Google’s stark AGI warning

Thursday’s AI Report

• 1. ⚠️ Google’s stark AGI warning
• 2. 🦶 In partnership with Kick
• 3. 🤯 OpenAI’s shocking costs revealed!
• 4. 💡 OpenAI’s non-profit expert group
• 5. 💼 In partnership with Innovating with AI
• 6. ⚙️ Trending AI Tools
• 7. 🏗️ Practical AI Applications
• 8. 📑 Recommended Resources

Read Time: 5 minutes

‼️The new AI Report podcast episode launches tomorrow where Liam talks to the founder of multiple AI start-ups—including The Signal and GrowHub—Alex Banks, about how he went from 0 engagement to 1M views on his socials, every week.

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Google’s stark AGI warning

🚨 Our Report 

Google DeepMind has published a 145-page document (co-authored by DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg) outlining its approach to ensuring the safety of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—AI that can complete any task that a human can—which it says is designed to be a starting point for further discussion, not necessarily a set of step-by-step instructions everyone should follow.

🔓 Key Points

• The paper predicts that AGI will arrive by 2030 and warns about the potential for it to cause “severe harm” and “existential risks” that could “permanently destroy humanity.”

• It criticizes Anthropic’s approach to AI safety as lacking “robust training, monitoring, and security” and slams OpenAI’s optimism for automating AI alignment (which ensures AI goals align with human values.

• It proposes AI firms should develop techniques to restrict access to bad actors, understand how AI systems make decisions, and create secure, regulatory-controlled environments to limit potential harm.

🔐 Relevance 

Google’s advocation for better safety protocols—including robust training, proactive monitoring, and multi-layered security systems—comes as interest in addressing the potential risks posed by AI has significantly waned over the past few months, as governments and tech conglomerates (globally) prioritize beating other countries in the race to achieve AGI, with many feeling that the “biggest risk could be missing out."

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🚨 Our Report

After announcing the impending launch of its highly capable reasoning AI model–o3—late last year, it’s been revealed that its operational costs could way surpass initial expectations.

🔓 Key Points

• Originally, the Arc Foundation (which manages the ARC-AGI benchmark, used for assessing the capabilities of advanced AI), thought o3 would cost $3,000 per task, but it’s since updated this to $30,000, per task. 

• It used the pricing of the o1-pro as a comparable reference (OpenAI hasn’t revealed o3 pricing yet), believing it to be a “closer approximation to the true cost of o3...because the compute used was as large."

• The huge cost is directly related to o3’s computational demands as o3high (the highest configuration of o3) needed 172x more computational power than o3low (the lowest configuration) when processing tasks.

🔐 Relevance

This just highlights the substantial expense of running complex AI models—and shows that it could be even costlier than originally thought—and although some believe that despite the high price tag, it still costs less than it would to hire a human to complete the same tasks, although others think these models just aren’t as efficient—with reports that it took o3hig over 1,000 attempts to complete each task in the ARC-AGI benchmark to achieve its best score.

• OpenAI has formed an expert group to make sure its non-profit, charitable arm remains impactful and effective, as it forges forward with its transition into a for-profit model.

• The group has experts from various sectors including health, science, education, and public services, and it will give OpenAI critical insights into challenges that nonprofits face in the current climate.

• This move is clearly a nod to its original founding mission—to build AGI for the benefit of humanity—while it navigates the move towards becoming a for-profit (...and possibly to counter Musk’s ongoing lawsuit?)

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QUICK HITS

• Anthropic’s AI chatbot for colleges and universities

• Google’s Notebook leader takes over as head of Gemini

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