WAID #17: A roundup of Top News & Developments in AI

The AI model race is fierce, with new breakthroughs announced weekly. Search engines are evolving with AI-powered features, while shopping and app discovery become more personalized. OpenAI, Meta, and Mistral are leading the pack with impressive advancements. However, concerns around AI safety and data privacy continue to grow, with regulatory scrutiny intensifying.

Industry Pulse

OpenAI just announced SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine prototype that combines powerful AI models with information from the Internet to provide users with timely answers from relevant sources — directly challenging Google’s search dominance. Also OpenAI is reportedly in talks with chip designers like Broadcom to develop its own AI chip, aiming to reduce dependence on scarce and expensive GPUs from Nvidia.

Anthropic is reportedly working on a new screenshot tool for Claude, potentially allowing users to seamlessly take screenshots from other screens or tabs.

Electronic Arts created digital clones of 11,000 college football players for their upcoming video game in 3 months — using AI to create the avatars using athletes’ headshot photographs.

Ukraine is reportedly developing AI-enabled war drones, aiming to overcome Russian signal jamming and enable swarm operations on the battlefield.

AMD claims its new laptop chips can outperform Apple's M3 — boasting improved performance in multitasking, image processing, and gaming.

NVIDIA is reportedly working on a version of its new flagship AI chips for the Chinese market that would be compatible with the restrictions around current U.S. export controls.

Scaled Foundations, a research company building ‘General Robot Intelligence’, announced GRID Beta, a free and cloud-based IDE to develop AI for robots.

The FTC launched an investigation into eight companies offering AI-powered "surveillance service pricing", seeking information on how these technologies use consumer data to personalize pricing.

Microsoft's Bing is testing a new generative search experience that combines traditional search results with AI-generated content — aiming to reshape how users interact with search engines.

Microsoft announced collaborations with Mass General Brigham and University of Wisconsin to advance AI foundation models for medical imaging, aiming to enhance radiologists' efficiency and improve patient outcomes. Also Microsoft partnered with Lumen Technologies to expand its AI workload capacity, addressing infrastructure shortages in its data centers, while Lumen will adopt Azure cloud services to improve its cash flow.

Google announced updates to the Play Store, including AI-powered app reviews, curated spaces, and personalized recommendations.

Deals & Finance

— OpenAI could lose up to $5 billion this year due to high operational costs, including $7 billion for AI training and inference, and $1.5 billion for staffing, despite rapid revenue growth.

— Cohere announced a new funding round of $500M from investors including Cisco, AMD, and Fujitsu, bringing its new valuation to a whopping $5.5B.

— The Monetary Authority of Singapore committed $74.3M to support financial institutions in building capabilities towards quantum computing and artificial intelligence.

— Harvey, an AI platform for legal services, secured a $100M Series C funding round with plans to expand its AI capabilities in the professional services sector.

— Elon Musk proposed a $5 billion Tesla investment into xAI, subject to shareholder and board approval.

— Commure to acquire Augmedix, the AI scribe in a $139M deal.

— Shaped raises $8M for a self-serve platform for AI search and recommendations.

— Gumloop AI raises $3.1M seed led by First Round.

— Pearl raises $58M at $400M valuation to bring AI to dentists.

— Lakera raises $20M Series A to deliver real-time GenAI security.

Researches & Reports

• Coatue Management, an investment firm with over $70B assets under management, has released a comprehensive report on the current state and future prospects of AI humanoids and robotics.

• Researchers from MIT and ETH Zurich have developed an AI model that can identify different stages of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), a type of preinvasive breast tumor, using simple tissue images.

• Google DeepMind's AI systems, AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2, achieved a significant milestone in AI’s math reasoning capabilities, attaining a silver medal-equivalent score at this year's International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO).

• Disney Research published a new paper on its famous bipedal robots, explaining the system that combines expressive motions and dynamic mobility to make the robots particularly lifelike.

Models Race

Mistral just released Large 2, a new AI model claiming to match or exceed the performance of recent offerings from OpenAI and Meta, despite having significantly fewer parameters.

Kling AI, developed by Chinese tech giant Kuaishou Technology, has released its impressive AI video model globally, offering high-quality AI generations that rival OpenAI’s (unreleased) Sora.

Meta just released Llama 3.1 alongside its prized 405B model, achieving state-of-the-art performance across key benchmarks and becoming the first-ever open sourced frontier model, marking a major milestone in open source AI development.

OpenAI announced GPT-4o fine-tuning — offering 2 million free daily training tokens until September 23 to help developers customize the model for specific applications.

Apple just unveiled a new 7 billion parameter open-source AI model, dubbed DCLM-7B, that outperforms Mistral 7B and closes in on other leading open models like Llama 3 and Gemma across key benchmarks.

Cohere launched Rerank 3 Nimble, a new foundation model for enterprise search and RAG systems, offering 3x faster performance than its predecessor while maintaining accuracy and supporting 100+ languages.

Stability AI unveiled Stable Video 4D, a new AI model that can turn single object videos into multiple videos from eight different angles — with potential applications in game development, video editing, and virtual reality.

Udio released version 1.5 of its AI music generator, featuring improved audio quality, key control, and enhanced language results, alongside new platform features like stem downloads and audio-to-audio remixing capabilities.

Google upgraded Gemini with 1.5 Flash, offering faster responses, a 4x larger context window, and expanded access in over 40 languages and 230 countries.

Public Speaking

Zuckerberg published an open letter detailing his thoughts on open source AI and it’s benefits for the greater good.

Sam Altman wrote an op-ed outlining a strategy for ensuring a vision for AI prevails in the United States and allied nations over authoritarian alternatives.

Elon Musk revealed in a tweet that Tesla will have humanoid robots working internally next year at Tesla, with high production for other companies expected in 2026.

US will fall behind in the AI race without natural gas - Williams Companies CEO says.

Regulation & Legal

► Five U.S. Senators have just sent a letter to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, demanding details about the company's efforts to ensure AI safety following reports of rushed safety testing for GPT-4 Omni.

► California state legislators are pushing for a proposed bill that would require big tech companies to test AI for "catastrophic" risks before public release.

► Runway's AI video generator reportedly trained on thousands of YouTube videos without permission, according to a leaked document obtained by 404 Media.

► Anthropic's web crawler allegedly violated website terms of use, with iFixit reporting nearly a million hits in 24 hours, raising concerns about AI companies' data collection practices.

► SAG-AFTRA announced a strike for video game performers starting July 26, citing concerns over AI protections in negotiations with major gaming studios, despite progress on wages and job safety.

► Japan’s copyright rules draw AI groups—and alarm from creators.

Must-Try Tools

• Cohesive AI - AI-powered web scraping and research in Google Sheets
• Immersity AI - Convert 2D images to 3D motions and videos Leia
• Supermemory - An open-sourced personal second brain
• Educato - Build an online teaching platform with AI Educato AI (YC S24)
• HeyGen Lab Interactive Avatar - Talk with personalized AI videos HeyGen
• Escape - Curates and distributes new forms of entertainment driven by AI
• Auphonic - AI sound engineer for podcasts, lecture recordings, and more Auphonic
• Nolan - AI script writing software for filmmakers
• Llama Tutor - Learn faster with an AI tutor powered by Llama 3.1
• Gandalf - Test your prompting skills and gain insights into securing AI Lakera
• Kling AI - The Sora-like AI video generation tool, now available globally KLING - AI Videos

Good Reading

— The data that powers AI is disappearing fast.

— Why do AIs need to stop and think before they answer?

— The uneven distribution of AI’s environmental impacts.

— Confronting impossible futures - predicting and planning them.

— AI is already taking jobs in the video game industry.

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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