March 20, 2025 News
Nvidia Faces Growing Challenges Despite Record GTC Attendance and New Product Launches
At GTC 2025, Nvidia unveiled new chips and products to a record 25,000 attendees while addressing growing challenges including U.S. tariffs, emerging competitors like DeepSeek, and AI clients developing in-house alternatives. CEO Jensen Huang emphasized that reasoning models will increase demand for Nvidia chips and announced plans for U.S. manufacturing investments to address potential supply chain issues.
Skynet Chance (0%): While Nvidia's new chips may accelerate AI development, this news primarily concerns business positioning and hardware manufacturing rather than introducing capabilities that would specifically increase or decrease AI control risks, and thus has negligible impact on Skynet probability.
Skynet Date (+0 days): The developments described are primarily about market competition and business adaptations rather than technological breakthroughs that would substantially alter the timeline for advanced AI capabilities, having minimal effect on when potential AI risk scenarios might emerge.
AGI Progress (+0.03%): Nvidia's new Vera Rubin GPUs with doubled inference capabilities represent an incremental advance in AI hardware that will support more powerful models, though the primary focus appears to be on business positioning rather than revolutionary technical capabilities.
AGI Date (-1 days): The competitive dynamics described—including Nvidia's response to reasoning models and announcement of faster inference chips—could moderately accelerate AI development timelines by ensuring continued hardware advancement despite emerging market challenges.
Perplexity AI Eyes Massive $1B Funding at $18B Valuation Amid Search Competition
AI search startup Perplexity is reportedly in early talks to raise up to $1 billion at an $18 billion valuation, doubling its previous valuation from December. The company, which has reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue, faces increasing competition as Anthropic adds web search to Claude and Google tests an AI-powered search engine.
Skynet Chance (+0.03%): The massive investment and valuation growth indicate accelerating commercialization of AI search capabilities, potentially incentivizing rapid development with less focus on safety considerations in a competitive market.
Skynet Date (-2 days): The intensifying competition between Perplexity, Anthropic, and Google is likely to accelerate development timelines for increasingly autonomous AI systems, pushing towards agentic capabilities as evidenced by Perplexity's new Comet browser.
AGI Progress (+0.04%): While not a direct technical breakthrough, the significant capital influx and market validation for AI search shows increasing capability for AI systems to access, synthesize and contextualize web information, representing progress towards more generally capable systems.
AGI Date (-2 days): The extreme funding levels and frenzied competition in AI search will likely accelerate development cycles and investment in underlying AI infrastructure, potentially bringing forward AGI timelines by increasing resources devoted to improving AI capabilities.
Anthropic Introduces Web Search Capability to Claude AI Assistant
Anthropic has added web search capabilities to its Claude AI chatbot, initially available to paid US users with the Claude 3.7 Sonnet model. The feature, which includes direct source citations, brings Claude to feature parity with competitors like ChatGPT and Gemini, though concerns remain about potential hallucinations and citation errors.
Skynet Chance (+0.01%): While the feature itself is relatively standard, giving AI systems direct ability to search for and incorporate real-time information increases their autonomy and range of action, slightly increasing potential for unintended behaviors when processing web content.
Skynet Date (+0 days): This capability represents expected feature convergence rather than a fundamental advancement, as other major AI assistants already offered similar functionality, thus having negligible impact on overall timeline predictions.
AGI Progress (+0.03%): The integration of web search expands Claude's knowledge base and utility, representing an incremental advance toward more capable and general-purpose AI systems that can access and reason about current information.
AGI Date (-1 days): The competitive pressure that drove Anthropic to add this feature despite previous reluctance suggests market forces are accelerating development of AI capabilities slightly faster than companies might otherwise proceed, marginally shortening AGI timelines.
OpenAI Enhances Voice and Transcription AI Models with Advanced Control Features
OpenAI has released new AI models for transcription and voice generation that offer improved accuracy and control over previous versions. The new text-to-speech model allows developers to steer voice characteristics using natural language, while the transcription models reduce hallucinations but show significant error rates for certain languages.
Skynet Chance (+0.04%): The explicit focus on developing more human-like, emotion-capable voices for "agentic systems" increases the potential for AI systems to manipulate human responses and operate more independently, creating subtle pathways toward autonomous AI with social influence capabilities.
Skynet Date (-1 days): OpenAI's emphasis on agentic systems that can independently complete tasks for users, combined with more natural voice interactions, accelerates the development pathway toward increasingly autonomous AI that can operate in human social environments.
AGI Progress (+0.05%): These improvements represent meaningful advances in AI's ability to process and generate human communication across modalities, particularly the increased steering capabilities that allow for contextually appropriate responses, getting closer to human-like communication abilities.
AGI Date (-2 days): The explicit framing of these voice and transcription models as components for building autonomous agents indicates OpenAI is advancing its agentic capabilities faster than previously disclosed, potentially shortening the timeline to more general AI systems.
SoftBank Acquires Chip Designer Ampere Computing for $6.5 Billion
SoftBank Group is acquiring Ampere Computing, a semiconductor designer specializing in ARM-based server chips, for $6.5 billion in an all-cash deal. This acquisition follows SoftBank's series of AI-focused investments, including partnerships with OpenAI and investments in AI infrastructure, as part of its strategy to support artificial superintelligence development.
Skynet Chance (+0.05%): SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son's explicit goal of developing "artificial super intelligence" combined with strategic vertical integration of chip design capabilities signals a concerted push toward powerful AI with less emphasis on safety considerations than capability advancement.
Skynet Date (-3 days): SoftBank's aggressive consolidation of AI infrastructure assets and direct statement about pursuing "artificial super intelligence" suggests a concerted effort to accelerate advanced AI development timelines through control of key compute infrastructure elements.
AGI Progress (+0.06%): By acquiring specialized AI chip design capabilities and integrating them with existing Arm holdings, SoftBank is positioning to overcome compute bottlenecks that currently limit AI scaling, potentially enabling much larger and more capable models.
AGI Date (-3 days): SoftBank's systematic investment in the full AI stack from chip design to partnerships with leading AI labs represents a concerted push to accelerate AGI development, with Masayoshi Son's direct references to superintelligence indicating an intention to compress development timelines.