The Signal: Elon's AI is all grown up, Google's voice AI joins the chat party, and Gen-3 Alpha Turbo

Hey friends 👋 Happy Sunday.

Here’s your weekly dose of AI and introspection.

AI Highlights

1. Elon's AI is all grown up.

This week, Elon Musk's xAI announced Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini. These are frontier language models with state-of-the-art reasoning capabilities, now available to Grok users on the X platform.

Alex’s take: Grok-2 is already outperforming both Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4-Turbo on the LMSYS leaderboard, with serious improvements in chat, coding, and reasoning. It’s nice to see the AI race accelerate in real time, and Elon’s team are shipping… fast.

2. Google's voice AI joins the chat party.

This week, Google gate-crashed the AI voice chat scene with Gemini Live. It brings "in-depth" convos across 10 voices to your phone, fit with interruption handling and real-time adaptation. This is available even when your phone is locked.

Alex’s take: Whilst OpenAI’s advanced voice mode is still in limited alpha, Google is pushing forward. The drive towards real-time assistants is now getting a whole lot more interesting.

3. Runway's AI video, blink and you'll miss it.

Runway unveiled Gen-3 Alpha Turbo. It’s 7x faster than the original Gen-3 Alpha and 50% cheaper, supporting up to 10-second video clip generation.

Alex's take: It feels like the future of video is almost in post-production. If you’re curious about how to create videos with Gen-3 Alpha, you can check out Runway’s own help guide here.

1 Article I Enjoyed

Unreasonably Effective AI with Demis Hassabis.

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, sat down with Hannah Fry to discuss the recent AI explosion and its implications.

Their chat got me thinking about where AI is heading.

My favourite takeaways:

• AI has surprised even the experts with its "unreasonable effectiveness"—doing things we didn't expect it could.

• Language models have shown real conceptual understanding and world knowledge despite only being trained on text.

• Demis thinks we could cure most diseases within 10-20 years if AI drug design pans out.

• He predicts AGI could arrive by 2030, in line with DeepMind's original 20-year timeline.

• Over the next 2-4 years, Demis believes agentic systems will be able to combine the expert planning capabilities of AlphaGo with the understanding of LLMs like Gemini.

The pace of AI progress has been wild over the last 2 years. While Demis' predictions sound optimistic, he's been pretty on the mark so far.

1 Idea I Learned

AI is becoming the great equaliser.

Boy, I didn’t expect this post to resonate quite like it did.

My partner struggled with dyslexia, and using tools like ChatGPT and Grammarly has enabled her to express ideas without the dread of a blank page or an unforeseen typo.

AI developments are levelling the playing field for all learning difficulties so everyone has a fair shot.

This is super exciting, considering the ‘ChatGPT moment’ happened not even two years ago.

1 Quote to Share

Paul Graham on AI improvement:

“A friend in the AI business estimated that the price/performance of AI had decreased by about 100x in each of the past 2 years. 10,000x in 2 years. I don't think any technology has improved so fast in my lifetime. And this is very general-purpose technology too.”

AI is intelligence on demand. It’s way quick and way faster than what we can get from humans. I believe there will never be another technology in our lifetimes that will diffuse and improve as fast as AI.

Source: Paul Graham on X

1 Question to Ponder

“What AI tools do you use on a regular basis?”

1. Content: Claude

Alex’s take: Sorry ChatGPT, there’s a new kid on the block. Well… not that new, but my clear favourite when it comes to generating content in my voice. Claude has this playful, energetic vibe that I’ve found other LLMs just can’t reach. When I’m wanting to explore new ideas, I provide Claude with a bank of examples. It could be for email, a LinkedIn post or an excerpt of writing, and it does a great job of replicating the voice I want.

2. Organising: Sparkle

Alex’s take: Sparkle came on my radar after my friend Dan Shipper invited me to be a beta tester back in July. For context, I have serious anxiety when it gets to the end of the week, and my downloads, desktop, and documents folders are a complete mess. Sparkle organises all of my files automatically with AI. This could be the end of organising.

3. Audio: ElevenLabs

Alex’s take: ElevenLabs is my go-to for generating audio. Being able to effortlessly clone your own voice and generate audio on demand still flabbergasts me to this day. Plus, you can translate across to 29 different languages—this is audio at scale. If you want a laugh, clone the voice of your friend or partner and sit there together, writing your text-to-speech prompt. I’ve spent way too much time doing this and dying with laughter.

4. Coding: Cursor

Alex’s take: Coding used to terrify me. I thought it was some arcane skill only people in dark basements could handle. Needless to say, I was put off for many years, unwilling to take the leap of faith. After seeing Cursor frequently pop up on my for you page on X (Twitter), I saw things differently. Cursor is an AI code editor. Sahil Lavingia’s ‘Coding with Cursor’ course (totally free) has been super helpful so far to get to grips with basic functionality and start my first project.

5. Writing: Grammarly

Alex’s take: If I had a dollar for every time Grammarly flagged a typo before sending an email. Not only that, Grammarly’s AI has a nice touch where it helps improve my sentence conjugation, grammar, and brevity. I find both the Chrome extension and the desktop app to be a great duo for my workflows. Whilst it doesn’t always provide great improvement suggestions, it’s a staple in helping me write effectively with ease.

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See you next week,

Alex Banks

P.S. The ocean is shrouded in mystery