It's AI Time

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 138 OpenAI And Anthropic Will Share Their Models With The US Government OpenAI and Anthropic have agreed to allow the US government early access to their major new AI models before public release to enhance safety evaluations as part of a memorandum with the US AI Safety Institute. California Legislature Passes SB 1047 California's controversial AI safety bill, SB-1047, has passed the State Assembly and is now one step away from Governor Gavin Newsom's desk. Newsom must decide by September 30 whether to sign it into law. Anthropic says it is closer to backing California's AI bill after lawmakers made some fixes Anthropic has shifted to a cautious endorsement of California's AI regulation bill SB 1047 after key amendments. Changes include reduced penalties, clearer language, and increased reporting requirements. The bill aims to ensure safety in AI practices, gaining support from Anthropic yet facing opposition from OpenAI and Meta. OpenAI...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 137 Midjourney Says It's ‘Getting Into Hardware' Midjourney is expanding into hardware with a new team based in San Francisco. The move, hinted at by the hiring of ex-Neuralink and Apple Vision Pro engineer Ahmad Abbas, suggests that the hardware could be related to its ongoing development of AI models for video and 3D generation. Google Rolls out Gems And Imagen 3 To Gemini Advanced Google is rolling out its new features, Gems and Imagen 3, to Gemini Advanced subscribers. Gems allows users to create custom versions of Gemini tailored to specific tasks, offering premade options like learning coaches and coding partners, while Imagen 3 is Google's latest image generation model, now available to generate detailed and artistic images. OpenAI In Talks For Funding Round Valuing It Above $100B OpenAI is in discussions to raise several billion dollars in a new funding round led by Thrive Capital that would value the company above $100 billion, with ...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 136 OpenAI Aims To Release New AI Model,  ‘Strawberry', In Fall OpenAI is planning to release a new AI product called "Strawberry" in the fall. It will feature advanced reasoning capabilities, such as the ability to solve previously unseen math problems, and can perform high-level tasks like developing market strategies. Announcing Higgs Llama V2  Boson AI has introduced Higgs-Llama-3-70B-v2, a new model that excels in dialog and comprehension benchmarks like Arena-Hard and AlpacaEval 2.0. The model reduces response regeneration rates by 21.6% and boosts day 1 retention by 5.3% compared to Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Enhanced by an in-house reward model, Higgs Judger, it ties with Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro on performance. LitServe  LitServe is an easy-to-use, flexible serving engine for AI models built on FastAPI. Features like batching, streaming, and GPU autoscaling eliminate the need to rebuild a FastAPI server per model.

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 135 Salesforce introduces Text-to-Video generation Salesforce has introduced xGen-VideoSyn-1, a text-to-video (T2V) model that generates realistic scenes from textual descriptions. The model uses a video variational autoencoder (VidVAE) to compress video data, reducing computational demands, and a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) for improved temporal consistency and generalization. AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products AI companies are struggling to find product-market fit for LLMs, leading to significant investments yet limited commercial success. The five main challenges hindering AI product viability are cost, reliability, privacy concerns, safety and security issues, and user interface limitations. Overcoming these sociotechnical issues is critical for the effective integration and widespread adoption of AI in consumer products. D-ID launches an AI video translation tool that includes voice cloning and lip sync D-ID has launch...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 130 Fine-Tuning Now Available For GPT-4o OpenAI has launched fine-tuning for GPT-4o, allowing developers to customize the model for specific use cases with their own datasets. It is offering 1 million free training tokens per day through September 23. OpenAI Strikes Search Deal With Conde Nast OpenAI has entered a multi-year licensing agreement with Condé Nast, allowing it to display content from the publisher's brands, such as Vogue and The New Yorker, within its products, including ChatGPT and SearchGPT. AI Companies Are Pivoting From Creating Gods To Building Products AI companies have overestimated the readiness of generative AI for widespread commercial use, leading to costly missteps in product development and market integration. As they try to correct course, they must overcome five key challenges: ensuring cost-effectiveness, improving reliability, safeguarding privacy, enhancing safety and security, and refining user interfaces. These obstac...

 AI Edition - It's AI Time - 129 Eric Schmidt's AI prophecy Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicts rapid advancements in AI, with potential to create significant apps like TikTok competitors in minutes within the next few years. He highlights the unpredictability and swift progress in AI, where large language models and agent-based systems with text-to-action capabilities could converge, causing tremendous economic and technological disruption. Schmidt's view reflects the substantial investments and energy requirements anticipated for leading-edge AI development, signaling a transformative period ahead. Gemini Live could use some more rehearsals Gemini Live, Google's AI-powered voice interaction system, mimics natural conversation but struggles with hallucinations and inaccuracies. Despite incorporating professional actors for more expressive voices, it lacks the customizability and expressiveness found in competitors like OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode. Overall, the...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 128 Runway's Gen-3 Alpha Turbo is here and can make AI videos faster than you can type Runway ML's new Gen-3 Alpha Turbo is now available, offering 7x faster AI video generation at half the price of its predecessor across various subscription plans, including free trials. This speed advancement significantly reduces time lag, fostering more efficient workflows, particularly for time-sensitive industries. Runway continues to push for improvements, including enhanced control mechanisms, while navigating the ethical landscape surrounding AI training data practices. What does Bitcoin smell like? AI startup wants to ‘teleport' digital scents Osmo, an AI startup, is developing technology to enable computers to interpret and recreate scents, potentially aiding in disease detection and digital scent transmission. Unlike audiovisual AI advances, scent detection lacks a standardized "smell map," challenging the team to establish a molecular b...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 127 Google upgraded AI image generator Google has released Imagen 3, an advanced AI text-to-image generator, through its AI Test Kitchen and the Vertex AI platform. Imagen 3 is designed to produce images with enhanced details and lighting while maintaining content guardrails to prevent the creation of certain restricted imagery. Despite limitations, users have found ways to depict characters and logos resembling copyrighted material. An AI empire AI advancements could make humanity second in intelligence on Earth. AGI could be imminent with the possibility of replicating AI research at an unprecedented scale. Exponential growth in computing hints at a rapid transition to ASI, leaving humans vastly inferior. Society may not be ready for such a profound shift, despite potential bottlenecks in AI development. To get regular update on AI visit - 

 AI Edition - It's AI Time - 126 Government Actions on AI Safety The Biden-Harris administration announced significant measures to address AI's safety and security risks, including new technical guidelines for managing AI misuse and the expansion of AI testing capabilities in government agencies. This initiative emphasizes the importance of transparency and ethical AI use, aiming to protect public safety and national security. Google’s AI Expansion Google has expanded its AI-generated search summaries to more countries, refining the feature to include more hyperlinks for accuracy. Additionally, Google has rolled out the Imagen 3 AI image generator in the U.S., enhancing capabilities for detailed and high-quality image generation, while maintaining ethical safeguards. Samsung’s AI Accessibility Samsung has extended its AI-powered "Circle to Search" feature, previously available only on flagship models, to its mid-range Galaxy devices. This move makes AI tools more acce...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 125 California AI bill SB 1047 aims to prevent AI disasters, but Silicon Valley warns it will cause one California's SB 1047, designed to prevent "critical harms" from large AI models, faces pushback from Silicon Valley, with stakeholders divided over its potential impact on innovation. Major industry figures and companies debate the bill's merits and consequences on AI development and safety. The bill, which requires AI model safety protocols and third-party audits, with enforcement and hefty fines outlined for non-compliance, is heading to a final Senate vote. SoftBank's Intel AI processor plans in doubt as insiders say it is now considering a TSMC partnership Intel failed to produce AI processors for SoftBank's Project Izanagi, leading SoftBank to explore a partnership with TSMC. Despite setbacks, SoftBank remains committed to challenging major AI players with its own hardware and data center ecosystem, potentially backed by ...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 124 Grok 2 xAI has released its newest model, Grok 2, a frontier class model capable of reasoning, code, and mathematics. It is collaborating with Black Forest Labs to bring FLUX to X users. Prompt Caching With Claude Anthropic has introduced prompt caching for its Claude models, allowing developers to cache frequently used context, significantly reducing costs and latency, with early users like Notion already benefiting from faster and more efficient AI-powered features. OpenAI updates ChatGPT to new GPT-4o model based on user feedback OpenAI quietly released an updated GPT-4o model for ChatGPT, with improvements based on user feedback, but not introducing a new reasoning style. Users speculated enhanced multi-step reasoning and image generation capabilities, although OpenAI clarified there's no fundamental change in how the model reasons. The company also noted that the latest ChatGPT variant may differ from the API version to optimize developer ex...

 AI Edition - It's AI Time - 123 Sakana Launches AI Scientist Sakana, a Japanese AI firm, has released a system that can autonomously perform research by suggesting hypotheses, performing experiments, writing code, and summarizing the results in well-reasoned papers. The company has provided examples of the papers the system wrote along with an open sourced version of the system. As Alexa turns 10, Amazon looks to generative AI Amazon's Alexa division incurred a $10 billion loss in 2022 and laid off staff, highlighting the unsustainability of its loss leader strategy despite the high household penetration. As enthusiasm for smart assistants like Siri and Google Assistant also wanes, Amazon is banking on generative AI to reinvigorate Alexa's capabilities and user engagement. The company's focus is on enhancing conversational interactions and overcoming the "smart timer" limitation. Replika CEO Eugenia Kuyda says the future of AI might mean friendship and marria...

 AI Edition - It's AI Time - 122 YouTube is testing a feature that lets creators use Google Gemini to brainstorm video ideas YouTube is trialing 'Brainstorm with Gemini,' a feature that helps creators generate video ideas and thumbnails using Google's AI. Available to selected creators for testing, this tool could differentiate YouTube from competitors by leveraging AI for content creation. The platform is evaluating creator feedback before deciding on a wider release. OpenAI Generates More Turmoil OpenAI's founding team is experiencing significant turnover, with only 2 of the 11 original members currently active, as concerns grow over the organization's shift away from its initial non-profit ideals toward a more profit-driven structure. This exodus includes co-founders Greg Brockman (on sabbatical) and Ilya Sutskever (who has left), amid speculation of burnout and lucrative secondary financial rewards. The organization faces challenges as it may require a new m...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 121 Zico Kolter Joins OpenAI's Board of Directors Zico Kolter, a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and expert in AI safety and robustness, has joined OpenAI's Board of Directors and its Safety and Security Committee. His extensive research in AI safety, alignment, and model robustness will enhance OpenAI's efforts to ensure AI benefits humanity. Don't pivot into AI research Scale has become the predominant driver of performance in the field of AI and machine learning. The substantial capital required has led to market consolidation, with only a few suppliers capable of employing productive ML researchers. This dynamic mirrors the historical consolidation seen in chip design, suggesting a future downturn in the prestige and salaries for ML roles as supply outstrips demand. Aspiring ML professionals should carefully assess their career motivations in light of these industry trends. Sonova's AI hearing aids offer crystal-clear spee...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 120 As of today, August 12, 2024, several key developments in AI have emerged: Stryker's Acquisition of care.ai: Stryker, a leader in medical technologies, has announced a definitive agreement to acquire care.ai, a company specializing in AI-assisted virtual care and smart room technology. This acquisition aims to enhance Stryker's healthcare IT offerings and address challenges such as nursing shortages and staff burnout by integrating care.ai's AI-driven solutions with Stryker's existing platforms. Generative AI Events:  The AI community is gearing up for several important events later this year, including the Generative AI for Automotive USA 2024 in September, which will explore AI's impact on the automotive industry, and the Generative AI World conference in October, which will focus on the latest advancements across various sectors. These updates highlight the continued integration of AI into critical sectors and the growing inter...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 119 AI in Robotics and Autonomous Systems:  Recent advancements in AI are pushing the boundaries of what robots can achieve. New models like PaLM-E and RT-2 are enabling more flexible robotic systems that not only perform complex tasks but also interact with the real world by asking questions. This marks a significant step toward creating more intuitive and adaptable robotic systems. AI in Business Adoption:  Business adoption of AI has seen a significant increase, doubling in the last five years. AI is now embedded in a wide range of business functions, from process automation to digital twins. Companies are increasingly integrating AI across various applications, reflecting the technology's growing importance in enhancing business operations. AI and Ethics:  The focus on responsible AI development continues to grow. Recent reports highlight the challenges in ensuring transparency and ethical use of AI, especially as it becomes more integrated...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 118 Humane's daily returns are outpacing sales Humane's AI Pin faced a significant return rate post-launch with negative reviews, leading to approximately 7,000 of the sold units remaining with customers. Despite raising over $200 million from tech luminaries, Humane struggled with over $1 million in returns and internal leadership turnover. Amidst financial woes, there's speculation about a potential HP acquisition and new debt fundraising efforts. Why AI hasn't shown up in the GDP statistics yet Despite impressive progress in LLMs solving complex tasks, they still fall short on consistently performing human-like tasks at scale. LLMs require detailed prompt engineering and iteration to achieve acceptable accuracy, limiting their current potential as direct human replacements in workflows. OpenAI's recent updates to JSON output control and cost reduction may address some issues, but the nuanced integration required for LLMs in organiz...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 117 Gemini intelligence is coming to Nest cameras, smart speakers, and smart displays Google announced new Gemini AI-powered features for Google Home, including intelligent captions for Nest camera footage, natural language processing for Home routine creation, and an upgraded, more natural-sounding Google Assistant. The advanced features, primarily behind a Nest Aware subscription paywall, aim to enhance the smart home experience with the rollout commencing in beta and expanding next year. As part of the move toward smarter home automation, Google envisions an assistant that can proactively manage complex and dynamic home environments. How GitHub harnesses AI to transform customer feedback into action GitHub is leveraging AI and machine learning to analyze and summarize customer feedback at scale, informing product improvements and feature prioritization with actionable insights. This automated approach enables the capture of multilingual feedback and d...

 AI Edition - It's AI Time - 116 Meta is reportedly offering millions to use Hollywood voices in AI projects   Meta is negotiating with celebrities like Awkwafina and Judi Dench to use their voices for its AI digital assistant, seeking extensive usage rights across its platforms. Striking a deal could mean millions in fees for the actors, with safeguards from SAG-AFTRA for AI-generated likenesses. The company aims to present these AI features at its Connect conference in September, after recently canceling a celebrity voice chatbot project. I'm Switching Into AI Safety After eight years on Google's robotics team, Alex Irpan has transitioned to the AI safety team at Google DeepMind, driven by a mix of personal reasons and a belief in the importance of addressing safety challenges as AI systems advance towards superhuman capabilities. They express concerns about the reliability of current AI safety measures, the increasing risks of unchecked AI development, and their commitme...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 115 Groq raises $640m Series D Groq, the lightning-fast AI chip startup, is raising a substantial round to meet demand for large language model inference. Elon Musk Sues OpenAI, Sam Altman For Making A “Fool” Out Of Him Elon Musk has revived a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, accusing them of fraudulently obtaining $44 million in seed funding by promising to keep OpenAI's technology open-source and prioritize the public good, only to later turn it into a for-profit venture with ties to Microsoft, which Musk claims betrays the original mission and has caused irreparable harm to both his interests and the public. BYU engineering research finds key to quicker nuclear power: artificial intelligence BYU chemical engineering professor Matt Memmott has developed an AI algorithm that could reduce the nuclear reactor design and licensing process by a decade, cutting costs significantly. His team's research shows AI can optimize complex nucle...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 114 Character Co-founders return to Google  Noam Shazeer, one of the authors of the original Transformer paper, is returning to Google after Character.AI licensed its tech for 2x the last funding valuation. Microsoft Says OpenAI Is Now A Competitor In AI And Search Microsoft has classified OpenAI as a competitor in its latest annual report, despite being OpenAI's biggest investor and long-term partner, marking a shift in their relationship. Prompt Poet Character AI has open sourced its prompting construction library, which is used in production to serve millions of conversations. Future of LLMs for avatars at Genies Genies is harnessing LLMs for user profiling, enabling personalized experiences by mapping behaviors to foundational traits. Its advancing chatbots and NPCs in gaming create immersive, conversational scenarios. Combining conversational data with traditional personalization techniques, Genies is elevating user engagement and providing intu...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 113 Nvidia reportedly delays its next AI chip due to a design flaw Nvidia's Blackwell B200 chips will take at least three months longer to produce than was planned. The delay is due to a design flaw that was discovered unusually late in the production process. Nvidia is now working through a fresh set of test runs and won't ship large numbers of the chips until the first quarter. Microsoft, Google, and Meta have already ordered tens of billions of dollars worth of the chips. There's a Tool to Catch Students Cheating With ChatGPT. OpenAI Hasn't Released It  OpenAI has a method that can reliably detect when someone has used ChatGPT to write an essay or research paper, but it hasn't released it despite it having been ready for release for about a year. The company is concerned that the tool would be unpopular with its users and disproportionately affect some groups. The tool is 99.9% effective when there is enough text. However, the wate...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 112 Open Source AI Models:  There is a growing trend towards the use of open source AI models, allowing organizations to develop custom models tailored to their specific needs without significant infrastructure costs. This approach is particularly beneficial in specialized fields like legal, healthcare, and finance, where proprietary data is crucial. Multimodal AI and Virtual Agents:  Advancements in multimodal AI are enabling more sophisticated virtual agents. These agents are expanding beyond simple chatbot functions to performing complex tasks such as making reservations and planning trips. This year has also seen the integration of AI with tools that allow users to interact with their environment in new ways, such as identifying items in a fridge to suggest recipes. Regulation and Ethical AI:  Regulatory measures are tightening globally. The EU has made strides with the Artificial Intelligence Act, focusing on high-risk AI systems and trans...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 111 NeMo Model by Mistral AI and NVIDIA:   Mistral AI, in collaboration with NVIDIA, has introduced the NeMo model, a 12-billion parameter AI model boasting an extensive context window of up to 128,000 tokens. This model is designed to excel in reasoning, world knowledge, and coding accuracy, setting a new benchmark for AI performance in its size category. TSMC's Revenue Forecast:  Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has revised its 2024 revenue forecast upwards due to the increasing demand for AI application chips. The company now expects growth slightly above 20%, reflecting the robust AI market. Meta and Apple's EU Regulatory Challenges:  Both Meta and Apple have decided not to launch their new AI models in the European Union, citing regulatory concerns. This move highlights the growing tension between tech companies and EU regulations regarding AI deployment. SoftBank Acquires Graphcore:  SoftBank has acquired Graphcore, ...

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 110 OpenAI Pledges To Give US AI Safety Institute Early Access To Its Next Model OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced a collaboration with the U.S. AI Safety Institute to provide early access to the company's next major generative AI model for safety testing, aiming to address concerns that OpenAI has deprioritized AI safety. The EU's AI Act Is Now In Force The EU's risk-based AI regulation began on August 1 with staggered compliance deadlines categorizing AI applications into low/no-risk, high-risk, and limited risk tiers, imposing transparency, risk management, and penalties for violations. Standards for high-risk and powerful general-purpose AI models will be finalized by April 2025. Stable Fast 3D Stability AI has released a great new fast and powerful 3D generation model. It uses the same commercial license as the company's previous models. On Speaking To AI ChatGPT's new Advanced Voice mode and the new AI-powered Siri have contrastin...

 AI Edition - It's AI Time - 109 White House says no need to regulate Open Source The White House says there is no need to regulate open source systems for AI in their current form and to allow the community to continue developing the technology. Samsung hints at new products as it bets on AI to drive upgrades to its latest foldable phones. Samsung's mobile chief, TM Roh, outlined the vision for Galaxy AI at a Paris event that showcased new AI features in Samsung products, including an evolution of Bixby driven by Samsung's LLMs. Roh discussed potential monetization strategies, including subscriptions for AI services, though plans are still under consideration. Elon Musk calls Grok 'the most powerful AI by every metric' but 'secretly' trains the new model with your X data by default. Elon Musk has announced that his AI company is training its Grok LLM using a powerful AI training cluster, aiming to create the most powerful AI by December. X is collecting use...