It's AI Time

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 349 H&M is now using AI “digital twins” of real models to show off clothes. These 3D avatars are made from photos and styled virtually - no need for stylists, makeup, or full photoshoots. It cuts production costs but raises concerns, similar to the 2023 actors' strike over digital cloning.  Otter just upgraded your meetings. Its new voice-activated Meeting Agent can answer questions, schedule tasks, and even draft emails - all in real time, right inside your Zoom calls, expansion to other platforms coming in the near future.  Figure 02 robots just learned to walk like humans - thanks to an AI brain trained fully in simulation. No manual tuning needed when switching to the real world.  Midjourney and NYU built new tricks for AI writing. Now, models pick creative and rare responses - without repeating the same boring answers over and over.  Bill Gates says we’re entering an era of “free intelligence” - where expert-level tutoring and med...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 348 Pony.ai has become the first company in China to receive a permit to operate fully driverless taxis with no safety driver or staff onboard in central Shenzhen, specifically Nanshan District. This is a big step toward building a revenue-generating robotaxi business in China's "Silicon Valley." PwC has launched "agent OS," a powerful AI operating system designed for intelligent automation across enterprises. It connects multiple AI agents, streamlines workflows, and integrates tools from different platforms to create scalable and modular processes. North Korea is expanding its production of AI-powered drones called "loitering munitions." These drones act like guided missiles, autonomously seeking targets and crashing into them with a warhead. The U.S. has blacklisted over 50 Chinese tech companies, aiming to limit Beijing's AI and chip capabilities. The companies are accused of advancing AI, supercomputers, and ...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 346 Amazon Launches Interests for Personalized Shopping: Amazon has introduced an AI-powered feature that tailors product discovery based on user-defined prompts that automatically surfaces relevant items and deals. OpenAI adopts rival Anthropic's standard for connecting AI models to data: OpenAI will support Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) across its products, enhancing AI models' data-driven capabilities. MCP, an open-source standard, allows AI models to connect with various data sources like business tools and software. Companies like Block, Replit, and Sourcegraph have adopted MCP. OpenAI plans to share more about its integration soon. Elon Musk's Grok AI lands on Telegram, gaining access to over 1 billion users: A new era for search and chat: Elon Musk's AI chatbot, Grok, is now available on Telegram, offering its sarcastic assistant to over 1 billion users. Bundled with Telegram Premium, Grok expands beyond X, enhanc...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 345 OpenAI's Improved Image Generation: OpenAI's GPT-4o introduces improved image generation with precise text rendering, instruction following, and multi-turn editing. DeepSeek-V3-0324 Release with MIT License: DeepSeek has released its new V3-0324 model, which outperforms GPT 4.5 in most benchmarks and features major improvements in performance. Qwen 2.5 32B Vision Language Model: Qwen has released a strong vision language model that is open and can run reasonably well on consumer hardware. Modifying Large Language Model Post-Training for Diverse Creative Writing: Midjourney has released some work to improve diversity in creative writing models. It was able to post-train a small 7B model that outperforms much larger open and closed models in creative writing.

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 344 Introducing Together Chat: use DeepSeek R1 for free, hosted in North America: Together Chat has launched a free consumer app that offers seamless interaction with top open-source models, including the new DeepSeek R1 for advanced reasoning. It supports web crawling, code generation with Qwen Coder 32B, and image creation using Flux Schnell, all accessible via a Progressive Web App. Roblox's new AI model can generate 3D objects: Roblox has open-sourced Cube 3D, an AI model that can generate 3D objects from text prompts, to enhance creation efficiency. Cube 3D uses tokenization techniques and is trained with licensed and publicly available datasets, plus Roblox experience data. Future iterations will incorporate multimodal inputs like images and videos. New Reve Image Generator Beats AI Art Heavyweights MidJourney and Flux at a Penny Per Image: Reve Image 1.0, an AI image generator, offers competitive pricing and impressive prompt adherence, rea...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 343 OpenAI and MIT Exploring AI and Emotional Well-Being: MIT Media Lab and OpenAI are exploring how users engage emotionally with ChatGPT, examining its impact on social and emotional well-being. The study highlights the diverse ways people use AI conversational models and sets the stage for further research on responsible AI interactions. Hugging Face Real-Time Endpoint Analytics: Hugging Face has revamped its analytics dashboard, which now features real-time updates for monitoring AI inference endpoints. The improved system ensures faster data loading and instant insights into request latency, error rates, and performance metrics. Perplexity's Plan for Rebuilding TikTok in America: Perplexity AI envisions a TikTok that prioritizes deep content discovery and truth-seeking powered by an advanced answer engine. It plans to enhance the platform's utility while maintaining its core function as a hub for creative expression. OpenAI exec leaves to...