform malicious activities.

The worm is capable of extracting sensitive information such as contact information and addresses – and the users are not even aware of their data being stolen.

The worm then encourages the AI system to deliver them to new agents by exploiting the connectivity within the Gen AI ecosystem. It is, in effect, malware for generative AI.

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4. Hugging Face Launches New Code Generation Models

Hugging Face has unveiled the latest version of its code generation model StarCoder – enlisting the help of Nvidia to bring it to life.

The original StarCoder, built in tandem with ServiceNow, launched last May. This new version, StarCoder2, can generate code across over 600 programming languages.

StarCoder2 comes in three sizes but is designed to be small – the largest version stands at 15 billion parameters – so developers can run it more efficiently on their PCs.

The new versions of StarCoder are more powerful too, with the smallest of the bunch matching the performance of the original StarCoder 15 billion parameter model. StarCoder2-15B is the best in its size class and matches models double its size.

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5. Human-in-the-Loop: Mission Critical for AI Usage and Evaluation

Udo Sglavo, the vice president of advanced analytics at SAS, penned an opinion piece on Human in the Loop (HITL) evaluations.

"The HITL model, in its essence, recognizes and capitalizes on the distinctive strengths inherent in both machine intelligence and human intuition. It serves as a testament to the belief that the synergy between artificial and human intelligence not only elevates the quality of outcomes but also nurtures a profound sense of trust in the capabilities of AI systems," he writes.

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