✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

2024 letter | Zhengdong

zhengdongwang.com · 12,465 words · saved by 1 readers

What does it mean to give a model a capability? And while we’re on the subject, how do you give a model a capability? I’m talking about AI progress in the past year again. Contrary to the expectations that GPT-4 set in 2023, research labs emphasized the “capabilities” of the models they released this year over their scale. One example is “long context,” which is the ability to effectively process longer inputs, and looks a lot like “memory.” Models that handle over a million tokens of context, like Gemini (February) and Claude (March), can find the timestamp of a movie scene from just a line drawing. Another capability is native “multimodality,” generally available since Gemini 1.5 (February), Claude 3 (March), and GPT-4o (May). Multimodal models input and output text, images, and audio interchangeably, a capability that we already take completely for granted. Sora (February) and Veo 2 (December) developed video as a nascent modality. We’re just discovering the right interfaces, in the

2024 letter | Zhengdong 2024 letter | Zhengdong Wang [home] | [all posts] 2024 letter 2024-12-29 06:11 GMT What does it mean to give a model a capability ? And while we’re on the subject, how do you give a model a capability? I’m talking about AI progress in the past year again. Contrary to the expectations that GPT-4 set in 2023, research labs emphasized the “capabilities” of the models they released this year over their scale. One example is “long context,” which is the ability to effectively process longer inputs, and looks a lot like “memory.” Models that handle over a million tokens of co

Explore this link on the map →

related reading