For the First Time Ever: AI Beauty Pageant Crowns a Winner Who Beat Out 1,500+ Contestants

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Is this what straight guys think looks good?

🚫 Andrew Ng Opposes U.S. SB 1047 Bill

💰 Over Half of OpenAI's Revenue Comes from GPT Subscriptions

📊 OpenAI Proposes Five-Level AGI Framework

🌐 Zhipu AI Open-Sources CogVLM2-Video

🤖 Baidu Launches Humanoid AI Social App

💻 HONOR Unveils AI Laptop

💼 SoftBank Acquires UK's "NVIDIA Rival" Graphcore

📈 Fireworks AI Valued at $552 Million

🏆 First-Ever AI Beauty Pageant Crowns Winner

Andrew Ng Opposes U.S. SB 1047 Bill

Renowned AI scientist Andrew Ng published a post on social media publicly opposing California's proposed "SB 1047" bill, arguing it would deal a devastating blow to innovation in open-source large language models. The bill aims to require developers to take measures to prevent open-source models from being misused, illegally modified, or used to develop derivative generative AI products — but its behavioral definitions are vague and lack clarity.

UC Berkeley professor Ion Stoica also criticized the bill, calling its one-size-fits-all regulatory approach and joint liability provisions deeply unreasonable, with the potential to stifle California's innovation capacity in artificial intelligence. One of SB 1047's primary objectives, critics note, is to target China — preventing it from using the latest open-source models from Meta, Google, and others to compete with the U.S. in generative AI. Many netizens voiced support for Ng's position, arguing that the bill won't stop China's competitiveness in the field and will instead seriously hinder American open-source LLM innovation.

Over Half of OpenAI's Revenue Comes from GPT Subscriptions

OpenAI's revenue breakdown reveals that the bulk of its income comes from various paid tiers of its chatbot service, ChatGPT. Here's how it breaks down:

  • ChatGPT Plus: The primary revenue driver, accounting for 55% of total revenue, or $1.9 billion. This comes from roughly 7.7 million subscribers globally paying $20 per month.
  • ChatGPT Enterprise: 21% of revenue, approximately $714 million, from about 1.2 million business users paying $50 per month.
  • API: Despite being a core technical product, API revenue represents only 15% of the total, roughly $510 million, from developers and companies using the ChatGPT API.
  • ChatGPT Team: 8% of revenue, approximately $290 million, from about 980,000 subscribers paying $25 per month.

According to FutureSearch's analysis, OpenAI's annual recurring revenue (ARR) stands at $3.4 billion. This underscores how critical ChatGPT Plus individual subscriptions are to OpenAI's revenue stream, while also highlighting the market potential of enterprise solutions and API services.

OpenAI Proposes Five-Level AGI Framework

OpenAI has introduced a five-tier framework for measuring progress toward artificial general intelligence. Executives told employees the company considers itself at Level 1 but is approaching Level 2.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) refers to intelligent agents with strong learning and generalization capabilities that can autonomously generate and complete tasks based on complex, dynamic environments. AGI encompasses autonomous perception, cognition, decision-making, learning, execution, and social collaboration abilities, aligned with human values, ethics, and morality.

OpenAI's proposed levels are:

  • Level 1: Chatbots — AI with conversational language abilities
  • Level 2: Reasoners — AI that can solve human-level problems
  • Level 3: Agents — AI that can take action on behalf of users
  • Level 4: Innovators — AI that can aid in invention
  • Level 5: Organizations — AI that can perform organizational work

Zhipu AI Open-Sources CogVLM2-Video

Zhipu AI announced that its video understanding model, CogVLM2-Video, is now open-source.

Zhipu AI developed an automated temporal localization data construction method based on vision models, generating 30,000 time-related video Q&A data points. Using this new dataset alongside existing open-domain Q&A data, the team introduced multi-frame video images and timestamps as encoder inputs to train the CogVLM2-Video model.

Zhipu AI stated that CogVLM2-Video achieves state-of-the-art performance on public video understanding benchmarks and excels at video captioning and temporal localization.

Baidu Launches Humanoid AI Social App

Baidu recently launched an AI digital human social app called "Wen Xiaoyan" (文小言). Built on Baidu's Ernie large model technology, it allows users to communicate and interact with AI virtual characters in real time, forming emotional connections. The app's distinguishing feature is its use of realistic digital humans as social companions, creating a more authentic interactive experience.

In the Wen Xiaoyan app, users can swipe through the "Discover" feed to find digital human chat partners they like. Each AI digital human offers a unique chat experience — serving as an encyclopedia, life assistant, or emotional counselor. Their profiles display age, location, personality, and occupation, along with a voice self-introduction. Users can interact via handwriting, voice, or image sharing, and the digital humans respond with voice, text, and body language.

HONOR Unveils AI Laptop

HONOR released its first flagship ultralight laptop, the HONOR MagicBook Art 14, starting at 7,999 yuan. It features a 14.6-inch 3.1K OLED touchscreen and is powered by up to an Intel Core Ultra 7 processor, enabling AI-powered meeting summaries, voice-to-text transcription, and AI image and video search through edge-cloud collaboration with large models.

A standout feature is its globally debuting "Smart Sensing" magnetic camera — pressing the left-side storage slot pops out the camera, which can then magnetically attach to the top of the screen, usable facing either direction and storable when not in use.

SoftBank Acquires UK's "NVIDIA Rival" Graphcore

SoftBank has finally put an end to long-running market speculation, completing its acquisition of UK AI chip startup Graphcore for an undisclosed amount. Though Graphcore denied receiving a takeover offer from SoftBank in September 2023, the two companies ultimately reached an agreement.

Graphcore CEO Nigel Toon declined to disclose deal specifics at a press conference and dismissed market rumors of a $500 million price tag. Graphcore was valued at $2.8 billion and backed by Microsoft, Sequoia Capital, and other prominent investors. The company's Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) architecture is purpose-built for AI workloads — compared to NVIDIA's GPUs, IPUs are more specialized and efficient for AI applications, aligning with current technology trends.

Fireworks AI Valued at $552 Million

AI startup Fireworks AI announced it has raised $52 million in Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital, bringing its valuation to $552 million. Other investors include NVIDIA, AMD, and MongoDB. Fireworks AI is a generative AI platform for developers, offering high-performance models including Meta Llama 3 and FireLLaVA, along with text and image generation tools.

Fireworks AI's prior investors include Benchmark, Databricks Ventures, and executives from LinkedIn, Confluent, Meta, and OnePassword. The new round brings total funding to $77 million. The investment will help Fireworks AI drive the industry's shift toward compound AI systems, expand its team, and enhance its platform to help developers rapidly move AI applications from prototype to production.

Sequoia Capital partner Sonya Huang said Fireworks AI is well-positioned to lead this industry transformation. "The team's expertise in building high-performance inference stacks and their innovative approach to compound AI systems will give developers access to scalable AI solutions previously available only to tech giants."

First-Ever AI Beauty Pageant Crowns Winner

The world's first AI model beauty pageant, WAICAs [1], has concluded, with a total prize pool of £16,000 and over 1,500 AI characters and 10,000 AI team members participating globally.

The winner is Kenza Layli [2], an AI-generated beauty from Morocco who currently boasts over 200,000 Instagram followers and 45,000 TikTok followers.

With more and more AI Barbie dolls appearing before our eyes, is the emergence of Miss AI dream factories really a positive trend?

I hope you can find your true self — not next year, not tomorrow, but now.

— Game of Thrones

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References

[1] WAICAs: https://miss-ai.webflow.io/

[2] Kenza Layli: https://www.tiktok.com/@kenza.layli