WAID #16: A roundup of Top News & Developments in AI

AI is transforming how we shop, learn, and create. Amazon's Rufus assistant personalizes shopping, while Disney revitalizes its music library with AI's help. Researchers at Cambridge developed an AI tool for early Alzheimer's detection, while Groq released open-source models for tool usage. OpenAI's "GPT-4o mini" aims to broaden AI accessibility, and Andrej Karpathy launched an AI-integrated education platform, Eureka Labs. Last week also saw concerns about data privacy and OpenAI's alleged use of restrictive NDAs.

Industry Pulse

OpenAI is reportedly developing a secretive new AI model codenamed ‘Strawberry’ (formerly Q*), designed to dramatically improve AI reasoning capabilities and enable autonomous internet research.

Amazon announced expanded access to its Rufus AI-powered shopping assistant for all U.S. customers, offering personalized product recommendations and enhanced responses to shopping queries.

Samsung revealed plans to release an upgraded version of the Bixby voice assistant later this year powered by the company’s own LLM, as part of a broader push to integrate AI across its device lineup.

HR software unicorn Lattice (founded by Sam Altman’s brother Jack) has backtracked on a controversial plan to give AI ‘workers’ employee status, following intense criticism from employees and tech leaders.

Japanese investment giant Softbank acquired struggling British AI chipmaking firm GraphCore, hoping to revitalize the former Nvidia rival and bolster its AI hardware portfolio.

U.S. Rep. Jennifer Wexton debuted an AI-generated version of her voice, allowing her to continue addressing Congress despite speech limitations caused by a rare neurological condition.

YouTube Music is rolling out a series of new AI-powered features, including the ability to search with sound and the testing of an AI-generated 'conversational radio’.

An update to Reuters’ article detailing OpenAI’s ‘Strawberry’ revealed that an internally tested model scored over 90% on a benchmark of ‘championship math problems’, far surpassing the top available non-specialized LLMs.

Google debuted Vids in its Workspace Labs, an AI-powered video creation tool enabling users to generate presentations — with the ability to craft scripts, AI voiceovers, stock imagery, and more.

Amazon published a new op-ed calling for global alignment on responsible AI policies, emphasizing the need for collaboration between government and tech firms.

Apple’s stock rose to record highs following investment giant Morgan Stanley naming the company its ‘top pick’ based on recent Apple Intelligence and other AI initiatives potentially boosting device sales.

C3 AI unveiled a new AI application powered by Google Cloud for government programs to streamline efficiency across federal, state, and local agencies.

Disney Music Group is partnering with AI startup AudioShake to separate instrumental ‘stems’ from classic songs, hoping to revitalize the company’s iconic catalog for new uses in remixing, licensing, and fan engagement.

Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI founding member and former Tesla Director of AI, just announced the launch of Eureka Labs, a new AI-integrated education platform — coming just months after his departure from OpenAI.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority launched a formal probe into Microsoft's hiring of former Inflection AI staff, mirroring a similar investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission.

Visual AI startup Haiper released Haiper 1.5, a new video generation model that doubles the platform’s output length to 8 seconds and introduces new HD upscaling, realism, and image generation features.

Cohere is partnering with Japanese tech giant Fujitsu to develop 'Takane', an advanced Japanese language AI model for enterprise use based on Cohere’s Command R+, set to launch in September 2024.

Meta’s Llama-3 405B model is set to release on July 23 and will be multimodal, according to a new report from The Information.

OpenAI just announced the launch of GPT-4o mini, a cost-efficient and compact version of its flagship GPT-4o model — aimed at expanding AI accessibility for developers and businesses.

Mistral AI and Nvidia just unveiled Mistral NeMo, a new open-source, 12B parameter small language model that surpasses competitors like Gemma 2 9B and Llama 3 8B on key benchmarks alongside a massive context window increase.

Groq just released two new open-source AI models specializing in tool use, surpassing heavyweights like GPT-4 Turbo, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro on key function calling benchmarks.

Sam Altman revealed in a post on X that the alpha release of OpenAI’s Voice Mode is coming ‘later this month’, with general availability coming ‘a bit after’.

AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li launched World Labs in April, a ‘spatial intelligence’ startup already valued at over $1B — working on developing AI capable of understanding and navigating 3D environments.

OpenAI is reportedly in talks with Broadcom to develop a new AI chip, hoping to reduce reliance on Nvidia and boost global semiconductor infrastructure.

Tech giants including Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Amazon formed the Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI), an open-source initiative aiming to develop best practices and address challenges in AI security.

Meta and Apple are planning to exclude EU customers from upcoming AI releases, citing regulatory uncertainty surrounding data usage and training under GDPR data protection laws.

OpenAI also introduced new compliance and administrative tools for ChatGPT Enterprise, aimed at supporting large-scale AI deployments in regulated industries.

Deals & Finance

— SK Telecom invests $200M to become global AI company SK Telekom

— Leya raises $25M in Series A funding round to scale legal work with AI Leya

— Exa raises $22M to build the search engine for AI. Exa ai

— SF Compute has raised $12M to build a trading platform for large-scale GPU clusters. San Francisco Compute Company

— Brev.dev has been acquired by Nvidia. Brev.dev (Acquired by NVIDIA)

— Vectara raises $25M Series A for enterprise RAG. Vectara

Researches

• Researchers from Cambridge University just developed a new AI tool that can predict whether patients showing mild cognitive impairment will progress to Alzheimer’s disease with over 80% accuracy.

• Microsoft researchers just published new research introducing SpreadsheetLLM and SheetCompressor, new frameworks designed to help LLMs better understand and process information within spreadsheets.

Regulation & Legal

► Whistleblowers just filed a complaint with the SEC alleging that OpenAI used overly restrictive non-disclosure agreements to prevent employees from reporting concerns to regulators, violating federal whistleblower protections.

► A new investigation by Proof News just revealed that tech giants including Apple, Anthropic, Nvidia, and Salesforce used content from over 170,000 YouTube videos to train their AI models without creators’ consent.

► OpenAI just published new research detailing a method to make large language models produce more understandable and verifiable outputs, using a game played between two AIs to make generations more ‘legible’ to humans.

► EU’s AI Act gets published in bloc’s Official Journal, starting clock on legal deadlines.

► Apple says OpenELM (the model trained on YouTube subtitles) is not a part of Apple Intelligence.

► Llamas don’t like regulators. Meta is facing the hurdle of explaining where the training data comes from. Thus Meta has decided it won’t offer future multimodal AI models in the EU and also suspend its generative AI tools in Brazil.

Must-Try Tools

Telescope - AI-driven lead generation for targeted B2B lists Telescope

Threado AI - Automated AI support for customer-facing teams Threado AI

Central - Streamlined payroll and benefits for startups Central

Tegon - Open-sourced issue tracking tool for engineering teams

GanAI - Record and share personalized videos at scale Gan.AI

Krea AI Scene Transfer - Generate scenes with high-quality light and color consistency krea.ai

SmartCrawl - Turn any website into an API Mendable

Elementor AI - An AI website builder for WordPress Elementor

Haiper AI 1.5 - A free-to-try AI video generator with up to 8 second generations Haiper

Prodia - Add generative AI to your app with one API Prodia

Undermind - Deep scientific search for complex problems Undermind

Paillor - Integrate apps, docs, and wikis for on-the-spot bot support Paillor

Otio - AI research and writing partner for students Otio

Bigfoot AI - Discover new experiences in your city with AI Bigfoot

Miro Intelligent Canvas - AI-powered canvas for team collaboration Miro

RDfox - AI knowledge graph and semantic reasoning engine Oxford Semantic Technologies

Good Reading

— China deploys censors to create socialist AI.

— How Wall Street needs to adapt to AI.

— The truth about AI's impact on software development jobs.

— a16z investment thesis and market map - AI scribes.

— Healthcare’s Failure of AI Imagination

— How AI is fuelling uncertainty for game developers

— 3 ways to add a human touch to AI-generated content

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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