Welcome to Last Week in AI, a post I publish every Friday to share a couple things I’ve discovered in the world of AI last week. I spend way too much time in Discord, on Twitter and browsing reddit so you don’t have to!
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This week, we get some perspective on just how cheap the new AI models from Anthropic are getting as well as take a look at some of the ways the US Government is using AI.
Let’s dive in!
AI processing continues to get cheaper
Slightly long Tweet linked down below, but by Alex’s analysis of the cost of Haiku, Anthropic’s newest LLM, “you could have Haiku process all the words a person says in their ENTIRE life for just about $300.”
We don’t currently have the technology to capture every word a person has said in their entire lifetime. But with some of the AI wearable technology that’s coming on the scene, we’re not far off from a world where your lifetime of speech could be captured. This would allow you to ask questions about past conversations you had, call up a specific dialog and more with the ability for an LLM to have all the context it needs to be the perfect personal assistant.
I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether that’s a dream or a nightmare.
The US Government reveals how they use AI
Through a series of clicking on .gov links from an AI report I was reading, I discovered that the US Government maintains a catalog about how various departments and agencies are using AI tools. The use cases for each department are in different formats and a bit difficult to parse, the insights are pretty interesting.
For example, the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is currently using AI to “Identify and locate aquatic weeds”. While NOAA has deployed “AI-based automation of acoustic detection of marine mammals” in the region of Alaska.
Browse all departments usage here. There’s some pretty 🤯 stuff in there!
See you next week!
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