5 days Ago
If you’re not familiar with that cluster of letters and numbers, you’re not alone – most people don’t immediately recognize this moniker for one of the most powerful new models to hit the AI world. No, it’s not a new virus. It’s AI.
As with so much of what we’re seeing these days, context is everything. If you get behind the name, and into the origin of the model, you start to see more about what’s going on internationally, as leaders work toward industry innovations that are going to have a big impact on our world. What’s Under the Hood? The Yi series of models is made with 6-bit and 34-bit LLMs, which are both open source.
There’s a sequence length of 4K, in a 34-billion parameter large training model that outperforms the 70 billion Llama 2 other Meta designs. A smaller 6-billion parameter model is also available. Behind the Project The company itself, 01.
AI, is brand-new, having been founded this year by someone named Kai-Fu Lee. Lee is a Taiwanese businessman who was educated in the United States, and has experience at Apple, Microsoft and Google. After his involvement in business, he moved back across the world, relinquished his American citizenship and created a large venture capital fund while also innovating new products.
Quotable Notes So who is this person who has so much experience with the AI frontier? Let’s look at some of what Lee has said publicly about the industry. As widely reported, he does suggest that AI will never attain the human traits that give us our special creativity. “AI can do extraordinary things,” Lee reportedly told an audience, “but it lacks the soul and purpose the define human ingenuity.
” Also: “What AI cannot replace is the human connections that give us purpose and meaning in life.” He has also spoken out on the Chinese positioning and viewpoint towards AI, saying: “China has woken up to the power of AI, and it is moving at an unprecedented speed to take the lead.” This is where you see American interest reacting to the advance, mostly playing catch-up, and worried that Sino-progress is going to dwarf what’s going on in the western hemisphere.
Then there is a bit of guidance that he gives on the priorities of a society: “We must ensure that AI serves humanity,” Lee says, “and does not become a tool for control or oppression.” Open and Closed Models There’s also the fact that the Yi models are open source. As we’ve written about in the past, there’s a trade-off, where American interests tend to think that open source models could be used in unethical ways, and may put up gates to the more advanced systems.
The advantages of open models include accessibility, collaboration, and the general advancement of community research. That appears to be part of what’s behind Lee’s outlook on sourcing these models to the public. The Age of Implementation Here’s another prediction that Lee has made in an interview with BB.
He talks about the age of implementation being after an age of discovery, which would presumably be right now. He suggests that AI will take 10 or 20 years to “penetrate every corner and every application.” Here’s how he characterizes the next big breakthrough: “The next possible big breakthrough could come from the combination of brain sciences and AI – capturing something about our logical and illogical thinking, or from quantum computing or hardware, or semantics or language understanding.
Each of the three has a 5 percent to 20 percent chance of making a big difference. In the next five years, probably Internet and financial and e-commerce are the biggest industries that will be affected, where there are immediate transactions of money. After that we will see an impact on areas such as retail, healthcare, manufacturing, education, transportation and automotive and logistics including warehousing/transportation/delivery.
Eventually AI will penetrate everything.” All of this is fundamentally centering, and orienting, as we look at where we are with AI, and where we’re likely to be going in the future. We know that there is this international effort, and some competition in terms of geopolitics.
We know who the company players are, and what they’re doing. What’s hard to see is what’s coming around the corner..
