The Most Surreal AI Week Ever

From Microsoft Bing’s AI chatbot, to Google redefining the search and online shopping experiences, IBM’s quantum breakthroughs, AMD’s contributions, Salesforce’s initiatives, Mercedes-Benz’s ChatGPT integration and more, this week saw some real and impactful advancements in the AI landscape.

Monday: The week started with Microsoft unveiling the voice control for the desktop version of Bing’s AI chatbot. With this new feature, users can now command chatbot using their voice, and it will respond in a voice of its own. Interestingly, this new development comes after the tech giant had announced its plans to discontinue Cortana.

A Reddit user who previously leaked the ‘chat-sharing’ feature, recently leaked a screenshot showcasing potential new ‘workspaces.’ These potential new features made rounds this week, which allows users to create profiles that ChatGPT can readily remember and also hint at file uploads.

This week, Google also announced several new improvements to Search Generative Experience, inviting more people to test its generative AI powered search engine via Search Labs. But, it is yet to be made available for Indian users. Available only to limited people in the US and in English. 

Tuesday: In a never-seen-before religious act, over hundreds of Protestant Christians congregated in Germany for a church service orchestrated largely with AI tools. This included ChatGPT-led avatars, composed of two young women and two young men. 

At the tenth London Tech Week, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak recently announced that Google Deepmind, OpenAI and Anthropic had granted priority access to their foundational systems to help build better evaluations, alongside helping them better understand the opportunities and risks of these systems. 

UN chief Antonio Guterres gave a nod for the creation of an international AI body similar to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). 

Salesforce announced the launch of AI Cloud, a suite of products built for CRM in enterprises, where they can boost their productivity through all the Salesforce AI applications. Read more here. 

Meta unveiled open-source AI music generator, MusicGen This new music-generating tool can turn text description into about 12 seconds of audio. It can optionally be steered with reference audio, like an existing song, in which case it’ll try to follow both the description and melody. 

In an interview with BBC Radio, Paul McCartney said that the producers used AI to mix a new Beatles song using John Lennon’s voice. He said that the engineers used AI to produce vocals on the track performed by a digital avatar of John Lennon. Check out the interview here. 

Framer has released a new AI tool that allows users to generate and publish a website in seconds with AI. Simply enter a prompt, and get an entire website. Click here to try. 

Wednesday: A new survey by GitHub, revealed that 92% of respondents are using AI coding tools at work and for outside projects. Check out the complete report here. 

Amazon, one of the proponents of banning ChatGPT for its internal employees, now seems to be using it secretly. A leaked internal document revealed the company’s plans to use the chatbot across various teams, with 67 potential use cases such as generating code, writing marketing material, and analysing financial reports among others. 

Mistral AI, a young startup based in Paris, secured an astounding $113 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed Ventures — this, despite it being only a month old and lacking a substantial product or team. The company has been started by former Meta and Google researchers. Read more here.

Adobe is acing the generative AI race for designers and illustrators. The company launched Generative Recolor for Adobe Illustrator, powered by Firefly. Read more here. 

AMD unveiled a new AI chip – MI300x AI as a 'generative AI accelerator.' This new chip helps run an entire 40-billion parameter model in memory, alongside reducing the number of GPUs. This new chip is said to take on NVIDIA’s H100 GPUs. Read more here. 

IBM in collaboration with UC Berkeley researchers announced a recent breakthrough experiment which indicates that quantum computers will soon surpass classical computers in practical tasks. Recently, the company announced that it made a 127-qubit quantum computer publicly available over IBM Cloud. Read: IBM Makes the Best Quantum Computer Open to Public

Thursday: A new report by McKinsey shows that generative AI is set to add up to $4.4 trillion of value to the global economy annually. The report also stated that half of all work will be automated between 2030 and 2060. It also said that generative AI has potential to change the anatomy of work, augmenting the capabilities of individual workers by automating some of their activities and tasks. Read on. 

The European Union (EU) has voted in favour of new, tougher rules to regulate the use of AI. This development comes after they had passed a draft a few weeks ago, known as the AI Act, which is aimed at placing greater restrictions on the use of AI, alongside assessing the levels of risk. 

Text-to-video startup Synthesia attained an unicorn status after raising $90 million from Accel Ventures with NVentures – NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, alongside existing investors Kleiner Perkins, GV, Firstmark Capital, Alex Wang, Olivier Pomel and Amjad Masad., The company will be using the fund to enhance its product and expansion. Read more here. 

Hugging Face has launched a free QR code AI art generator. This new tool allows users to generate QR codes that blend in very naturally with their provided prompt. Check it out here. 

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Friday: Google this week announced the launch of its new virtual try-on-feature, reshaping online clothing shopping for everyone. This new feature allows users to see how cloth looks on real models with different body shapes and sizes. Check out the details of the new AI shopping feature here. 

Mercedes-Benz has added ChatGPT to its in-car voice control. With this new feature, drivers will not be able to have more dynamic conversations. Read more here. 

Saturday: MachineHack GenAI has unveiled DataLyze, an AI-powered data analysis tool, making data analytics accessible on the go. Access the tool here.