WAID #14: A roundup of Top News & Developments in AI

This week saw advancements in AI for creative endeavors (Motorola's AI ad campaign, ElevenLabs' celebrity voices), language processing (Google Translate expansion), and robotics (Menteebot's navigation). However, Google's emissions increase highlights the environmental impact of powerful AI models.

Industry Pulse

Apple is reportedly working on bringing its new AI features from its Apple Intelligence push to the Vision Pro headsets, according to a new report from Bloomberg.

Stability AI recently released Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, a new text-to-image model with exceptional quality, photorealism, and typography — now available for free on Hugging Face.

Google just announced its largest-ever expansion of Google Translate, adding support for 110 new languages enabled by the company’s PaLM 2 LLM model. Also Google reported a 13% increase in emissions for 2023, falling short of its ‘net zero’ climate goal set for 2030 — citing growing AI power demands as a key factor for the setback.

Amazon is hiring executives from enterprise AI startup Adept onto the company’s AGI Autonomy team, also licensing its automation tools to build agents for software workflows.

Meta’s anticipated Llama-3-405B model is reportedly displayed in a recent WhatsApp update, indicating the new version may be close to launching.

Motorola just launched its ‘Styled By Moto’ ad campaign, an entirely AI-generated fashion spot promoting its new line of Razr folding smartphones — created using nine different AI tools, including Sora and Midjourney.

Elon Musk revealed that Grok-2 will be released in August, and will improve on the problem of LLMs being trained on data from other models.

ElevenLabs just announced a new ‘Iconic Voices’ feature for its recently released Reader App, allowing users to have text read by AI-generated voices of famous Hollywood stars.

Anthropic launched an initiative to fund third-party organizations in developing new advanced AI model evaluations, focused on AI safety assessments, capability metrics, and evaluation infrastructure.

Kyutai just introduced Moshi, a new ‘real-time’ AI voice assistant capable of responding in a range of emotions and styles in a similar fashion to OpenAI’s delayed Voice Mode feature.

Perplexity just announced new upgrades to its ‘Pro Search’ feature, enhancing capabilities for complex queries, multi-step reasoning, integration of Wolfram Alpha for math improvement, and more.

Cloudflare released a free tool to detect and block AI bots circumventing website scraping protections, aiming to address concerns over unauthorized data collection for AI training.

Shanghai AI Lab introduced InternLM 2.5-7B, a model with a 1M context window and the ability to use tools that surged up the Open LLM Leaderboard upon release.

WhatsApp beta revealed an upcoming 'Imagine' AI avatar generator feature, which will allow users to create personalized avatars of themselves in various settings.

Mantee Robotics showcased a new video of its humanoid robot, Menteebot, navigating new environments by following humans, demonstrating potential for various real-world applications.

Figma is pausing its “Make Design” feature as a post of it copying Apple’s weather app goes viral.

Deals & Finance

— Agility Robotics just signed a multi-year deal with GXO Logistics to bring the company’s Digit humanoid robots to warehouses, following a successful pilot in Spanx facilities in 2023.

— Character AI discussed research partnerships with Google and Meta in exchange for IP.

— Andrew Ng’s AI Fund is aiming to raise $120M for its second venture fund, focused on early-stage AI startups, coming in significantly lower than the initial $175M fund.

— Amazon is planning to spend over $100B on data centers over the next decade, shifting its investment focus towards AI infrastructure.

— Biden awards $504M to tech investment hubs across the US.

— AI coding startup Magic seeks $1.5B valuation in new funding round.

— Runway AI is in talks with General Atlantic to fundraise at a $4B valuation.

— Harvey AI is expected to raise about $100M from GV, Google's investment arm.

— Sentient raises $85M seed led by Founders Fund to bring AGI development on blockchain.

— K Health raised $50M for its AI-powered primary care platform, bringing the company’s valuation to $900M as it aims to expand its U.S. market presence and AI capabilities.

— Robinhood acquires Pluto, an AI investment research platform.

Researches

• Salesforce just published new research on APIGen, an automated system that generates optimal datasets for AI training on function calling tasks — enabling the company’s xLAM model to outperform much larger rivals.

• Researchers at Radboud University just developed an AI system capable of reconstructing remarkably accurate images of what someone is looking at based on their brain activity recordings.

• An international research team introduced EMOKINE software, an open-sourced AI tool that can decode emotional expression through motion capture and whole-body movements.

Public Speaking

OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy spoke at UC Berkeley’s AI hackathon, predicting that rather than a single AI, there will be multiple AIs populating a digital space, collaborating on tasks and having their own Slack threads.

Citadel CEO Ken Griffin told the company’s new class of interns that he is ‘not convinced’ AI will achieve breakthroughs that automate human jobs in the next three years.

Regulation & Legal

► YouTube now lets you request removal of AI-generated content that simulates your face or voice.

► The Center for Investigative Reporting filed a new copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging use of its journalism in AI training.

► Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman is facing backlash after claiming that all publicly available online content is ‘freeware’ for AI training during an interview with CNBC.

► Meta updated its AI content labeling from ‘Made with AI’ to ‘AI info’ following complaints from photographers of incorrect flagging and a lack of context.

► French antitrust regulators are reportedly set to charge Nvidia with anti-competitive practices, marking the first regulatory action against the AI chip giant.

Reports

— Retool just launched its new State of AI report, packed with data from 700+ devs and tech leaders to help you cut through the hype and learn how to leverage AI for real impact.

— Goldman Sachs on Gen AI - Too much spend, too little benefit?

— Investors pour $27.1B into AI start-ups, defying a downturn.

Must-Try Tools

Briefy - Turns lengthy content into concise, structured summaries

Jamahook - Sound assistant that finds royalty-free musical elements

Legaliser - Simplifies legal contract analysis and drafting with AI

Plus AI Powerpoint Maker - Generate PowerPoint presentations in minutes

MagicSchool - Streamline teacher lesson planning, communication, feedback, and more

Walling - Organize and present your idea with AI

Fluently - Refine English speaking skills with an AI language coach

Gumloop - Skip the learning curve, automate any workflow with AI

Motiff - AI-powered UI design for professionals

Rapport - Animate and deploy virtual avatars of ChatGPT and other AIs

RunDiffusion - A cloud platform for generative art that allows you to run open-source models

AI Tutor Pro - An AI tutor to grow your knowledge on any topic

BIK - AI marketing automation for eCommerce brands

Humanity Health - Track your health and optimize for longevity

Digen - Generate AI videos with real motion

Video to Sound Effects - Upload videos and get instant sound effects

Articles Worth Reading

— Generative AI is rapidly reducing the cost of productivity.

— Counterintuitive advice for building AI products - Lessons from 20+ top product builders.

— Foundation Capital’s recipe for building magic beyond LLMs.

— AI in retail - How it's impacting the industry & what you need to know.

— Why AI infrastructure startups are insanely hard to build.

— AI safety regulations: prudent or paranoid? with a16z's Martin Casado.

Stay Curious, Stay Informed!

The world of AI is constantly buzzing with innovation. This newsletter is your key to staying ahead of the curve. Let me know in the comments what AI topics pique your interest, and I'll be sure to cover them in future issues!

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