Nvidia's AI conference, Google's chatbot, and the Fed's rate raise. #Newsletter 16

Nvidia’s GTC (GPU Technology Conference) event was, unsurprisingly, focused almost entirely on AI this year. Nvidia builds much of the technology that powers AI...

• Nvidia’s AI Conference

• Google’s New Chatbot

• Fed Raises Interest Rates by 0.25%

• Terraform Labs Founder Charged with Fraud

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Nvidia’s AI Conference

Nvidia’s GTC (GPU Technology Conference) event was, unsurprisingly, focused almost entirely on AI this year. Nvidia builds much of the technology (mainly graphical processing units) that powers AI today.

The chip company announced partnerships with many other big tech companies including Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, to bring new simulation and collaboration capabilities to every industry.

“We are at the iPhone moment of AI” - Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang.

Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, detailed how Amazon is using AI to train autonomous robots for use in its warehouses and how Microsoft plans to connect hundreds of millions of users to a platform for building and operating hyper-realistic virtual worlds.

This image was made by Midjourney when I asked it for “a robot looking at an Nvidia GPU”. Ironically, Midjourney runs on Nvidia GPUs, so it was basically an Nvidia GPU creating an image of itself. Spooky 👻

A partnership between chip-making companies including Nvidia, TSMC, ASML, and Synopsys was also announced. The partnership sets the stage for the next generation of chip-manufacturing technology to boost energy efficiency, bring the cost down, and build even more powerful chips.

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Google’s Chatbot

In an effort to catch up to OpenAI and Microsoft, who partnered to create ChatGPT, Google last week released BARD, its own chatbot and its competitor to OpenAI’s chatbot.

TechCrunch did a comparison between BARD and GPT-4 and concluded that GPT-4 was far ahead of it. And although most users on the web seem to agree with this sentiment, things are moving so fast in the AI space right now that it could change soon.

“AI is the most profound technology we are working on today.” - Google CEO, Sundar Pichai.

The BARD chatbot is powered by a lightweight and optimized version of LaMDA, Google’s own large language model which you might remember as the one that led a Google engineer to believe it had become sentient last year.

Google was caught flat-footed with the release of ChatGPT back in 2022 and has been at pains ever since to show that, when it comes to AI, anything other companies can do, it can do better. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that the release of BARD adds any weight to that argument. Perhaps everything in the forecast below will turn out to be prescient (except the date).

juan @juanbuis

i asked bard when it'll (inevitably) be shut down by google turns out it's already been shut down due to lack of adoption 🤔

The release came the same week that OpenAI announced that plugins would be coming to ChatGPT soon. The company said the new additions are:

“Tools designed specifically for language models with safety as a core principle, and help ChatGPT access up-to-date information, run computations, or use third-party services.”

Every day seems to be bringing major releases in the world of generative AI at the moment, and for anyone more interested in the topic, this video goes into all the big releases made last week.

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Fed Raises Rates by 0.25%

The Fed announced it would raise interest rates in the US by 0.25% last Wednesday. The rise was widely anticipated and marks the ninth increase in the past 12 months.

The move lifts rates to a range of 4.75% - 5% and comes as it tries to balance two conflicting problems - inflation and the threat of turmoil within the banking system.

Increasing the interest rate would help to tackle inflation and make it more expensive to borrow money, but it would also slow the economy and put more stress on banks which might need to borrow money to pay back depositors.

The Fed has kept inflation from spiralling out of control so far and it’s looking more and more likely it will be able to do so for the foreseeable future.

The Bank of England in the UK also announced it would raise rates by 0.25%, bringing the base rate to 4.25%.

The cost of living crisis afflicting many households in the west has been caused by inflation due to supply-chain disruption and money printing during the pandemic, as well as the conflict in Ukraine leading to massive rises in food and energy prices.

Policymakers in the US anticipate that rates will climb by another 0.25% by the end of the year before coming down in 2024.

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Terraform Labs Founder Charged with Fraud

Terraform Labs was a platform for minting stablecoins (coins that mimic the value of fiat currencies), and the creator of the cryptocurrency known as Terra. It was founded in 2018 by Do Kwon and Daniel Shin.

In May of last year, Terra collapsed and its $45 billion market cap disappeared within a week, along with hundreds of billions of dollars being lost throughout the wider crypto ecosystem. Soon after the collapse Terra’s creator, Do Kwon, disappeared, and his location has been a mystery for months despite Interpol asking law enforcement agencies worldwide to search for and arrest him.

Do Kwon was born in South Korea in 1991 and is best known for creating the Terra blockchain and then disappearing when it crashed in May 2022.

That was until last Thursday when the interior minister of Montenegro announced that Kwon had been arrested at an airport in the country with falsified documents.

According to the complaint, Kwon is being charged with conspiracy to defraud, commodities fraud, securities fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to engage in market manipulation.

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