AI art sells for $728,784

👋 Good morning/evening (wherever you are). It’s Friday. Let’s make it spicy and give you something more controversial.

Below are excerpts from Artnet:

A couple days ago, Christie’s closed out its first all-A.I. auction, Augmented Intelligence, with a haul that surpassed expectations. The sale brought in $728,784, with many lots reaching beyond their high estimates.

In all, 28 of the 34 lots sold, with some works, including those by Botto, Jake Elwes, and Pinder Van Arman, failing to find buyers.

According to Christie’s, the auction saw many new and young bidders. Some 37 percent of them were first-timers at the auction house, and almost half were Millennials and Gen Z.

Augmented Intelligence, however, has not proceeded without controversy. On February 8, not long after the auction was announced, a group of artists co-signed an open letter urging Christie’s to cancel the sale, claiming that “many” artworks in the auction “were created using A.I. models that are known to be trained on copyright without a license.” It decried the sale as perpetuating “A.I. companies’ mass theft of human artists’ work.”

What else?

• Google co-founder Larry Page reportedly has a new AI startup

  The new company called Dynatomics is focused on applying AI to product manufacturing, according to The Information (paywalled).

• The world’s best document understanding API

  Being lighter weight than most models in the category, Mistral OCR performs significantly faster than its peers, processing up to 2000 pages per minute on a single node.

• Is this the world’s first fully autonomous AI agent?

  Move over DeepSeek, there’s a new sheriff in town…and it’s called Manus. According to the demo, Manus can autonomously browse websites, leverage various capabilities, and display its workflow in real time.

• SXSW is happening from 3/7-3/15

  You can watch it live on their site. And yes, there’s an AI track…I’ll recap the important takeaways next week.

The numbers:

• The Top 100 GenAI Consumer Apps (a16z)

• Superintelligence startup Reflection AI launches with $130 million in funding. Sequoia and Lightspeed releases from earlier today.

• AI Startup Anysphere in Talks for Close to $10 Billion Valuation

• A quarter of the W25 startup batch have 95% of their codebases generated by AI, YC managing partner Jared Friedman said during a conversation posted on YouTube.

Thought starters:

• Miles used to work at OpenAI from 2018 through 2024, first as Research Scientist on the Policy team, then as Head of Policy Research, and finally as Senior Advisor for AGI Readiness.

• “MCP” is trending — if you want to catch up, here’s a thread:

• LADDER: Self-Improving LLMs Through Recursive Problem Decomposition

  We introduce LADDER (Learning through Autonomous Difficulty-Driven Example Recursion), a framework which enables Large Language Models to autonomously improve their problem-solving capabilities through self-guided learning by recursively generating and solving progressively simpler variants of complex problems. Unlike prior approaches that require curated datasets or human feedback, LADDER leverages a model's own capabilities to generate easier question variants. We demonstrate LADDER's effectiveness in the subject of mathematical integration, improving Llama 3.2 3B's accuracy from 1% to 82% on undergraduate-level problems and enabling Qwen2.5 7B Deepseek-R1 Distilled to achieve 73% on the MIT Integration Bee qualifying examination. We also introduce TTRL (Test-Time Reinforcement Learning), where we perform reinforcement learning on variants of test problems at inference time. TTRL enables Qwen2.5 7B Deepseek-R1 Distilled to achieve a state-of-the-art score of 90% on the MIT Integration Bee qualifying examination, surpassing OpenAI o1's performance. These results show how self-directed strategic learning can achieve significant capability improvements without relying on architectural scaling or human supervision.

Thanks for reading,

Eddie

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