Full Title: Why AI Companies Are Recruiting Hackers for Help đź’»
Highlights
For decades, web pages have used a piece of code called robots.txt that acts like a museum security guard. It says “You can look at our site all you want, but please don’t take anything.” Well, according to a content licensing startup called TollBit, AI companies have lately been sneaking in after hours and grabbing things right off the walls. (View Highlight)
What’s the evidence? Tech publications Wired and Forbes recently claimed that some of their articles had been lifted and republished on AI platform Perplexity without proper attribution. But TollBit emphasized that the problem is bigger than any single company. OpenAI, Anthropic, and others also appear to be ignoring these longstanding conventions. “The more publisher logs we ingest, the more this pattern emerges,” TollBit wrote. (View Highlight)
In 2022, before the launch of ChatGPT, a startup called Etched was already convinced that transformers would one day become the algorithm-of-choice for AI companies. Transformers — the neural networks that power GPT-4, Llama, Stable Diffusion, and nearly every other major LLM — are unique because they can break sentences down into individual words and figure out how to use those words in future contexts. (View Highlight)
Most GPUs can handle lots of different AI-oriented tasks. But Etched says it’s built the “world’s first transformer-specific AI chip” — one that was designed from the ground up to work exclusively with transformer algorithms, and nothing else. (View Highlight)
Etched claims that while competitors like Nvidia have been building chips that get bigger and bigger, they haven’t managed to develop ones that are also more powerful — at least not in the past few years. That’s because most AI chip companies have to save space on their semiconductors for algorithms besides transformers. (View Highlight)
The company thinks AI startups will come to rely on its chips as they continue to scale up toward super-intelligence — adding that it has already courted tens of millions of hardware reservations from early customers. It recently raised $120 million in a Series A funding round, including contributions from Peter Thiel, Kyle Vogt, and other notable investors. (View Highlight)
