By the Matt Levine Vacation Rule, I took several days to go to Seattle and there was a truly epic amount of news. We had x.AI, Llama 2, upgrades to ChatGPT, a profile of Anthropic, a ton of very interesting papers on a variety of topics, several podcasts that demand listening, fully AI-generated South Park episodes and so much more. I could not fully keep up. Oh, and now we have Barbieheimer.

Thus, I have decided to spin out or push to next week coverage of four stories:

The release of Llama 2.

The plans of x.AI.

The profile in Vox of Anthropic.

Whether GPT-4 is getting worse, as was claimed.

These might get their own posts or they might get pushed to next week, depending on what I find on each. Same with my coverage of Oppenheimer since I haven’t seen it yet, and my bonus thoughts on Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (spoiler-free review of MI:DR for now: Good fun if you like such movies, some interesting perspective of on how people would handle such a situation, a lot of clear struggling between the writer who knows how any of this works and everyone else involved in the film [...]

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