Happy… Wednesday!
Rather than kicking off the week, we’re giving you a lift of energy and information to get through the rest of it. Truth-be-told, it’s been quite busy in the Larkwin Nest the last couple of weeks and that delayed this post. There is a lot to cover, so let’s get right into it.
TL;DR
OpenAI announces that their models will no longer be available to Cursor users starting November 12, Cursor indicated this represents 5% of their users so it isn’t existential but unfortunate.
Waterloo Tech Week is happening from September 11-17 with disparate hosts, topics, and locations across the Kitchener-Waterloo region.
Anthropic has released the next iteration of their Fable/Mythos models in 5.1.
Microsoft released a paper (and the code) showing that even the best models succeed at a higher rate on first pass, but become less reliable through 20 tries of the same task.
Shiny & Chrome - What’s New / What’s Useful
Taking Their Ball and Going Home
Following the acquisition of Anysphere (the organization that releases the popular AI-IDE Cursor) by SpacexAI, OpenAI announced they would no longer provide access to their GPT models to the software.
This would be the latest in a long-running tension between Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) and Elon Musk (CEO of SpaceXAI) stemming from the inception and growth of OpenAI as an organization.
OpenAI cited a change-in-control clause in their provider agreements had in place as the basis for this change. That same clause is likely to be available to other organizations in this space (Google, Anthropic) but the latter’s Tom Brown (co-founder and CCO) posted on X that
Users, both enterprise and otherwise, will also have the option of using their own API keys rather than the built-in models, so for teams reliant upon GPT for their workflows there is still a workaround.
Bigger! Faster? Better?
Anthropic announced just yesterday the release of their latest iterations of their Fable / Mythos class models. An iteration on their existing 5.0 models, they have released the standard series of benchmarks showing numbers going up effectively. They have also indicated that the use of the new models should be less expensive due to a pricing change in their caching tokens, as well as other improvements.
In this release was also a mention about access to Mythos being rolled out to partners as part of their Cyber Verification Program. This would be a shift away from having a smaller subset of bigger organizations with access to the tool to a much wider swath over time.
Fun fact: I have a daily sweep of news set up in case I miss anything interesting using Claude. It was blocked 3 times over the last two weeks from reporting the news to me due to Cyber Security Risks. As part of that, I applied to be part of this CVP and we have been granted access. No news will escape my gaze now!
There’s AI in my CRM
While there have been many integrations already between Salesforce and Claude that teams have been able to utilize, and other organizations have been able to build tools off of, the companies announced Claudeforce as the official AI integration tool for the platform last week.
Given the marketplace for third-party AI-driven tools for Salesforce has already been exploding in the last year, this puts the two big players teaming up to try and push out a bit more of the middlemen. Also touting integration along the entire Salesforce platform including Tableau and Slack. Whether this measures against the tools that have already been building and iterating to solve the problem of Data Analytics at scale using Natural Language Processing will be better told by their users.
The tool isn’t yet available and will go to open beta some time this month.
Works on my Machine - Our Team’s Learnings
If you’re going to read anything this week about what our team is learning, you should check out our COO Toni’s series about building our internal HRIS system.
I Built a Full People Ops System in a Weekend. Here's How (and Why).
I could have found the budget. I could have signed a contract with a fancy HR vendor and called it a day.
The second part will be published tomorrow so you won’t have to even wait very long for that.
The Real Heroes - Research and Academia
Thinkingbox Not Being Cool
Last month a few academics and a lot of Microsoft team members released a paper discussing how models are more likely to be successful on the first shot then with subsequent attempts. The touted Claude Opus 5 as the “best model” which succeeded at a rate of 65.4% on one try, but 25.3% on 20 attempts of the same task.
Even with those failures, many of them terminated clearly which would give the appearance of a successful run.
This is based on a simulated data-set meant to mimic workflows in various industries. Microsoft released the code for the project, called Thinkingbox, so you can even have a look at their methodology in more depth.
Ragging on RAG
Two researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, USA did a deep dive on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems for semantic search. It concludes that even when all of the prompts, policies, models and more are fixed, any index expansion can cause it to return different answers.
RAG has been a significant tool of risk mitigation for companies to avoid hallucinations (which we read another paper on last issue) but it is coming to conflict with ongoing research about just how grounded and accurate those systems can reliably be.
In my experience with larger clients (or smaller clients with larger datasets) the tools in this space are also becoming increasingly expensive to run and maintain. Every piece of data added to a RAG-based search system needs to be re-indexed and it is quite computationally expensive to do so.
Alternatively, there is growing research in the informational retrieval space for a different paradigm. A local company, Moorcheh, led by Dr. Majid Fekri has been building a case against Vector Databases for agent memory and has the research/studies to back it up. Worth having a look if you’re in the space of Big Data.
Standing on Business - Money, Policy & Politics
Hugging Face looks appetizing…
While it has been confirmed by neither company at this point, reporting has been showing that Nvidia is in the later stages of talks to acquire Hugging Face. Bloomberg reports the deal to be worth about $12.9 billion (USD) and include a $1 billion (USD) retention package for existing HF staff.
Hugging Face is a platform for the development and distribution of open-weight and general machine-learning technologies. They were recently in the news after OpenAI reported that one of their agents went “rogue” and hacked the platform.
While it is already backed by funding from Meta, Amazon, Google, Salesforce, and Nvidia itself, having this platform for open-weight/open-source distribution does fall into the greater trend of organizations being swallowed up by the largest of the tech giants one by one.
There is some level of dark humour in the company that provides the chips that allowed OpenAI to break into Hugging Face’s systems is now purchasing them.
To Build or not to Build
Second Shakespeare reference in a row? Let’s hope this trend does not continue…
Originally reported as a moratorium on data centre construction, Cambridge council voted to expedite the recently released Ontario Data Centre Playbook. Given that data centres are permitted in the region as “Information and Data Processing” there is no public role in the construction of these sites in employment zones.
On the flip side and just next door, Centre Wellington voted for a one year pause on construction of data centres.
This duality is especially important given Waterloo recently announcing a shortfall of water supply in the region, only to pull back on that statement with an expansion of the Mannheim Service Area to add 600 litres per second of new water capacity by 2032.
Decisions made by disparate councils in adjacent areas will be able to have an effect on that ongoing issue. While the environmental and social costs of Data Centres is an ongoing debate, the fact that the facilities require a significant amount of potable water to cool their systems is not.
B-Sides - Everything else good enough to post
The FTC is seeking comment on creating policy to regulate personalized pricing, a big use case for many AI systems analyzing large sets of customer data.
OpenAI announces their newest model, Astra, is a cybersecurity risk level Critical according to their own metrics. They are going to release it anyway.
Local academic Isaac Joffe will be presenting his Master’s thesis from UoW at the 20th Conference on Neurosymbolic Learning and Reasoning (NeSy) in Lisbon, Portugal this week. It proposes a new framework for automated solving of ARC-AGI benchmarks, something current LLMs/Neural nets are not as proficient at.
Anthropic’s case against the Pentagon’s blacklisting of their services was terminated last month with a ruling indicating that the model usage is protected speech.
This post was not written with any AI assistance and also directly in the CMS like a real hero. Which means you have to deal with all of the improper grammar and weird run-on sentences. Claude is used to help aggregate and factcheck sources as a bit of rubber-ducking. Written posts will always be marked on the bottom with how/if AI is used.