Ethan B. Holland

Over 54,400 manually organized AI links and counting

The cover this week is inspired by an open letter signed by current and former employees at leading AI companies titled “Right to Warn”. MidJourney prompt “corporate PR photo. a group of smiling office managers posing next to a large button labeled "Run Away!" --ar 4:3 --style raw”. Upscaled with Magnific. OpenAI logo added to the name badge with Photoshop. Font is Arial to be as corporate as possible.

AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary, Top 40 Links, and Helpful Visuals

About This Week’s Cover Images

The main cover this week is inspired by an open letter signed by current and former employees at leading AI companies titled “Right to Warn”.  MidJourney prompt “corporate PR photo. a group of smiling office managers posing next to a large button labeled “Run Away!” –ar 4:3 –style raw”.  Upscaled with Magnific. OpenAI logo added to the name badge with Photoshop.  Font is Arial to be as corporate as possible.

This week’s category cover prompt is “A fashion photoshoot of a runway look inspired by {category topic}. A large screen displays the word “{category name}” –ar 4:3 –style raw”

Executive Summary: Week Ending 06/07/2024

AI Employees Sign Open Letter for Stronger Oversight and Whistleblower Protections
Current and former employees at leading AI companies have signed a letter warning about significant risks posed by AI, including misinformation and loss of control over autonomous systems. They stress the need for robust whistleblower protections and call for AI companies to adopt policies allowing open criticism and anonymous reporting of risks to independent bodies. 

Former OpenAI Researcher Predicts AGI by 2027

Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former researcher at OpenAI, has released a new essay series outlining his views on the imminent arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Aschenbrenner argues that the world is underestimating the advancements in AI, predicting another significant leap akin to the progression from GPT-2 to GPT-4 by 2027, which he believes will achieve AGI. He highlights the trendlines in deep learning and the international dynamics, particularly between the US and China, suggesting a race towards superintelligence. Aschenbrenner warns that society is unprepared for AGI and the potential large-scale alignment failures that could occur.   A snippet:

‘Situational Awareness’ Excerpt
“The AGI race has begun. We are building machines that can think and reason. By 2025/26, these machines will outpace college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I; we will have superintelligence, in the true sense of the word. Along the way, national security forces not seen in half a century will be unleashed, and before long, The Project will be on. If we’re lucky, we’ll be in an all-out race with the CCP; if we’re unlucky, an all-out war.”

Click to access situationalawareness.pdf

Andreessen Horowitz Report Highlights AI Voice Agents Revolutionizing Phone Calls

“Phone calls are an API to the world — and AI takes this to the next level.”

Andreessen Horowitz’s latest report argues that voice agents are poised to revolutionize phone calls. 

Businesses can look forward to cost savings and improved customer experiences, while consumers will benefit from human-like services without human interaction. Advanced models like GPT-4o are set to enhance conversation efficiency and naturalness. In the B2B sector, companies are transitioning from basic phone trees to sophisticated LLM-based systems tailored to specific industries, promising better handling of diverse and complex call workflows. Key opportunities lie in industries with high phone dependency and labor shortages. Meanwhile, B2C voice agents, despite engagement challenges, are set to deliver innovative experiences in areas like therapy and coaching. “Thanks to gen AI, no human will ever again have to make a call. Humans will spend time on the phone only when a call has value to them.”

Chinese Company KWAI Launches AI Video Generator That Rivals OpenAI’s Sora 

This week, KWAI, a main competitor to TikTok in China, introduced KLing, a shockingly strong AI video generator. KLing can create 2-minute videos at 30fps in 1080p quality and is accessible through the KWAI iOS app for users with a Chinese phone number. The videos are equal to the quality of Sora, OpenAI’s video generator.  A shot across the bow from China. Must see examples:

Must See Video: OpenAI Demo Showcases Advanced Character Voices

OpenAI’s demo highlights GPT-4o’s impressive capability in generating diverse character voices simply by having a user describe them!  With prompts from a a human, GPT effortlessly generates various accents, tones, and speech styles.  The technology foreshadows significant advancements in entertainment, voiceovers, personalized digital assistants, and bedtime stories.

Eleven Labs Launches Innovative Text-to-SFX Feature

This weekend, Eleven Labs unveiled their much-anticipated text-to-sound effects (SFX) feature. The update allows users to generate sound effects, short instrumental tracks, soundscapes, and various character voices from simple text prompts. This tool is designed for a wide audience, including content creators, video game developers, and filmmakers, providing a versatile and powerful resource for creative projects. Check out the demo video showcasing around 40 prompts:

Udio Introduces Audio Prompting 

Users can upload their own music or sound files, which Udio’s advanced AI then extends into longer new material. Here are a few must listen examples:

Nvidia Continues To Absolutely Crush Souls

CEO Jensen Huang revealed NVIDIA managed a staggering 350X reduction in computational costs for datacenter-scale AI over the past eight years. Nvidia’s market valuation has soared to $3.01 trillion, surpassing Apple.  This week, Jensen introduced the next-generation ‘Rubin’ chips, expected in 2026, with an enhanced ‘Rubin Ultra’ version following in 2027. He emphasized the significant impact of these chips, in an era dominated by GPU data centers.  Additional AI focused chips featuring Arm and Blackwell cores are also on the way.

Adobe Faces PR Backlash Over New Terms of Service And Ansel Adams Ripoffs

This week, Adobe’s updated terms of service have sparked significant outrage among creatives. The controversy centers around a broad and permissive sublicense that appears to grant Adobe extensive access to user files uploaded to their cloud, including the potential for human review. Concerns were amplified when users questioned whether these terms mean Adobe could access all work created in Photoshop, even under non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). Furthermore, Adobe is facing criticism for selling AI-generated images styled after Ansel Adams.

ByteDance Circumvents U.S. Restrictions And Acquires Top NVIDIA AI Chips

Despite stringent U.S. restrictions, ByteDance has managed to secure advanced AI chips from Nvidia, revealing a significant loophole in the export controls. The acquisition underscores the challenges in regulating the flow of critical technology to China and highlights the competitive pressures in the global AI arms race. Most of all, the development raises questions about the effectiveness of current policies aimed at limiting China’s access to cutting-edge technology.

ChatGPT Introduces “Background Conversations” Feature

In its latest update, ChatGPT has added a “Background Conversations” feature, enabling users to continue interactions even while using other apps or with the screen off. This enhancement is set to improve user convenience and multitasking capabilities.  

Anthropic’s Claude Opus Gains Recognition for Handling Complex Documents

Claude Opus is emerging as a strong contender to OpenAI, particularly praised for its adeptness in handling complex documents and its notably lower hallucination rate compared to GPT-4.  It’s also getting attention for multimodal efficiency in tasks such as creating timestamps and segments for YouTube descriptions and generating ffmpeg commands for video editing, outperforming GPT-4 as well. Additionally, Claude Opus recently demonstrated value in legal contexts by identifying critical issues overlooked by lawyers on both sides of a case, who agreed they gained from the missed details.

xAI’s Grok Rumored to Receive New Modes: Socrates and D.E.I.

The chatbot is rumored to be receiving two new modes, Socrates and D.E.I., expanding its current options of Normal and Fun. 

Meta’s LLaMA 3 Achieves Breakthrough Token Processing Rates

Meta’s LLaMA 3 continues to achieve remarkable milestones in token processing rates. Last week, Groq (not to be confused with Grok, above) processed 30,000 tokens per second on LLaMA 3’s 8B model. This week, the 70B model reached an impressive 40,792 tokens per second using FP16 Multiply and FP32 Accumulate, with a full context length of 7,989 tokens. This achievement underscores LLaMA 3’s efficiency and potential, offering GPT-4 level chatbot performance while completely free to use.

Alibaba’s Qwen2 Multilingual Open Source Model Family Released

Alibaba has released Qwen2, a new multilingual model family available in five sizes, which outperforms Meta’s LLaMA 3. Qwen2 supports 29 languages and includes Base and Instruct models ranging from 0.5B to 72B parameters. This release is hailed as the most impactful since LLaMA 3, achieving state-of-the-art performance across academic and chat applications. The models are accessible on Hugging Face.

Microsoft Unveils Aurora: A Groundbreaking AI for Weather Forecasting

Microsoft researchers have unveiled Aurora, the first large-scale foundation model of the atmosphere, designed to generate highly accurate weather forecasts.

NVIDIA Earth 2: Advanced AI Project Enhances Extreme Weather Response

Earth 2 combines geospatial imagery, physics simulation, generative AI, and 3D visualization to aid countries and corporations in predicting and responding to extreme weather events. This cutting-edge initiative has now been enhanced to provide street-level insights, featuring narration by an AI version of Jensen Huang. 

AI Predicts Nearly 1 Million New Antibiotics in Groundbreaking Study

In a revolutionary breakthrough, researchers used artificial intelligence to predict nearly one million new potential antibiotics, offering a significant advance in the fight against antimicrobial resistance. The study, published in Cell, employed machine learning to analyze vast genomic datasets, identifying numerous antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) across various environments, including human and animal microbiomes, soil, and marine habitats. Of the 100 synthesized candidates tested, 79 were active in vitro, with 63 effectively targeting drug-resistant pathogens. This discovery could drastically speed up the development of new antibiotics, a process traditionally taking over a decade​.

SignLLM: The First Video Model for Sign Language Production

Researchers from Rutgers University, Carnegie Mellon University, and other institutions have introduced SignLLM, the first multilingual AI model for Sign Language Production (SLP). The model can generate AI avatar videos, creating sign language gestures from natural language inputs in eight different languages!

https://signllm.github.io

Tesla’s $10B Annual AI Investment and xAI’s New Supercomputer in Memphis

Tesla plans to spend $10 billion this year on AI, focusing on both training and inference within vehicles. Elon Musk highlighted that companies not investing at this level will fail to compete. Concurrently, Musk’s xAI is developing a new supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, named the “Gigafactory of Compute.” This state-of-the-art facility, housed in a former Electrolux building, will utilize 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, significantly enhancing xAI’s AI capabilities. The supercomputer will also support xAI’s generative AI chatbot, Grok, improving its data processing efficiency and performance.

Top 40 Links of The Week

Agents

Microsoft AI Screen Recording Backlash

  • “Nice to see Microsoft listening to AI Recall feedback, making MUCH needed changes: 1. Recall will now be opt-in (vs. previously opt-out with users being enrolled by default) 2. Local database is now encrypted (vs. previously unencrypted in plain text) 3. Biometric authentication
  • “The narrative around Windows Recall has snowballed into a major PR disaster. People don’t trust Microsoft, and that means features like Recall aren’t welcome in the eyes of many Windows users.”

Other Agent News

AGI

A Bearish Prediction That OpenSource Will Lose

Interpretability: Extracting Concepts from GPT-4 | OpenAI

  • We currently don’t understand how to make sense of the neural activity within language models. Today, we are sharing improved methods for finding a large number of “features”—patterns of activity that we hope are human interpretable.

Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) News: Week Ending 06/07/2024

Gaussian Splatting and Nerfs

  • “When Apple said they were rolling out ‘spatial media’ this is what I actually expected – 3D video with six-degrees of freedom. Instead Vision Pro users got old wine (VR180 video) in a new bottle (Apple’s MV-HEVC format). Conveniently, here’s an open source NeRF-based volumetric video engine, with WebXR streaming to Vision Pro and Quest. Oh and it supports Mac too. All this from a little known company called Lifecast (YC ’21).
  • “I used Gaussian Splats for the first time in a video, and it’s kind of mind blowing to be able to traverse through a scene that’s essentially an identical match to the real world This is what I dreamed of doing as a kid Thanks to @Polycam3D for providing their tool ❤️

Chips, Hardware, and Infrastructure: Week Ending 06/07/2024

Brain Processor

AMD

ByteDance Gets Best Chips Despite Regulations

NVIDIA

Ethics

  • “Alignment, of a sort: this paper conducts what they call a “moral Turing Test,” asking people to compare GPT-4o to humans on ethical questions. “Here we find that LLMs appear to have a strong aptitude for moral reasoning on par with expert ethicists.”
  • “The Big AI Debate explained by Forbes. What is more beneficial or more dangerous: open source AI or proprietary controlled by 3 or 4 big players? The people who worry most about AI safety also tend to be he ones who overestimate the power of AI.”
  • “No one should act like state actors can’t build their own GPT4/5/6/7/87 – and they will remove any boundaries in their models preventing them from having their model develop new weapons, psychological manipulators, whatever your afraid of – and they will attempt to do this. The US included.”
    https://twitter.com/Teknium1/status/1797979400526581833  
  • “🚨New paper: with many technologies, younger employees typically “get it,” and give advice to others on using it. This doesn’t work in AI. We interviewed junior consultants about handling the risks associated with AI in their job… and found that their advice was mostly off.

Google  

Imagery

  • “Tonight I grabbed some other ingredients: milk from the kitchen and black ink from my son. Watching the images emerge is like clearing my mind. Some parts of this video have been sped up 4x, while others are in real-time. Real-time diffusion with Stream Diffusion + SDXL Turbo.

Multimodality 

Open Source

Hugging Face

Other Open Source News

OpenAI

Publishing  

Robotics and Embodiment 

Tech Papers, Training, and Development 

  • “At current growth rates, AI runs out of easy-to-access high quality data by 2028, depending on how aggressive training is. There are techniques that may extend this (eg synthetic data) and possibilities for using less-easily-accessed data. (Google & Meta are sitting on a lot).”
  • “Given all this, when will we exhaust the web’s text? Training a compute-optimal dense model on ~100T tokens for 4 epochs would take ~5e28 FLOP (around 3 OOMs above GPT-4). At historical growth rates, we’ll reach this level by 2028. 7/12
  • LLMs Aren’t Just “Trained On the Internet” Anymore – Allen Pike

https://allenpike.com/2024/llms-trained-on-internet

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/2024/06/07/agents-and-copilots-ai-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

Amazon 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 or a major product release.
This week’s latest Amazon AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/07/amazon-ai-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/anthropic-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/apple-ai-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/artificial-general-intelligence-agi-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/audio-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/autonomous-vehicles-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/augmented-and-virtual-reality-ar-vr-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/business-and-enterprise-ai-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/chips-hardware-and-infrastructure-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/ethics-legal-security-ai-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/google-ai-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/imagery-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/international-ai-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

Locally Run AI Models News of the Week: This is a niche mostly for serious AI followers. It refers to AI that can be privately downloaded and run on a device without an internet connection. These have an array of powerful implications, from ethics of rogue users with untethered agents, to practical uses like Apple running a full AI on your phone, to corporate installations for security, to embodied robots with AI running in their virtual brain.
This week’s latest locally run AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/07/locally-run-ai-models-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/meta-ai-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/microsoft-ai-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

Mobile AI News of the Week: In April, 2024 I added a dedicated category for mobile. Prior, I put all most the mobile news into either the company (Apple v. Google v. Microsoft) or locally run AI. It also ended up in the chips and hardware section, or the consumer products category. There is enough mobile news to at least start cross linking it all in one place. This week’s latest mobile AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/07/mobile-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/multimodality-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/openai-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/open-source-ai-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/podcasts-youtube-op-eds-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/publishing-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

RAG Retrieval-Augmented Generation News of the Week: RAG allows a language model to “reference an authoritative knowledge base outside of its training data sources before generating a response” (via Amazon). Historically RAG was prone to hallucinations, however new methods are improving the reliability. There is enough news about RAG, that I want to start tracking it separately for my own use.
This week’s latest RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/07/rag-retrieval-augmented-generation-news-week-ending-04-19-2024-2/

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/2024/06/07/robotics-and-embodiment-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/science-and-medicine-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/video-news-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/twitter-x-grok-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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/2024/06/07/tech-papers-training-and-development-week-ending-06-07-2024/

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.

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22 responses to “AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary, Top 40 Links, and Helpful Visuals”

  1. Agents and Copilots: AI News Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

    Reply
  2. Anthropic News: Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

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  3. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) News: Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

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  4. Amazon AI News: Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

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  5. Autonomous Vehicles News: Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

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  6. Business and Enterprise AI News: Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

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  7. Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) News: Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

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  8. Imagery News: Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

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  9. International AI News: Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

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  10. Meta AI News: Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

    Reply
  11. Microsoft AI News: Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

    Reply
  12. Locally Run AI Models News: Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

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  13. Mobile News: Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

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  14. Multimodality News: Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

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  15. Open Source AI News: Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

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  16. Publishing News: Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

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  17. Perplexity News: Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

    Reply
  18. Podcasts/YouTube/Op-Eds: Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

    Reply
  19. Science and Medicine News: Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

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  20. (RAG) Retrieval-Augmented Generation News: Week Ending 04/19/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

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  21. Video News: Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

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  22. Tech Papers, Training, and Development: Week Ending 06/07/2024 – Ethan B. Holland

    […] This week’s executive overview and top links are here:AI News #36: Week Ending 06/07/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 40 Links […]

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