The Four Wars of the AI Stack (Dec 2023 Recap)

As we turn the 2023rd page of human history1, the main theaters of conflict among AI startups and stakeholders have become apparent: We saw all elements of these in December 2023: The Data War - with OpenAI announcing a partnership with Axel Springer (see also its deal with the AP and its Data Partnerships program), the NYT bringing a lawsuit on OpenAI demanding shutdown of all GPTs, and Apple now offering $50m for data contracts with publishers. Meanwhile there is an undeniable rise in interest in synthetic data both at NeurIPS and at Deepmind. The GPU/Inference War - with the price per million Mixtral output tokens starting at ~$2 and rapidly racing down to $0.27 in a week (details below), and fresh benchmark drama between Anyscale and other inference providers. New research into new model architectures (Mamba, RWKV), and moving compute off Nvidia (Modular, tinycorp, Apple MLX) make more out of existing GPU resources. The Multimodality War - with Midjourney soft-launching v6, a web U

As we turn the 2023rd page of human history1, the main theaters of conflict among AI startups and stakeholders have become apparent: We saw all elements of these in December 2023: The Data War - with OpenAI announcing a partnership with Axel Springer (see also its deal with the AP and its Data Partnerships program), the NYT bringing a lawsuit on OpenAI demanding shutdown of all GPTs, and Apple now offering $50m for data contracts with publishers. Meanwhile there is an undeniable rise in interest in synthetic data both at NeurIPS and at Deepmind. The GPU/Inference War - with the price per milli