AI Models Take Center Stage: Google and Meta Make Major Updates

The AI world is always buzzing with activity, and this week was no exception. Google and Meta, two of the biggest players in the AI game, made significant updates to their AI models. Google released new Gemini models, which boasted improved performance and reduced costs. Meta, on the other hand, launched Llama 3. 2, a major update to its open-weights AI model lineup. Google's Gemini models are designed to handle complex tasks such as math and long-context processing. The new models showed a 7% increase in performance on the MMLU-Pro benchmark and a 20% improvement in math-related tasks. What's more, Google reduced the costs of its Gemini 1. 5 Pro model by 64% and 52% for input and output tokens, respectively. This makes it an attractive option for developers looking to build AI-powered applications.Meta's Llama 3. 2 is a significant update to its open-weights AI model lineup. The new models include vision-capable large language models and lightweight text-only models designed for edge and mobile devices. Meta claims that the vision models are competitive with leading closed-source models on image recognition and visual understanding tasks, while the smaller models reportedly outperform similar-sized competitors on various text-based tasks. But Google's AlphaChip is perhaps the most exciting development. It's a reinforcement learning method for designing chip layouts and has been used to create "superhuman chip layouts" in the last three generations of Google's Tensor Processing Units. Google claims that AlphaChip can generate high-quality chip layouts in hours, compared to weeks or months of human effort. The company has released a pre-trained checkpoint of AlphaChip on GitHub, sharing the model weights with the public.