💻 AMD's AI Chips Not A Threat to NVIDIA (yet)

AMD's AI chip was announced, but their stock actually dropped...meanwhile Tesla's Cybercab is met with both enthusiasm and skepticism.

Author

Jack Lajoie
October 11, 2024 • read time ~ 9 minutes

The Daily Current ⚡️

NVIDIA is going to be singing MC Hammer all day today. AMD’s rival chips aren’t looking like much of a threat, so far.

In other news, OpenAI introduced a benchmark tailored for AI agents, Tesla's Robotaxi finally dropped, ByteDance is pivoting to AI wearables, and HubSpot makes an acquisition of their own after their Google deal fell through.

 🔌 Plug Into These Headlines:

  1. AMD Faces Challenges Despite AI Chip Announcements

  2. Introducing MLE-bench: Testing AI Agents on Real-World ML Engineering

  3. Tesla's Cybercab Aims to Redefine Urban Transportation

  4. ByteDance Introduces AI-Powered Ola Friend Earbuds

  5. HubSpot to Acquire AI Billing Startup Cacheflow

AMD recently revealed its new AI-integrated chipsets across the Ryzen, Instinct, and EPYC product lines, designed to handle demanding AI workloads.

  • Memory Advancements: The Instinct MI325X accelerators feature cutting-edge memory architecture tailored for AI with 1.8x higher memory capacity and 1.3x more bandwidth than Nvidia's H200 GPU.

  • Enterprise AI: AMD's Ryzen AI Pro chips, which are already powering Microsoft's Copilot+ laptops, signal a push into enterprise-grade AI.

  • Stock Performance: Despite the product announcements, AMD's stock dropped by 6%, reflecting market skepticism.

  • Investor Sentiment: Concerns remain regarding AMD’s ability to scale and execute its AI ambitions, especially in the face of strong competition from Nvidia.

While its promising moment, the long-term success of AMD's AI strategy hinges on effective execution and the ability to win over investors, particularly as competition intensifies. AMD's future AI roadmap includes the MI350 series in 2025, but the market will be closely watching whether the company can deliver.

MLE-bench is a newly launched benchmark designed to evaluate how well AI agents perform real-world machine learning engineering tasks. With 75 curated Kaggle competitions, MLE-bench sets the stage for agents to be tested on challenges like model training, data preparation, and experimentation.

  • Public Accessibility: MLE-bench is open-sourced, enabling researchers to use these real-world competitions for further testing and refinement of AI models.

  • AI Agent Scaffolding: Several scaffolds for AI agents were tested, with AIDE outperforming other setups in terms of effectiveness on these tasks.

  • Real-World Tasks: The benchmark mirrors real-world machine learning engineering challenges, testing AI agents across domains such as natural language processing, computer vision, and signal processing.

  • Performance Baseline: Human baselines for each competition were established using Kaggle’s public leaderboards, allowing direct comparisons between AI agents and human engineers.

  • Top Performance: OpenAI’s o1-preview model, using AIDE scaffolding, achieved a bronze or higher in 16.9% of the competitions.

The benchmark aims to mirror the practical skills required in the field while also pushing AI systems to adapt to complex environments. For a deeper dive into the full research, check out the full paper.

At Tesla’s "We, Robot" event, Elon Musk unveiled the highly anticipated Cybercab, a fully autonomous robotaxi priced at $30,000, designed for a future without human drivers.

Despite the excitement, Tesla’s stock dropped as investors questioned whether the company can meet regulatory requirements and deliver on time amid growing concerns.

ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has launched its first AI-powered wearable, the Ola Friend earbuds, exclusively in China. These $170 wireless earbuds let users interact with ByteDance’s AI chatbot, Doubao, without needing to use a smartphone, marking a significant step in ByteDance’s expansion into AI wearables.

  • AI Chatbot Integration: The Ola Friend earbuds are integrated with ByteDance’s chatbot, Doubao, allowing users to engage in conversations or complete tasks without needing to check their smartphone.

  • Chatbot Activation: Users can activate the chatbot with the voice command "Doubao Doubao," giving them easy access to AI-powered help at any time.

  • AI Wearables Push: This product signals ByteDance’s strategy to compete in the growing AI wearables market, entering the space dominated by companies like Meta and Snap.

The Doubao chatbot China’s most widely used GenAI app, and ByteDance looks to be hoping to build on that success. They are set to start sales October 17th.

HubSpot is expanding its enterprise software capabilities with the acquisition of AI billing startup Cacheflow, in a deal valued at roughly $100 million. This move strengthens HubSpot’s ability to offer comprehensive invoicing tools alongside its marketing, sales, and customer service software.

  • Cacheflow Growth: Founded in 2021, Cacheflow has experienced rapid growth, doubling its revenue every four months, supported by $16 million in venture capital funding from Alphabet and Notable Capital.

  • Invoicing Expansion: The acquisition enhances HubSpot’s invoicing services, allowing businesses to integrate AI-driven billing solutions with their existing sales, marketing, and customer support platforms.

  • Enterprise Software Struggles: HubSpot’s move comes as enterprise software startups face tougher market conditions, with slower sales growth and more challenging fundraising environments.

Left out in the cold after the Google deal fell through earlier this year, the CRM software (which has struggled lately) seems prepared to fight it out.