Ensemble #2: The AI Battle Begins & Layoffs Continue
A Summary of February News on AI - A month filled with announcements regarding new Language Models.
Ensemble is a monthly issue from The Overfit, aggregating the most relevant updates in the Data Science & AI industry for the given month, always with some personal takes on “why is this happening?” and “what will happen next?”
AI News
While January was fascinating with all the noise from ChatGPT, February showed that the AI wave continues.
ChatGPT is integrated with Bing, Edge, and Windows 11. The partnership OpenAI has with Microsoft shows — ChatGPT is already available for multiple products.
Google announced Bard. In short, it’s the ChatGPT of Google. It’s based on another architecture — LaMDA. It’s not yet available to the public, so it’s hard to compare.
Snapchat launched an AI Chatbot powered by Open AI. It’s very similar to ChatGPT, but they have tuned it a bit, trying to avoid sensitive topics (violence, swearing, etc.)
Meta launched Llama. It’s available in different sizes — in billions of parameters — (7B, 13B, 33B, and 65B). The 13B version outperforms GPT-3 (ChatGPT “basis”) in most benchmarks and is way more efficient — GPT3 has 175B parameters (Llama is more than 10x smaller)
Generally, we should expect more products based on this type of AI — generative text, chatting, etc. — soon. There will undoubtedly be a lot to talk about in the coming months! ;)
Layoffs
In the last ensemble article, I discussed why layoffs are happening. As I mentioned, layoffs were still expected in February.
This time, the most significant layoffs for February are:
Ericsson: 8500
Dell: 6650
Yahoo: 1600
Byju’s: 1500
Twilio: 1500
Zoom: 1300
And many other “smaller layoffs” from notable companies such as GoDaddy, eBay, Thoughtworks, Wix, etc. You look at them individually at layoffs.fyi.
I still expect some layoffs during March (as some planning for the year finishes during February), but I guess the “layoff velocity” will decrease after April.
Notes on the market
Even though we still have uncertainty in the market and layoffs should continue throughout the year, this year will most likely be an excellent opportunity for AI-based startups to get some traction.
For instance, Tome — a “Generative Storytelling” app — is leading a $43M investment round. And OpenAI has a dedicated fund specifically for OpenAI-powered startups.
Because of all the buzz, many startups will either surge or pivot to embrace AI solutions. Let’s see which ones will stick around!