Alex Volkov

ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week · Claude now leads 26% of Anthropic’s R&D, Meta drops an 816B open…

• What's the Earnings Limit for Offering Muse Spark?

  Alex Volkov says a company can offer Muse Spark as long as yearly revenue stays under $20 million. He reads a restriction that applies where third-party outputs of such models, models of service, and the aggregate gross revenue of the licensee and its affiliates exceed $20 million, or the equivalent, during any consecutive 12-month period. Alex Volkov says there is probably a license once revenue crosses that line, and he does not say what that license requires.

  Meta put out two huge releases the same week. Muse Wonder and Wonderful landed first, and Alex Volkov says folks are split on them a little bit. Then Meta released the open source version, Muse Spark, at 816 billion parameters with

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• How Do Most People Use AI Models?

  Nathan Benaich bets that 90% of people use a model at best to read their email, answer their email, or ask questions the same way they ask Google. He says they probably never click the work button. Most people do not even know they can swipe left, open Codex, and talk to the machine so it does the work. He says knowing you can make the machine do the work is so far away, which is one reason he has started saying the big labs should open a genius bar or an actual physical store and walk regular people through the magical things they can do with AI.

  Alex Volkov asked Nathan Benaich how regular folks on the street view AI, what use cases he tracks, and whether personal agents, Glockbots and Mu

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• Do Americans Prefer a Nuclear Plant to a Data Center?

  Nathan Benaich says Americans would much prefer living near a nuclear power plant than a data center. A survey found the preference, and he calls the finding quite wild.

  Nathan Benaich frames the objection as not-in-my-backyard opposition: not wanting a data center next to the garden. The objection is a real problem, hampering the buildout of data centers and also influencing part of the midterms, which arrive in the next couple of weeks.

  Alex Volkov says the show covered the survey and still cannot believe it, amid people on the street talking about AI boiling the planet. Nathan Benaich says the pattern is certainly happening in Europe and in Korea and other places too, where a small prop

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• What Was AI Engineer New York About?

  Alex Volkov says Anthropic is likely to IPO on Wall Street, and the second New York Artificial Intelligence Engineer conference sat beside Wall Street, so the event focused on finance. Latent Space called the big theme autonomy versus security.

  Two Sigma, Capital One, Bridgewater, Apollo, and Bloomberg were all there, along with OpenAI and Anthropic. Alex Volkov first told anyone he had a podcast while heading to Artificial Intelligence Engineer in 2023 to cover it. Since then the conference blew up, and SWIX, co-host of Latent Space and creator of the Artificial Intelligence Engineer category, has kept curating the lineup. The show had already gone live from Moscone West with Wolfram Raven

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• Did Grok Voice 3 Top the Voice Boards?

  Alex Volkov says xAI dropped Grok Voice 3, and he puts the word apparently on that drop. What he states outright is the ranking. Grok Voice 3 tops the speech to speech leaderboards.

  He asks the room whether anyone can see the speech to speech leaderboard, then gives the result. Grok Voice 3 sits at the top. He follows the ranking with a second report and hedges that one the same way. Apparently, all of the Starlink support calls are now used by Grok Voice 3. Alex Volkov is passing along the week's news on the new xAI speech model, and the Starlink line stays a claim he heard, not a rollout he confirms in his own voice.

  The firm point in the rundown is the leaderboard. Grok Voice 3 leads sp

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