About This Week’s Cover Images
This week’s cover depicts Ilya Suskever on a lifeguard stand in an image that grows increasingly surreal the further one looks from his face. This represents Ilya’s departure from OpenAI to launch Safe Superintelligence Inc. In the cover, unaligned AI hallucinates all around him, while he remains untouched. Image created with MidJourney then face swapped with InsightFace. The original image was then upscaled through Magnific.ai with 100% chaos and layered onto itself with Photoshop. The starting prompt was ‘a beautiful day at a community pool. a skinny bald lifeguard sits in the lifeguard stand. –chaos 50 –ar 4:3 –style raw –personalize 9zxyhz8’. Font is Times New Roman, which is the font Safe Superintelligence Inc. uses on its website.
The theme for this week’s category covers is “safety”. Each image attempts to incorporate a safety theme alongside the category name. MidJourney struggled with mixing concepts, and I’d give this week a C. As usual, I resist revisions and to test what MidJourney can muster with direct and simplistic prompts.
Executive Summary: Week Ending 06/24/2024
Here’s the high-level overview of everything you need to know:
OpenAI Co-founder Ilya Sutskever Launches Safe Superintelligence Inc.
Ilya Sutskever, former chief scientist and co-founder of OpenAI, announced the creation of a new AI-focused research lab named Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI). In a bid to prioritize safety over commercial pressures, Sutskever’s startup will concentrate solely on developing safe super intelligent AI, insulating itself from the complexities and competitive pressures typical of tech companies
Anthropic Launches Claude 3.5 Sonnet: Beats ChatGPT and Gemini – takes top spot!
Anthropic introduced Claude 3.5 Sonnet, its most advanced AI model. This new release marks the first in the 3.5 model family, boasting superior performance on key evaluations compared to competitors, operating at twice the speed of its predecessor Claude 3 Opus and at one-fifth the cost.
“Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton Backs AI Startup Carbon Capture
Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI,” has emerged from a year of cautionary warnings about AI’s risks to support CuspAI, a Cambridge-founded startup. CuspAI, which recently secured $30 million in seed funding, uses deep learning and molecular simulation to design next-generation building materials aimed at capturing carbon emissions. Hinton will serve as an advisor to the company, highlighting the dual role of AI in posing and solving global challenges. Co-founders Max Welling and Chad Edwards envision CuspAI’s technology as a “search engine” for discovering new materials, with potential collaborations including Meta. The funding round was led by Hoxton Ventures, marking a significant investment in AI-driven climate solutions.
TikTok Introduces Symphony, a Creative AI Suite with Assistants, Translation, and Avatars
TikTok has launched Symphony, a generative AI-powered suite aimed at enhancing content creation. Symphony’s Avatars support translation and multilingual campaigns for global audience engagement. Symphony Assistant offers personalized guidance and recommendations for content ideation and best practices. Symphony Creative Studio simplifies video production, transforming minimal input into engaging videos. The suite also integrates with TikTok Ads Manager, for AI driven ad optimization and generation.
Runway Launches Gen-3 Alpha: The Best Publicly Available AI Video Tool
Runway has unveiled Gen-3 Alpha, a groundbreaking model for high-fidelity, controllable video generation. This latest advancement marks a significant improvement in video quality and motion consistency over its predecessor, Gen-2. The model introduces fine-grained temporal control, allowing precise transitions and key-framing, and excels in creating photorealistic human characters.
AI Will Transform Finance, Citi GPS Report
According to Citibank, AI is poised to revolutionize the finance industry, potentially driving global banking profits to $2 trillion by 2028, a 9% increase over the next five years. Similar to past technological upheavals, AI will displace traditional roles while creating new opportunities. AI promises to automate routine tasks, streamline operations, and allow employees to focus on higher-value activities. However, this transition brings challenges in data security, regulation, and ethical concerns. Citi says the pace of AI adoption will vary, with FinTechs and BigTech leading the charge, while traditional banks struggle with legacy systems and cultural inertia.
Apple Unveils Over 20 Open Source AI Models
Apple released (the wonderfully named model) 4M-21, a versatile “any-to-any model” capable of tasks ranging from text-to-image generation to producing depth masks. Apple hopes to enhance AI applications by integrating multiple functionalities into a single model. Additionally, Apple launched 20 new models for on-device AI, along with four new datasets on Hugging Face. These models highlight Apple’s commitment to advancing open-source AI and supporting the research community.
Role-playing Chatbot, Character.ai, Gets 20,000 Queries per Second
Character AI, a platform specializing in creating and interacting with custom AI-driven characters, is managing 20,000 queries per second (QPS), equating to 20% of Google’s query volume. The big takeaway is Character AI’s capability to efficiently handle vast amounts of data. The technologies powering this performance include advanced machine learning algorithms, scalable cloud infrastructure, and optimized query handling systems. These innovations enable Character AI to serve users rapidly and accurately, demonstrating its competitive edge in the AI landscape.
Nvidia Becomes Most Valuable Public Company, Surpassing Microsoft
Nvidia has surpassed Microsoft to become the most valuable public company in the world, reaching a market cap of $3.34 trillion. The chipmaker’s shares rose over 170% this year. Nvidia’s data center business alone grew by 427% to $22.6 billion in the most recent quarter. The growth also increased the net worth of Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, to $117 billion. Microsoft, despite its own gains from the AI boom and significant investments in OpenAI, now holds a market cap of $3.32 trillion.
Top 91 Links of The Week
Must-See Demos of Runway’s New AI Video Generator
Runway Gen-3
Crazy times ahead. This video is not real. @runway 3 : r/singularity
“This is bananas. Gen-3 Alpha just got dropped by Runway. 7 wild examples:
Introducing Gen-3 Alpha: A New Frontier for Video Generation
“Gen-3 Apha is fking insane thread: Prompt: Highly detailed close up of a bacteria.
Other Video
“Hedra just dropped Character-1, a new foundation model that can turn images into signing portrait videos According to the startup, the model has infinite duration (but 30s max for the public preview)
“Introducing the research preview of our foundation model, Character-1. Available today at
Google Gemini and DeepMind
Gemini
“I have access to the 2M token version of Gemini 1.5. I think multimodal video is going to have some big effects on management, training & coaching. I gave Gemini an 85 minute video of a meeting. It was able to identify what happened & how to improve it. Not perfect yet, but nice
DeepMind
Generating audio for video – Google DeepMind
“Google DeepMind just shared progress on their new video-to-audio (V2A) tech Until now, AI video generations have been silent, this solves that. V2A can generate an “unlimited number” of tracks for any video. Here are some thoughts & examples (Sound up 🔉):
DeepMind’s new AI generates soundtracks and dialogue for videos | TechCrunch
Google DeepMind Shifts From Research Lab to AI Product Factory – Bloomberg
Other Google News
“Google last month’s landmark paper on InfiniAttention for achieving infinite context. 👨🔧 While true infinite context may be far-fetched idea, I think a very long context length, which is sufficient for most industry use cases, is within reach. The paper shows that a 1B LLM can
Ilya Sutskever Launches Safe Superintelligence Inc.
OpenAI Co-founder Plans New AI Focused Research Lab – Bloomberg
“This company is special in that its first product will be the safe superintelligence, and it will not do anything else up until then,” Sutskever says in an exclusive interview about his plans. “It will be fully insulated from the outside pressures of having to deal with a large and complicated product and having to be stuck in a competitive rat race.”
OpenAI’s former chief scientist is starting a new AI company – The Verge
Ilya Sutskever is launching Safe Superintelligence Inc., an AI startup that will prioritize safety over ‘commercial pressures.’
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s former chief scientist, launches new AI company | TechCrunch
“I am starting a new company:”
Safe Superintelligence Inc.
Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet
“Introducing Claude 3.5 Sonnet—our most intelligent model yet. This is the first release in our 3.5 model family. Sonnet now outperforms competitor models on key evaluations, at twice the speed of Claude 3 Opus and one-fifth the cost. Try it for free:
Introducing Claude 3.5 Sonnet \ Anthropic
Claude rolled out Sonnet 3.5 came with UI enhancements : r/LocalLLaMA
Claude 3.5 Sonnet as a writing partner – YouTube
Claude 3.5 Sonnet significantly outperforms GPT-4o (and all other models) on LiveBench : r/singularity
Claude 3.5 Sonnet: Anthropic’s AI model is competing with GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5. – The Verge
“Claude 3.5 Sonnet is now available to @AnthropicAI devs everywhere. It’s our best model yet – smarter than Claude 3 Opus and twice as fast. And it costs just $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.
“Anthropic launched claude 3.5 sonnet today. In the release, agentic coding evals caught my attention. How agentic coding eval works: • claude reads an open source codebase • claude gets instruction (fix bug, etc.) • claude creates action plan • claude implements required
“In our internal pull request eval, Claude 3.5 Sonnet passed 64% of our test cases. To put this in comparison, Claude 3 Opus only passed 38%.
“At Anthropic, everyone from non-technical people with no coding experience to tenured SWEs now use Claude to write code that saves them hours of time. Claude makes you feel like you have superpowers, suddenly no problem is too ambitious. The future of programming is here folks.” / X
“Claude is starting to get really good at coding and autonomously fixing pull requests. It’s becoming clear that in a year’s time, a large percentage of code will be written by LLMs. Let me show you what I mean:” / X
“We’re also launching a preview of Artifacts on http://claude.ai. You can ask Claude to generate docs, code, mermaid diagrams, vector graphics, or even simple games. Artifacts appear next to your chat, letting you see, iterate, and build on your creations in real-time.”
“New Anthropic research: Investigating Reward Tampering. Could AI models learn to hack their own reward system? In a new paper, we show they can, by generalization from training in simpler settings. Read our blog post here:
“@AnthropicAI I think people have a tendency to massively over-estimate the value that the data they submit to LLM tools has as a potential training source See also:
AI Carbon Capture Startup
The ‘Godfather of AI’ emerges out of stealth to back carbon capture startup | Fortune Europe
TikTok Launches AI Creator Suite
“TikTok just launched Symphony, a new suite of AI features including digital avatars, translation tools, an AI assistant, and more. Brands can choose from a selection of ‘stock avatars’ based on real actors OR create custom avatars to serve as virtual brand reps.
Meet TikTok Symphony, Our New Creative AI Suite | TikTok For Business Blog
“TikTok also announced “Translate for global reach” It’s a new AI Dubbing tool that automatically transcribes, translates, and dubs videos into 10+ languages, helping brands scale content globally. Similar to Mr.Beast, at scale
Agents and Copilots
“Dharmesh just built an AI tool that summarizes or answers any question about an email you forward. I’ve tried it, and it works great. It’s also 100% free. I probably sound like a broken record, but the future of AI and agents (and how the industry onboards the next 1B users) is by seamlessly integrating AI into existing workflows.”
“At Anthropic, everyone from non-technical people with no coding experience to tenured SWEs now use Claude to write code that saves them hours of time. Claude makes you feel like you have superpowers, suddenly no problem is too ambitious. The future of programming is here folks.” / X
“Reid Hoffman says everyone will soon have AI agents to help them navigate the world while some people will choose to have digital twins, and it will be startling how soon this will happen
character.ai | Personalized AI for every moment of your day
“Character AI is serving 20,000 QPS. Here are the technologies we use to serve hyper-efficiently. [
“Character ai is doing 20% as many queries per second as Google!? What the fuck???? That’s insane.
Apple
“Apple announced Apple Intelligence, a suite of generative AI features integrated with iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and MacOS Sequoia. More quietly, Apple also offered a peek into its new models’ performance and how they were trained and optimized. Learn more:
“EPFL and Apple just released 4M-21: single any-to-any model that can do anything from text-to-image generation to generating depth masks! 🙀 Let’s unpack 🧶
“Apple is back! 20 new coreML models for on-device AI & 4 new datasets just dropped on HF:
Apple adds more AI models for open-source study
apple (Apple)
“Apple Intelligence is insane! As always, Apple is late, but they are showing up with the best implementation in the market. We are about to glimpse what AI can accomplish when used on everyday tasks. I’ve been reading everything they have published, and one of the most fascinating aspects is how they can dynamically specialize their foundational models on the fly to solve different tasks. (full walk-through in link)
Apple Explains iPhone 15 Pro Requirement for Apple Intelligence – MacRumors
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
“Claude is fully capable of acting as a Supreme Court Justice right now. When used as a law clerk, Claude is easily as insightful and accurate as human clerks, while towering over humans in efficiency.”
If Ray Kurzweil Is Right (Again), You’ll Meet His Immortal Soul in the Cloud | WIRED
“Watch Reinforcement Learning in action! 🤖⚔ In this example, bots adapt to opponents’ anticipated moves, improving performance by learning from experiences.🧠⚡#Ubisoft Check out La Forge’s latest R&D presented at AAMAS. Learn more:
Audio
ElevenLabs
“ElevenLabs launched a new open-source text and video-to-sound effects app and API It allows users to generate audio based on text prompts or videos and developers to build apps with the tech. Launched within 24 hours after Google V2A, wild!
“We are excited to introduce the Text to Sound Effects API. To showcase it – we’ve built the first Video to Sounds Effects app. This app is available for free online and fully open-source.
Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR)
Roblox’s Road to 4D Generative AI
Roblox is building toward 4D generative AI, going beyond single 3D objects to dynamic interactions.
Autonomous Vehicles
Waymo
“New data shows that the Waymo Driver continues to make roads safer. Over 14.8M rider-only miles driven through the end of March, it was up to 3.5x better in avoiding crashes that cause injuries and 2x better in avoiding police-reported crashes than human drivers in SF & Phoenix.
Chips, Hardware, and Infrastructure
NVIDIA
“Nvidia became the most valuable company in the world today. As celebration, below to is @mreflow’s prediction from the start of 2023. Wild that NVIDIA added ~3 Trillion in market cap over the last 20 months
Nvidia passes Microsoft in market cap, is most valuable public company
Nvidia’s (NVDA) Rally to Most Valuable Stock: How It Happened – Bloomberg
Nvidia’s New Sales Booster: The Global Push for National AI Champions – WSJ
“softbank sold every nvidia share it had in 2019 for $3.6B (today’s value: $153B) the fund’s primary goal was to invest in AI. being too early is sometimes fatal” / X
“We’re building a Dell AI factory with @nvidia to power @grok for @xai @elonmusk
Ethics/Legal/Security
Citigroup: Artificial Intelligence (AI) will profoundly change the future of finance and money. And according to a new Citi GPS report, it could potentially drive global banking industry profits to $2 trillion by 2028, a 9% increase over the next five years. Just as the steam engine powered the industrial revolution, and the internet ushered in the age of information, AI may commoditize human intelligence. Finance, a data rich industry with clients adopting AI at pace, will be at the forefront of change.
Imagery
Adobe
“Adobe’s New Terms of Use: A Win for Creators, but AI Concerns Persist. Here’s a quick rundown: Imagine logging into Photoshop, ready to work on a high-profile, confidential project, only to be slammed with new terms of use that seemingly handed Adobe free reign over your files.
Adobe – Adobe Reimagines PDFs by Integrating Adobe Firefly into Acrobat and Adding Support for Chat Across Multiple Documents in Acrobat AI Assistant
MidJourney
“BREAKING It seems like a partnership between X and MidJourney has been achieved 👀 Grok might be able to use Midjourney for image generation in the future.
Microsoft
“New vision model from Microsoft, Florence-2 – Can perform various tasks: object detection, grounding, segmentation, OCR – 200M and 800M models
microsoft/Florence-2-large-ft · Hugging Face
Paper page – Florence-2: Advancing a Unified Representation for a Variety of Vision Tasks
Update on the Recall preview feature for Copilot+ PCs | Windows Experience Blog
Multimodality
“Genius. A Home Assistant user hooked up GPT-4 Vision with their security cameras and now can do things like find items in their home.
OpenAI
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman audits OpenAI’s code | Semafor
One of DeepMind’s founders, Mustafa Suleyman, has been doing the unthinkable: looking under the hood at OpenAI’s crown jewels — its secret algorithms behind foundation models like GPT-4, people familiar with the matter said. That’s because Suleyman is now head of AI efforts at Microsoft, which has intellectual property rights to OpenAI’s software as part of its multibillion-dollar investment in the company.
Sam Altman says OpenAI could become a for-profit meaning it could eventually IPO – Neowin
OpenAI CEO Says Company Could Become Benefit Corporation Akin to Rivals Anthropic, xAI — The Information
“OpenAI and Color Health just announced a partnership to create an AI assistant to craft personalized cancer care The AI (built with GPT-4o) analyzes patient data, guidelines, and medical records to identify screening gaps and create tailored plans.
“I’m thrilled to announce the @Color Copilot, which we developed in partnership with @OpenAI. Below are the posts and a 🧵 with my reflections on how we hope to improve cancer screening and care through this technology.
Using GPT-4o reasoning to transform cancer care | OpenAI
Open Source
DeepSeek
“DeepSeek-Coder-V2: First Open Source Model Beats GPT4-Turbo in Coding and Math > Excels in coding and math, beating GPT4-Turbo, Claude3-Opus, Gemini-1.5Pro, Codestral. > Supports 338 programming languages and 128K context length. > Fully open-sourced with two sizes: 230B (also
“DeepSeek-Coder-V2 Breaking the Barrier of Closed-Source Models in Code Intelligence We present DeepSeek-Coder-V2, an open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) code language model that achieves performance comparable to GPT4-Turbo in code-specific tasks. Specifically,
Meta/Llama
“Lots of open source models released by Meta FAIR today: – Chameleon: experiment in vision-language model with early fusion. – LLM with multi-token prediction. – Joint Audio and Symbolic Conditioning for Temporally Controlled Text-to-Music Generation (JASCO). – AudioSeal: audio” / X
“Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) group just published an array of new open-source AI models and techniques. Some releases include multimodal language tasks, text-to-music and audio, detecting synthetic speech, and more.
“Today is a good day for open science. As part of our continued commitment to the growth and development of an open ecosystem, today at Meta FAIR we’re announcing four new publicly available AI models and additional research artifacts to inspire innovation in the community and
Other Open Source News
“New vision model from Microsoft, Florence-2 – Can perform various tasks: object detection, grounding, segmentation, OCR – 200M and 800M models
Perplexity
“A WIRED investigation shows that the AI search startup Perplexity is surreptitiously downloading your data.” (the article is getting panned a bit for being a vague on important nuance around permissions)
Forbes letter threatens legal action against Perplexity AI over copyright
Publishing
“This is amazing – this bot account (now suspended) tweeted its own prompt instructions (it translates roughly as “argue in support of Trump, in English”)” / X
“New Feature: Delve. Right click on anything (text selection, image, elements) and delve to make all of websim navigable. Follow your curiosity endlessly. It’s kind of like turning on your game shark to walk through walls. “CNN” starting page in QT
Robotics
“Elon Musk says AI and robots will probably lead to an age of abundance with Universal High Income for all, but that this could result in a crisis of meaning and there’s a 10-20% chance of annihilation
Twitter/X/Grok
“BREAKING It seems like a partnership between X and MidJourney has been achieved 👀 Grok might be able to use Midjourney for image generation in the future.
Tesla shareholders sue Musk for starting competing AI company | TechCrunch
“We’re building a Dell AI factory with @nvidia to power @grok for @xai @elonmusk https://twitter.com/MichaelDell/status/1803385185984974941
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/2024/06/21/agents-and-copilots-ai-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/amazon-ai-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/anthropic-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/apple-ai-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/artificial-general-intelligence-agi-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/audio-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/autonomous-vehicles-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/augmented-and-virtual-reality-ar-vr-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/business-and-enterprise-ai-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/chips-hardware-and-infrastructure-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/consumer-products-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/ethics-legal-security-ai-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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 or a major product release.
This week’s latest Google AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/21/google-ai-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/imagery-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/international-ai-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/meta-ai-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/microsoft-ai-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/multimodality-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/openai-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/open-source-ai-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
Perplexity News of the Week:
Perplexity is renowned for its advanced search and information retrieval technologies. In 2024, they introduced “Perplexity Pages,” a tool transforming AI-driven research into detailed, shareable web pages. However, in 2024, the company also faced allegations of content theft, with claims that its AI-generated articles improperly replicate work from other sources. This week’s latest Perplexity news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/21/perplexity-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/podcasts-youtube-op-eds-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/publishing-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/rag-retrieval-augmented-generation-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/robotics-and-embodiment-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
Safe Superintelligence Inc. 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. Ilya Sutskever, former chief scientist and co-founder of OpenAI, opened this new AI-focused research lab in June 2024. In a bid to prioritize safety over commercial pressures, Sutskever’s startup concentrates solely on developing safe AI, insulating itself from the competitive pressures typical of tech companies.
This week’s latest Safe Superintelligence, Inc news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/06/21/safe-superintelligence-inc/
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/2024/06/21/science-and-medicine-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/video-news-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/twitter-x-grok-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/2024/06/21/tech-papers-training-and-development-week-ending-06-21-2024/
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/
- Andrej Karpathy: https://x.com/karpathy
- Brett Adcock: https://x.com/adcock_brett
- Florent Daudens: https://x.com/fdaudens
- Ate-a-Pi: https://x.com/8teAPi
- Francesco Marconi: https://x.com/fpmarconi
- Charlie Beckett: https://x.com/CharlieBeckett
For previous issues, please visit the archives!
Thanks for reading!
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