Shares of Nvidia rose 4% yesterday and are up another 3% today in a market that's otherwise flat. Is that a tell?
Here are three very simple reasons that I think it is:
1) ChatGPT voice advanced was released today
I've been using ChatGPT voice for awhile and it's very good but because of the latency, it wasn't natural and it was clunky. The new version was demoed months ago but was slow to roll out. It's now been released and it's everything that was promised and more. I demoed it today and it's whatever Siri was supposed to be plus so much more.
Now, I'm still annoyed that Scarlett Johansson took Sky away from us but there are some big improvements in the experience and it's a total gamechanger. It also gives me great confidence that they can roll out and scale the video features.
Bad news though if you're in the EU or UK as it's not being released there because of the insane regulatory regime in Europe. This image, to me, is probable the single defining image of everything about Europe's economic competitiveness.
2) ChatGPT o1
Two weeks ago, ChatGPT released version o1. This rollout was big and didn't get nearly enough attention. There was a fear that LLMs had stalled at a certain level as Anthropic and others all got to around the same level as GPT. But this 'strawberry' model kicked down the door to PhD-level thinking in a big leap forward. Perhaps more more importantly, it adds great credibility to Sam Altman and others who say that great things are coming.
"It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there," he wrote in a blog post and if you only read one more thing today, make it that post.
"It won’t happen all at once, but we’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI; eventually we can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine. Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. We can imagine similar ideas for better healthcare, the ability to create any kind of software someone can imagine, and much more.
With these new abilities, we can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today; in the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now."
Do you want to believe?
3) Microsoft certainly believes
Sam Altman talks. A lot of people talk. But if you don't believe them, then maybe you should believe it when money talks. This week, Microsoft announced it will fund a reopening of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant and buy all its power for 20 years to fuel its data centers.
This isn't a sign that megacap tech is dabbling in AI. This isn't a hedged bet, it's the smartest people in technology going 'all in' on the transformative power of AI.
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