This Week’s Cover
This week’s cover shows a robot holding a sign with a friendly message, “Happy to help you today!” Its reflection in a mirror shows the sign reading, “Happy to harm you today!” The cover was inspired by Google’s ex-CEO Eric Schmidt, who predicts AI agents will create their own language that humans can’t understand. At that point, Schmidt says we need to have an off switch for AI. GPT-4 wrote the copy for the messages on the signs. The MidJourney prompt was “a kind, gentle humanoid robot holding up a blank sign standing in front of a wall mirror admiring its reflection –ar 5:3 –style raw.” I had to mirror the robot and add the text in Photoshop. The font on the signs is Adobe Handwriting Frank. The font for the title is Sys TT, which is from the logo of the dystopian robot movie “M3GAN.” I manually trimmed the Es into the iconic three-stripe style using Photoshop.
This week’s category cover theme is a sand sculpture with the category’s name inscribed into the sand. MidJourney struggled more than usual with this one. I’d give the results a C+.
Executive Summary: Week Ending 05/31/2024
The Agents are Coming!
AIs have begun working together to solve problems, browse the Internet, and accomplish tasks without supervision. Eric Schmidt founded a killer AI drone company (literally) while warning that collaborative AIs (exactly like the ones in the news this week) might develop a secret language and we would lose control over them.
The Robots are Coming!
NVIDIA created a full training simulation suite to prepare robots for real world tasks (think “The Matrix”). OpenAI in turn launched a robot division to embody robots with GPT and real world capabilities. Keep your eyes out for robots coming out of nowhere next year.
AI Audio is Getting Wild
Song creation tool Suno launched a spectacular feature that can turn everyday sounds into songs. The tool can also add instruments to play duets or accompany existing songs. Google created a tool that enables AIs to read highly technical papers and unpack them in layperson’s terms, in conversation that is uncannily like NPR.
Publishers Are Throwing in The Towel 🙁
Publishers are signing deals with OpenAI in droves. Answer engine Perplexity can automatically create full articles (with images and charts) from research papers.
The AI Era is Just Getting Started
Open AI has started training their next model and has made their latest model free (that’s a flex).
Eric Schmidt Paints a Dystopian Future of Collaborative AI Agents
In an interview, Google ex-CEO Eric Schmidt discussed the future of AI agents, highlighting the potential for these systems to collaborate on complex problems. Schmidt suggested that as agents grow more powerful, they may develop their own languages for communication, leading to a point where humans can no longer understand their operations. He questioned whether we should intervene if this happens. Schmidt predicts that within the next five years, due to significant investments and rapid progress by major companies and numerous smaller players, millions of highly capable AI agents will emerge, fundamentally transforming our world.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgpYiysQjeI&t=808s
- https://www.noemamag.com/mapping-ais-rapid-advance
- https://x.com/electrik_dreams/status/1794475485168009621
Anthropic Launches Tool Use for Claude
Anthropic tool use for its AI assistant, Claude, allows it to intelligently select and orchestrate tools to handle complex tasks end-to-end based on natural language instructions. Tool use enables Claude to perform a variety of tasks, such as extracting structured data from unstructured text, converting natural language requests into API calls, answering questions via database searches, automating tasks through software APIs, and managing multiple subagents (!) for granular tasks.
- https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/1796210547077128578
- https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/30/24167231/anthropic-claude-ai-assistant-automate-tasks
- https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/1796210547077128578
Multion’s AI Agents Buy Cars and Flights Without Assistance
Multion showcased its AI agents by having one autonomously purchase a Cybertruck and book an airline flight. To put it mildly, these demonstrations highlight the potential for AI to transform daily life by performing complex tasks concurrently.
- https://twitter.com/MultiOn_AI/status/1795853913255772342
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS8oIMzrjVk
Google DeepMind Unveils Gato: A Versatile AI Generalist
Google DeepMind introduced Gato, a multi-modal, multi-task generalist agent inspired by large-scale language models. Gato operates across various skills with the same training and is capable of playing Atari games, captioning images, chatting, and manipulating a real robot arm. Gato is trained on extensive datasets from both simulated and real-world environments, as well as natural language and images.
NVIDIA Introduces RoboCasa: An Open-Source Simulation Framework to Create Embodied Robots
NVIDIA announced RoboCasa, a large-scale simulation framework designed for training generalist robots in everyday tasks. Utilizing generative AI tools, RoboCasa creates a variety of objects, scenes, and tasks essential for comprehensive robot training. This framework supports the development of robot arms, dogs, and humanoids in a safe, simulated environment. Emphasizing its significance, NVIDIA highlighted the pivotal role of simulation in their Data Pyramid for robot training. RoboCasa is open-source and available for public access, as detailed in threads by Yuke and Dr. Jim Fan on X.
OpenAI Reboots Its Robotics Team
OpenAI, which had disbanded its robotics team in 2020 due to insufficient training data, is now reviving the team amidst a surge in AI robotics. Unlike the previous iteration, this reboot comes with a revised mission. This development was revealed through a job listing and corroborated by sources. The new direction for the team aims to align with the current advancements and opportunities in the AI robotics sector.
Suno v3.5 – Create Songs From Any Sound!
With this update, users can now generate complete 4-minute songs in a single session, create up to 2-minute song extensions, and enjoy improved song structure and vocal flow. Suno emphasized the importance of user feedback in their ongoing development efforts.
Additionally, Suno teased upcoming features allowing users to make songs from any sound. The first volume will feature a watering can transformed into psychedelic rock, and the second volume will blend classical piano with French accordion, performed by Anessa, a pianist and Suno software engineer.
- https://x.com/suno_ai_/status/1796273804991156326
- https://x.com/suno_ai_/status/1794367911408353349
- https://x.com/suno_ai_/status/1795878282631512512
AI leader Andrej Karpathy is a fan of a Suno song called “Dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog woof woof”
Google’s AI generated NPR style discussion: two AI’s explain a technical paper in layperson’s terms
Google AI has launched an innovative experiment that generates NPR-like dialog to explain academic papers in layperson’s terms. It’s uncanny.
Bearish AGI Predictions
“Yann LeCun @ylecun: “There is no such thing as AGI and we shouldn’t be talking about AGI at all”
“VCs are betting against (1) continued scaling, where larger models beat specialized models while rapidly decreasing costs & (2) AGI, which would invalidate a lot of the underlying assumptions for AI startups (& many firms) It is an okay bet but I wonder if it is a conscious one” / X
“Whats interesting about this list of recently funded AI startups is that most of them are a bet that AGI will not happen in the next 5-8 years (average time to exit) I am not saying that they are wrong, but it is a strong private signal of VC beliefs contrasting with public ones” / X
Elon Musk’s Ambitious xAI Projects
Musk Plans xAI Supercomputer, Dubbed ‘Gigafactory of Compute’
Elon Musk announced plans to develop a supercomputer for his xAI initiative, which he refers to as the “Gigafactory of Compute.” This project aims to significantly enhance computational power and support advanced AI research and development. The Information reported that this supercomputer will serve as a critical infrastructure to bolster xAI’s capabilities.
Grok Analysis Feature on X
Every post on X (formerly Twitter) will now feature a “Grok Analysis” button. This functionality allows users to view an AI-generated summary of the post, leveraging the advanced analytical capabilities of xAI.
xAI Raises $6 Billion in Funding
Musk’s xAI has successfully raised $6 billion to fuel its competition against leading AI platforms like ChatGPT. The funding marks a significant milestone for the startup, providing it with substantial resources to innovate and scale its operations. The Verge highlighted this as a key development in the rapidly evolving AI industry.
AGI Prediction
In a somewhat cryptic tweet, Musk suggested that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) could be realized as early as next year. This statement has sparked discussions and speculation about the potential timeline for achieving AGI.
Perplexity AI Launches Perplexity Pages: A Huge Disruption for Publishers
The new feature allows users to convert research into visually appealing well-formatted articles. With the automatic inclusion of images and sections, Pages represents a significant step in the company’s evolution from an answer engine to a content publisher, drawing inspiration from Wikipedia with a focus on citations and reliable sources.
- https://x.com/perplexity_ai/status/1796203494401040846
- https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/perplexity-pages
- https://x.com/AravSrinivas/status/1796220011448786949
- The leap from ‘answer engine’ to ‘publisher’ isn’t very far!: https://x.com/bilawalsidhu/status/1796293340104696157
More Publishers Sign Content Deals with OpenAI
Vox Media and The Atlantic have entered into strategic content and product partnerships with OpenAI, aimed at enhancing the integration of high-quality journalism within AI platforms. The deals include licensing agreements that will allow OpenAI to incorporate content from both media entities into its AI models, enhancing the depth and accuracy of news-related responses.
Additionally, OpenAI launched the Newsroom AI Catalyst, a global program in collaboration with WAN-IFRA (World Association of News Publishers). This initiative is designed to support news organizations in leveraging AI to innovate their newsrooms and improve journalism practices.
OpenAI also announced a multi-year global partnership with News Corp, further solidifying its commitment to enriching AI with credible and diverse news sources. These collaborations underscore a significant shift towards integrating AI and traditional journalism to deliver enhanced news experiences.
- https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24167072/openai-content-copyright-vox-media-the-atlantic
- https://openai.com/index/newsroom-ai-catalyst-global-program-with-wan-ifra/
- https://wan-ifra.org/newsroom-ai-catalyst/
- https://x.com/fdaudens/status/1795843451558490271
- https://www.voxmedia.com/2024/5/29/24166483/vox-media-openai-strategic-content-and-product-partnership
- https://investors.newscorp.com/news-releases/news-release-details/news-corp-and-openai-sign-landmark-multi-year-global-partnership
- https://openai.com/index/enhancing-news-in-chatgpt-with-the-atlantic/
OpenAI Has Begun Training Its New Major AI Model – Beyond GPT4o
You know something big is up when a company gives its entire paid product lineup away for free. That was yesterday’s news. Today, we learned that OpenAI is in the process of training its next major AI model, signaling a significant advancement. Alongside this development, OpenAI has formed a new safety committee (one week after the old one quit) to oversee and ensure the responsible deployment of its technologies.
OpenAI Expands ChatGPT Features for Free Users
OpenAI announced that all ChatGPT Free users now have access to a suite of advanced features. These include browsing the web, using vision capabilities, conducting data analysis, uploading files, and creating custom GPTs. This update significantly enhances the utility of ChatGPT for a broader audience, making powerful AI tools more accessible to everyone.
Scale AI Launches SEAL Leaderboards for Evaluating AI Models
With AI companies gaming the systems to get the highest ratings (like colleges gaming US News rankings), Scale AI introduced SEAL Leaderboards, a new system for private, expert evaluations of leading AI models like GPT-4 and Claude 3 Opus. These evaluations focus on coding, math, following instructions, and using multiple languages, including Spanish. The leaderboards are designed to avoid overfitting and are regularly updated with new data. They provide trustworthy, third-party assessments by comparing how well different AI models perform on the same tasks, ensuring a fair and reliable measurement of their capabilities.
Top 69 Links of The Week
Agents
“I was able to get GPT-4o to highlight all clickable on-screen elements and make it take control of the mouse. It can navigate the computer autonomously using the button coordinates.
“🚨 New @a16z investment thesis! It’s time for AI to reinvent the phone call – enter conversational voice agents 📱 What we’re excited to invest in + market maps (from me and @illscience) 👇
Anthropic
“Tool use is now generally available. With tool use, Claude can, if instructed, intelligently select and orchestrate tools to solve complex tasks end-to-end. Start building today with our API, Amazon Bedrock, or Google Vertex AI:
Anthropic’s AI now lets you create bots to work for you – The Verge
“Tool use is now generally available. With tool use, Claude can, if instructed, intelligently select and orchestrate tools to solve complex tasks end-to-end. Start building today with our API, Amazon Bedrock, or Google Vertex AI:
Anthropic hires former OpenAI safety lead to head up new team | TechCrunch
“GPT 4o is 100x overhyped compared to Claude Opus 4o is a good model, but it tends to make several mistakes. In addition, It considerably slows down when OAI has a lot of traffic Opus, on the other hand, has consistently been performing very well and doesn’t quite get its due
Apple
Report: Apple signs deal with OpenAI for iOS, still wants Google as an ‘option’
“Power On: Inside Apple’s generative AI plan and iOS 18, including new features like AI-created Emojis, extensive Home Screen customization and a big focus on summarizing information
Apple iOS 18 Siri AI Update Will Let Users Control Features in Apps With Voice – Bloomberg
Apple iOS 18, macOS 15 AI Features: Project Greymatter, Privacy, OpenAI Deal – Bloomberg
Apple plots creating AI ‘black box’ for iCloud
“Crazy — my son was looking for a book on our bookshelves, so he took an iPhone picture of the whole shelves (hundreds of books) and then searched for the book’s title in his photos.” / X
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Leaderboards
Introducing Hard Prompts Category in Chatbot Arena | LMSYS Org
“Honestly this is sort of unsettling to watch. From a YouTuber who is doing experiments with AI-powered NPCs in VR: five historical figures are on a train, only the YouTuber is human, the others are LLMs. Watch the LLMs figure out who is the dumb human.
“NVIDIA presents NV-Embed: Improved Techniques for Training LLMs as Generalist Embedding Models Achieves #1 on the MTEB leaderboard
“AI versus 100,000 humans in creativity in this careful study using the Divergent Association Test (a well-validated measure, but all measures of creativity have flaws) GPT-4 wins. Better prompting can further improve performance & diversity of ideas.
“Transformers Can Do Arithmetic with the Right Embeddings Achieves up to 99% accuracy on 100 digit addition problems by training on only 20 digit numbers with a single GPU for one day repo:
“Transformers can learn arithmetic with the right embeddings. Models trained on 20-digit addition can generalize to 100-digit addition. The same tricks can do 15 digital multiplication, sorting, etc. 🧮 Unlike the previous SOTA, we don’t need fancy hardware. We do training” / X
Audio
Cartesia: Announcing Sonic: A Low-Latency Voice Model for Lifelike Speech
Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR)
Gaussian Splatting and Nerfs
“The future of Street View looks like this 😍 Basically City-scale 3D Gaussian Splatting. Thanks to a hierarchical level of detail (LOD) approach, you get real-time rendering of massive scenes at 30+ FPS! But capturing city scale at street level is SUPER messy, with people,
World Models
Vista: A Generalizable Driving World Model with High Fidelity and Versatile Controllability
Other AR/VR News
InstructAvatar: Text-Guided Emotion and Motion Control for Avatar Generation
Business and Enterprise
OpenAI signs 100K PwC workers to ChatGPT’s enterprise tier as PwC becomes its first resale partner | TechCrunch
“Growing evidence that GPT-4 class LLMs give good business advice if done carefully: 1) Getting AI advice boosts profits of high performing Kenyan entrepreneurs by 18% 2) Our paper shows that AI can help consulting work at a high level 3) AI and strategy professors agree on advice
“EB-12: The CEO’s Advocate Interviewed @CeciliaZin , founder of @gcai_co , an AI platform specifically designed for in-house legal counsel Highlights > On the evolving role of General Counsel: “They are considered to be really the strategic advisor to the CEO, right? So
Education
OpenAI for Education | OpenAI
Ethics/Legal/Security
Mastercard expects to find compromised cards quicker using AI | AP News
California regulation continues: “Incidentally, the threshold for proposed regulation in many jurisdictions is 10^26 FLOPs. The charts show this will be a barrier that will be substantially passed by frontier models this year and most models in a couple years, if trends continue.” / X
“The computing power used to train frontier AI models (and all AI models) is increasing at over 4x a year. Until we see a sign of slowdowns in investment and returns to compute (not yet, but which will happen eventually), this is the base trend to expect.
AI’s Communication Revolution: We’re All Talking to Computers Now
AI displacing 50% of jobs by 2027 is ‘uncannily accurate’: Kai-Fu Lee | Fortune
“Kai-Fu Lee Advocates for AI in Education: “Using AI Tools is Not Cheating” In a recent interview with Fortune Magazine, AI expert Kai-Fu Lee shared important thoughts on using artificial intelligence in our daily lives, especially in education. Lee argued that using AI tools
The Student Who Was Suspended for a Prizewinning AI Tool Fights Back – WSJ
Apple iOS 18, macOS 15 AI Features: Project Greymatter, Privacy, OpenAI Deal – Bloomberg
Apple plots creating AI ‘black box’ for iCloud
“We used AI to bet on the Kentucky Derby, and won. My friend and I tested ChatGPT’s derby picks by asking it to run 100 race simulations. We then opened a @DKSportsbook account, backed the AI’s top picks, Sierra Leone (won most simulations), and the best value bet, Mystic Dan
“Disagree! Society Will Shift Towards People With Design Skills While AI may make coding obsolete, it will make design and supervision of agents necessary People who can use AI tools and execute will be the ones in demand The problem with verbal skills is that there is not
Viral ‘All Eyes on Rafah’ image seems AI-generated. What does the phrase mean? – The Washington Post
Continued Fallout Over Google Search Results
Google AI Overviews Search Errors Cause Furor Online – The New York Times
Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search – The Verge
Gemini
“Big news – Gemini 1.5 Flash, Pro and Advanced results are out!🔥 – Gemini 1.5 Pro/Advanced at #2, closing in on GPT-4o – Gemini 1.5 Flash at #9, outperforming Llama-3-70b and nearly reaching GPT-4-0125 (!) Pro is significantly stronger than its April version. Flash’s cost,
Imagery
midjourney has a new hardware team
International
Bilderberg: Google DeepMind, Microsoft AI, Anthropic among elite guests
Exclusive: TikTok preparing a US copy of the app’s core algorithm, sources say | Reuters
OpenAI
Reproducing GPT-2 (124M) in llm.c in 90 minutes for $20 · karpathy/llm.c · Discussion #481 · GitHub
“LLMs “intelligence” is hard to benchmark, as we don’t have good benchmarks for human performance at complex tasks. Take theory-of-mind: several tests found GPT-4 beats humans, but another one finds a huge gap. Is it the testing structure? Prompting? Which is right? Hard to know.
“I was able to get GPT-4o to highlight all clickable on-screen elements and make it take control of the mouse. It can navigate the computer autonomously using the button coordinates.
The OpenAI Executive and Board-Level Drama Is Relentless, Dramatic, Emotional, and Immature (all of ‘em)
Disclosure, I think this is a bit suspect. I am a huge fan of Bilawal, but I’m not sure I’m down with Helen Toner (nor Sam Altman). It feels dramatic for drama’s sake. GPT was out in OpenAI’s world for 18 months (with chat overlays internally) before it was public. To frame it like ChatGPT was a total surprise seems contextually a bit dramatic.
Bilawal Sidhu on X: “❗EXCLUSIVE: “We learned about ChatGPT on Twitter.” What REALLY happened at OpenAI? Former board member Helen Toner breaks her silence with shocking new details about Sam Altman’s firing. Hear the exclusive, untold story on The TED AI Show. Here’s just a sneak peek:
“Stunning display of incompetence. Misunderstand Technology & GPT3.5 API was released in March 2022 & it was wrapped into ChatGPT in Nov 2022 & It went viral > the audacity “We learned about ChatGPT on Twitter” Misunderstand Board Roles & “Sam claimed to be an independent
OpenAI Safety Dialog Continues
So did they dismantle it or did they form it? What is going on people?
OpenAI Forms Safety Committee As It Starts Training Latest Artificial Intelligence Model – TV News Check https://tvnewscheck.com/ai/article/openai-forms-safety-committee-as-it-starts-training-latest-artificial-intelligence-model/
OpenAI Board Forms Safety and Security Committee | OpenAI
Disrupting deceptive uses of AI by covert influence operations | OpenAI
OpenAI finds Russian, Chinese propaganda campaigns used its tech – The Washington Post
Open Source
“# Reproduce GPT-2 (124M) in llm.c in 90 minutes for $20 ✨ The GPT-2 (124M) is the smallest model in the GPT-2 series released by OpenAI in 2019, and is actually quite accessible today, even for the GPU poor. For example, with llm.c you can now reproduce this model on one 8X
URL: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1795484547267834137
“Today’s highlight is LlamaFS – a self-organizing file manager 🦙🗃️ Given a directory of messy files (e.g. your ~/Downloads directory), it will automatically and reorganize the entire set of files into an organized directory structure with interpretable names. It can “watch”
Codestral: Hello, World! | Mistral AI | Frontier AI in your hands
“Announcing Codestral: our first-ever code model. – Open-weights under the new Mistral AI Non-Production License – New endpoint via La Plateforme:
URL: https://x.com/MistralAILabs/status/1795820935540584909
Podcasts/YouTube/Op-Eds
“We interviewed the most prolific jailbreaker of @ChatGPTapp and other leading LLMs, @elder_plinius . READ ⛓️💥👇
Publishing/Media
Google will roll out Chrome’s new extension spec on June 3rd – The Verge
“Every post on 𝕏 will feature a “Grok Analysis” button, enabling users to view a grok summary of the post.
“🚨ANNOUNCING SHOWRUNNER🚨 We believe the future is a mix of game & movie. Simulations powering 1000s of Truman Shows populated by interactive AI characters. 🚨Welcome to Sim Francisco & Showrunner!🚨 SOUND ON! Link to Signup in Bio
Media Companies Are Making a Huge Mistake With AI – The Atlantic
Netflix CEO: AI Isn’t Going to Replace Writers, Actors, and Directors – Business Insider
Video
George Lucas Thinks Artificial Intelligence in Filmmaking Is ‘Inevitable’ – IGN
“George Lucas Thinks Artificial Intelligence in Filmmaking Is ‘Inevitable’ “It’s like saying, ‘I don’t believe these cars are gunna work. Let’s just stick with the horses.’ “. 🥰
“Showrunner, AI generated entertainment on the fly. There is just so much to unpack from this release. Fable Simulation has been heads down building since last years release of the AI generated Southpark episode and their paper release. it shows
“We’re thrilled to announce our work on @Eminem’s new music video “Houdini” which just dropped today! This project is a testament to our team’s incredible talent and dedication at Metaphysic, who ensured every detail was perfect. #Eminem #SlimShady
https://twitter.com/Metaphysic_ai/status/1796593647758303443 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22tVWwmTie8
The Rest: AI News of The Week
Don’t let the volume overwhelm you. Have fun and skim these. The links are organized by topic, sorted from ‘coolest’ to ‘least cool’, and each topic is clearly defined with a headline. I’ve added a description and glossary of what the topics mean, beneath each label, in plain language. I do the work so you don’t have to! When you visit the pages, note that the links and descriptions are often pulled directly from tweets or articles, so it’s not always my voice. Pause when you see something that interests you. Reach out to me any time. I enjoy sharing and discussing these items.
Agency/Agents/Copilots News of the Week: Agency is when AI can do things for you (like Googling an actress name or fetching the latest weather forecast). An agent is one step further, when AI given autonomy to take action on your behalf (“Alexa, book a reservation for three at Peak in Hudson Yards for Friday night”). A co-pilot is an assistant (like spell check or autofill).
This week’s latest agent news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/01/agents-and-copilots-ai-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Anthropic News of the Week:
Anthropic is a company that builds LLMs like OpenAI, Mistral, Meta, etc. Their main AI brand is Claude. As with Amazon and Apple, individual Anthropic company posts will often be placed in the categories they match (image, audio, agents, robots, etc). Occasionally, I’ll dedicate space to a company’s news if it’s broad or a major product release.
This week’s Anthropic news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/anthropic-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Apple News of the Week: As with Amazon, individual Apple company products will often be placed in the categories they match (image, audio, agents, robots, etc). Occasionally, I’ll dedicate space to a company’s news if it’s broad or a major product release.
This weeks’ latest Apple AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/apple-ai-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) News of the Week: Artificial General Intelligence, in a nutshell, is when artificial intelligence is able to beat humans at everything (including embodying physical forms and completing physical tasks). It’s usually a thought catalyst for predictions, like when AGI will occur. 10 years? 25 years? 100? AGI is an event horizon that is tough to define, tough to imagine, and tough to predict. OpenAI defined AGI in its charter as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work”. OpenAI has a section of its website dedicated to AGI. Google’s DeepMind published my favorite report on the five levels of artificial intelligence on the way to AGI (see also here).
This week’s latest Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/artificial-general-intelligence-agi-and-leaderboard-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
AI Audio News of the Week: In this case, AI audio can mean a few things. The first is “generative audio” which refers to creating sounds with AI, much like ChatGPT writes words or MidJourney creates images. For example, asking for the “sound of waves crashing on the beach” would be text to sound. Another example would be an AI ‘watching’ a video and adding sound to it, like a foley artist would add footsteps or a creaking door to a movie scene. Lastly, AI audio can refer to microphones that only pick up certain speaker’s voices or headsets that cancel out all voices but your friends. This week’s latest AI audio news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/audio-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Autonomous Vehicles/Driverless Cars News of the Week: Driverless car news doesn’t always get its own category, because it’s so close to robot embodiment. I go with my gut each week around what to place in each category. My recommendation would be to follow Robotics/Embodiment also, as the two fields are converging.
This week’s autonomous vehicle news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/autonomous-vehicles-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) News of the Week: Augmented reality is when you see images or information on top of the real world. A car windshield with a heads-up display of the speed. Or glasses that have facial recognition and overlay the names of everyone in view. Virtual reality is when you are transported into another place, usually wearing goggles, but a flight simulator could also be considered virtual reality.
This week’s latest AR/VR news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/augmented-and-virtual-reality-ar-vr-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Business/Enterprise News of the Week: This broad category is for stories that impact corporations and large scale AI implementation. Enterprise refers to a type of AI that is often custom built for a business or leverage an API to connect secure data to an AI model.
This week’s latest enterprise AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/business-and-enterprise-ai-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Chips and Hardware AI News of the Week: Most of the chip news is NVIDA usually, yet more and more Meta, Google, and OpenAI are starting toward their own manufacturing. I have to make the call whether to put Meta, Google, and OpenAI’s chip news under this section or their company sections. Lately, I’m putting each company’s chips news into the company category, rather than the chips category. This is the rest of the chips headlines.
This week’s latest chips and hardware news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/chips-hardware-and-infrastructure-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Consumer Electronics AI News of the Week: This is a broad category meant to capture end user tools and products that incorporate artificial into their feature, from high-end grills to smartphones.
This week’s latest consumer AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/consumer-products-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Education AI News of the Week: There is a lot of buzz around the impact of AI in education. This section focuses both on the risks and rewards of how AI can impact learning. It’s broader than just K-12 and includes things like skills, trade, professional, and higher education. This is not about how to learn AI, it’s about AI’s impact on learning.
This week’s latest education news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/education-ai-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Ethics/Legal/Security AI News of the Week: This section focuses on the impact AI is having on ethics (deep fakes, war, trust, false information, plagiarism, job loss, income), legal (rights, laws, regulations), and security (hacking, phishing, national interests, safety). For huge news stories like the NY Times suing OpenAI, I usually put them under the main section or give them their own page.
This week’s latest AI ethics/legal/security news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/ethics-legal-security-ai-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Google AI News of the Week: Individual company products will often be placed in the categories they match (image, audio, agents, robots, etc). Occasionally, I’ll dedicate space to a company’s news if it’s broad
This week’s latest Google AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/google-ai-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Imagery News of the Week: AI imagery covers “generative AI” image tools. This usually text-to-image, where a user enters a prompt (“a polar bear walking through NYC”) and a tool like Dalle or MidJourney generates an image in the likeness of the description. This is different than AI vision, where an AI “looks at” an image and can derive context, details, and contents. AI vision is a subset of AI called multimodality. Imagery, in this case, is for image creation and modification/editing. Adobe Photoshop’s AI tools would fall into this category. I’ll also include things like automatic masking and object removal, even though that’s in between imagery and vision… but practically speaking it fits into editing.
This week’s latest AI image news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/imagery-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
International AI News of the Week: A lot of international news will get cross listed in the chips, security, or open-source categories, however it’s nice to have a separate category for worldwide AI news.
This week’s latest international AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/international-ai-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Meta AI News of the Week: This is a space dedicated for Meta specific AI advancements and news stories.
This weeks Meta AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/meta-ai-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Microsoft AI News of the Week: This is a space dedicated for Microsoft specific AI advancements and news stories.
This weeks Microsoft AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/microsoft-ai-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Multimodal AI News of the Week: This is a broad topic for an single AI model that demonstrates an ability to interact with more than one modality (imagery, video, audio, text). Often multimodal news will end up in one of these categories. I’m playing it by ear on a case by case basis. Please be patient with my organizational challenges.
This week’s multimodal AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/multimodality-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
OpenAI: OpenAI is the leading force in the AI boom of 2023 and now 2024. This section focuses on news that is specific to OpenAI. This section will compete with all of the other sections (imagery, vision, ethics, etc) because OpenAI is so broad. I won’t be able to consistently pick when to put things under OpenAI or other sections, so bear with me.
This week’s latest OpenAI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/openai-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Open Source Models: An open source AI model refers to a class of artificial intelligence models with public source code. They can be inspected, copied, installed, and customized on private computers. In contrast, a closed source model is proprietary and owned by a company that you pay to use (like PowerPoint or Photoshop). One of the most famous open source language models is a French model called Mistral. Its code is completely publicly available, and anyone can download it and customize it. On one hand, open source is a transparent and powerful way to democratize AI, but on the other hand, open source models circumvent the guard rails and copyright protections that private companies implement. Open source models are the wild west of artificial intelligence, but also the potential saving grace (depending on who you ask). It’s a bit like gun control debates but for computing power.
This week’s latest open source news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/open-source-ai-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Podcast/YouTube Clips of the Week: This is for more general interviews and explainer videos and podcasts that provide access to leadership, demos of new products, and walkthroughs and tutorials. Videos focused on specific topics will live in the topic category (i.e. images), but broader videos will live here.
This week’s latest podcasts and YouTube clips: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/podcasts-youtube-op-eds-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Publishing AI News of the Week: These are stories about AI’s impact on the publishing industry. From copyright and crawling to the death of page views or even the end of browsers.
This week’s latest publishing AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/publishing-media-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Robotics/Embodiment News of the Week: This is the most intense area of AI. Embodiment refers to putting an AI inside of a machine. It’s “embodying” the object and therefore giving a robot agency in the real world. An example would be using a large language model as an interface to a complex coding task. Just as you ask “Alexa, play Bad Blood by Taylor Swift on Spotify” using plain language, with embodiment you could ask a robot to “Go to the laundry basket and bring me all of the red shirts”. The language model in the robot would translate your request into the proper code to go get the red shirts. The robot was never trained on the task. Another type of embodiment would be training a robot using virtual reality simulations. Using an simulation, a robot could be trained on thousands of scenarios until the real world can be swapped out and the robot doesn’t “notice”. This section also includes factory automation and human prosthetics. There will be some overlap with other categories like autonomous vehicles. I first learned about embodiment from Alan Thompson. I highly recommend his video explainer: https://youtu.be/peLqYP9BAUg?si=2FzrvDlw-qaQFaCx.
This week’s latest robot and embodiment AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/publishing-media-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Science/Medicine AI News of the Week: AI’s strength is learning patterns. This applies nicely to medical diagnosis and identifying trends. When combined with data and AI vision, this means AI is good at looking at x-rays. Language models are helping with patient interface, and robotics and augmented reality are advancing surgery. Powerful enterprise models like Google’s Alphafold can master protein folding. Other models can read ancient scrolls without opening them.
This week’s latest AI science and medicine news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/science-and-medicine-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
AI Video News of the Week: AI video in this case refers to generative video. Much like imagery meant generative imagery. This usually text-to-video, where a user enters a prompt (“a wizard walking out of a flaming building”) and a tool like Pika or Runway generates an video in the likeness of the description. It also covers animation of still images, where an image is given motion (like a photo of a waterfall appearing to have flowing water). As with images, this is different than AI vision, where an AI “looks at” an image or video and can derive context, details, and contents. Video, in this case, is video creation and modification/editing.
This week’s latest AI video news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/video-news-week-ending-05-31-2024/
X/Twitter/Grok: Grok is one of several AI’s developed by X, and it’s a bit blended in with Telsa and other Elon Musk technology. Not every week will have a Grok section, but like Meta, Google, Apple, and OpenAI, X will be in the news enough to have its own section.
This week’s latest X news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/twitter-x-grok-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Technical and AI Developer News of the Week: Everything that is too technical for general consumption goes here. These are stories I think are important, but might be inaccessible and confusing. It’s also a space for developer news and deep dives into how AI works, under the hood.
This week’s technical and dev AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/02/tech-papers-and-development-week-ending-05-31-2024/
Credits/Sources
Most of these weekly links come from just a few prolific oversharing sources. Please follow them, as they work hard to find the news each week and they make it a lot easier for me to compile.
- Robert Scoble: https://x.com/Scobleizer
- Ethan Mollick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emollick/
- Alan Thompson: https://lifearchitect.ai/
- Theoretically Media: https://www.youtube.com/@TheoreticallyMedia
- The Rundown: https://www.therundown.ai/
- Bilawal Sidhu: https://twitter.com/bilawalsidhu/
- TLDR: https://tldr.tech/ai
- Jeremiah Owyang: https://twitter.com/jowyang
- Nick St. Pierre: https://twitter.com/nickfloats
- Dr. Jim Fan: https://twitter.com/DrJimFan
- All About AI: https://www.youtube.com/@AllAboutAI
- Marshall Kirkpatrick: https://aitimetoimpact.com/
- AI News (Smol Talk): https://buttondown.email/ainews/archive/
For previous issues, please visit the archives!
Thanks for reading!
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