🧙🏼 Amazon's "Olympus" model is almost here

Howdy, wizards.

Here’s what’s brewing in AI this Friday.

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1. Amazon’s “Olympus” model is around the corner

Rumour has it that Amazon has developed a new model under the codename “Olympus”, and it might be launching already next week during the AWS re:Invent conference, according to The Information.

The model is apparently great at image and video understanding, and can recognise specific scenes from what it is shown based on text prompts, such as a winning shot in a basketball game. It is apparently not as performant as the leading frontier models when it comes to text generation, but the video understanding might still make it an attractive alternative for many use cases.

Amazon is getting serious about the AI race. They recently doubled their investment in Anthropic (makers of Claude) and are looking towards competing with Nvidia on AI chips.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Training LLMs from scratch is an expensive game, and Amazon has the funds to play. Just because they’ve been deepening their ties with Anthropic lately, it doesn’t mean they’re not going to have their own AI models too.

“Olympus” has been in the works for a long time though, and might’ve been the in-house model they reportedly first had in mind for the next Alexa version—before eventually deciding on using Claude. Entering a market with very tough competition, it will be interesting to see if Amazon’s model can stand out and carve out its own space.

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2. Linkup is building a legal bridge between LLMs and content publishers

French startup Linkup is creating a solution to a key challenge in AI: how can publishers monetize their content when readers no longer visit their sites, but rather get information directly from chatbots? Tools like ChatGPT (with web search), Perplexity, even Google itself with AI overviews, demonstrate just how quick and convenient AI is becoming at giving us up-to-date answers from around the web. In some instances they have a licensing deal in place, but often it’s scraped information that the publisher simply isn’t compensated for.

Linkup's API connects developers of AI tools (or rather, any tools that use LLMs) with premium content sources through direct licensing deals and CMS integration so they can fetch content without scraping. Publishers earn revenue based on how much their content is accessed by the applications.

Their approach stands in contrast to AI companies lifting content without paying, which has led to high-profile lawsuits like the ongoing case between OpenAI and the New York Times. By serving as a marketplace and intermediary between content publishers and AI developers, the goal is creating a sustainable publishing ecosystem where everyone benefits.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Some say that the health of the web, in this age of AI companies scraping it all up without paying for it, can only be saved by new business models – this is potentially one such approach. There’s also another similar startup named Scalepost which is currently working with Perplexity.

As long as the usage is fairly compensated for the publisher, they have a lot of incentive to join a marketplace like this. For the application developers though, it really depends on the legal system stepping in and sanctioning some of the vast web scraping that current AI companies are doing – if they don’t, it’s essentially a wild west and I’d think this approach has a less potential.

In any case, it’s encouraging to see innovation like this that can potentially ensure the longevity of quality content on the web.

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