The 3rd Era of AI Language Models

September 19, 2024

A 3rd Paradigm for AI models

o1 is not just better, it is different

What Happened? The o1-family was trained in a different way to all models previously. It was fine-tuned with only answered that had been confirmed, or verified, to be correct, and given the computational ‘test-time’ to perform serial calculations first. This is new.

Yes, a log scale, but inference compute is 10x-ing every year it seems

  • First, models predicted the most likely next word. Think 2018-2021, for transformer-based language models.

  • Second, they were rewarded for words that were helpful, harmless, and honest. Think RLHF or RLAIF, 2022-2023.

  • Now, with the o1 family, they are being rewarded for being objectively correct. Think 2024-???

So What? The results are impressive, and are in no ways close to a peak. This does not break the fundamental paradigm of relying on training data to predict an output, but it is a new training method (albeit one I foreshadowed on the channel in 2023!). And there is no reason to believe that this paradigm cannot be extended to videos and mother modalities, leading to a step-change in physics-adherent realism (yes, leaving Sora far behind). If LLMs are an off-ramp to AGI, that ramp is taking us to awfully interesting places.

Does It Change Everything? Rating = ⚄

But video realism is not waiting for o1

What Happened? AI image and video generators keep getting better, at a stunning pace. Yes, deepfake videos too. Kling has an epic motion brush. Runway has video to video. And Minimax is not too shabby either.

AI-generated frame of a video, generated by facecam.ai

  • You already could, but it is getting ever easier to livestream video using a face that’s not your own. This is facecam.ai. Might wanna warn anyone vulnerable in your life not to trust even live videos now, from untrusted sources.

  • Kling allows you to choose the motion of a video, which allows for fascinating flexibility in generation. Point the brush of a video frame in a direction, and the cat jumps there.

  • There is no shortage of rivals either, even if Sora never got released. Minimax from Hailuo, just got a major upgrade.

So What? Like the famous but likely apocryphal boiling frog, society is slowly being confronted with fake images, video and now livestreams. We are running a giant experiment on the effects on trust and social cohesiveness. I am not optimistic. But I do enjoy making AI videos as much as the next person.

Does It Change Everything? Rating = ⚂

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