I can confidently say artificial intelligence is advancing fast when a neural network 50 times larger than another can be trained at a 100 times less energy cost -- with just one year in between! On June 25, Alibaba DAMO Academy (the R&D branch of Alibaba) announced they had built M6, a large multimodal, multitasking language model with 1 trillion parameters -- already 5x GPT-3's size, which serves as the standard to measure the rate of progress for large AI models. The model was intended for multimodality and multitasking, going a step further than previous models towards general intelligence. In terms of abilities, M6 resembles GPT-3 and other similar models like Wu Dao 2.0 or MT-NGL 530B (from which we have very little information). InfoQ, a popular Chinese tech magazine compiles M6's main skills: "[It] has cognition and creativity beyond traditional AI, is good at drawing, writing, question and answer, and has broad application prospects in many fields such as e-commerce, manufacturing, literature and art."

Jack Clark, OpenAI's policy director, calls this trend of copying GPT-3, "model diffusion." Yet, among all the copies, Wu Dao 2.0 holds the record of being the largest of all with a striking 1.75 trillion parameters (10x GPT-3). Coco Feng reported for South China Morning Post that Wu Dao 2.0 was trained on 4.9TB of high-quality text and image data, which makes GPT-3's training dataset (570GB) pale in comparison. Yet, it's worth noting OpenAI researchers curated 45TB of data to extract clean those 570GB. It can learn from text and images and tackle tasks that include both types of data (something GPT-3 can't do).

OpenAI was born to tackle the challenge of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) -- an AI capable of doing anything a human can do. Such a technology would change the world as we know it. It could benefit us all if used adequately but could become the most devastating weapon in the wrong hands. That's why OpenAI took over this quest. To ensure it'd benefit everyone evenly: "Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole."