Welcome back to Daily Zaps, your regularly-scheduled dose of AI news ⚡️ 

Here’s what we got for ya today:

• 🇺🇸 AGI Manhattan Project

• 🩻 ChatGPT beats doctors in diagnosing illnesses

• 🇫🇷 Mistral has entered the chat

• 🥵 NVIDIA chips overheating issues

Let’s get right into it!

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GOVERNMENT

US government commission pushes AI Manhattan Project

A U.S. congressional commission has proposed a major initiative to advance artificial intelligence (AI) development, similar to the Manhattan Project, to ensure the U.S. stays ahead of China’s technological advancements. The bipartisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) recommended granting the executive branch broad contracting authority for AI, cloud, and data center companies to develop AI technologies, including Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

This initiative is part of a broader effort to maintain U.S. competitiveness in emerging technologies like AI, quantum computing, and biotechnology. The report stresses that China’s rapid technological progress poses a threat to U.S. economic and military stability. In response, the commission suggested prioritizing AI projects with national security implications and expanding measures to limit U.S. investment in Chinese technologies that could enhance its military capabilities.

Link to report PDF.

HEALTHCARE

ChatGPT beats doctors in diagnosing illnesses

A study involving 50 doctors found that ChatGPT-4 outperformed medical professionals in diagnosing medical conditions from case reports. Doctors who used ChatGPT scored an average of 76%, while the chatbot scored 90%. Surprisingly, doctors often ignored the chatbot's suggestions, sticking to their own diagnoses, even when the AI pointed out flaws.

The study highlighted that many doctors did not know how to use the chatbot effectively, treating it like a search engine instead of leveraging its full capabilities. This issue underscores the challenge of integrating AI into healthcare, as doctors are not fully exploiting its potential, despite AI's ability to analyze complex cases more efficiently.

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STARTUPS

Mistral has entered the chat

Mistral’s web-based chatbot, Le Chat, has been enhanced with new features such as image generation, web search with citations, a creative canvas for ideation, and advanced document analysis, directly competing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Le Chat is free during its beta phase, offering a multimodal experience with capabilities like task automation and high-quality image generation, positioning Mistral as a strong competitor in the AI field.

Mistral also launched several updates, including a new large model, Pixtral Large, which boasts 124 billion parameters and excels at both text and visual data processing. The model is designed for tasks like multilingual OCR, chart understanding, and document analysis, and is available for research use on Hugging Face.

BIG TECH

NVIDIA chips overheating issues

Nvidia is facing significant challenges with its new Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs) and the accompanying server racks, which have encountered overheating issues when multiple GPUs are connected. Despite repeated design changes, customers, including major companies like Microsoft and Meta, are concerned about potential delays in receiving fully functional servers.

The Blackwell racks, which combine 72 GPUs to accelerate AI model training, require water cooling due to their high power demands. However, testing revealed that the racks' dense configuration led to overheating, complicating production.