About This Week’s Cover Images
This week’s cover image depicts a judge wearing headphones, referencing the RIAA suing AI audio startups Udio and Suno. MidJourney prompt: “a judge in a courtroom wearing headphones listening to music –chaos 40 –ar 4:3 –style raw –personalize t1hfffm.” Upscaled in Magnific.AI. The font is Futura to mimic the RIAA font, and the stroke and shadow are “32346b” to match the RIAA logo.
This week’s theme is album cover art to mirror the big story of the RIAA’s lawsuit against Udio and Suno. The prompt foundation is “album art for a record titled “[category name]”. I keep it simple to see what MidJourney does with as little direction as possible.
Executive Summary: Week Ending 06/28/2024
Here’s the high-level overview of everything you need to know:
Record Labels Sue AI Audio Startups Udio and Suno
The world’s largest record labels, including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment, have filed lawsuits against AI startups Suno AI and Uncharted Labs Inc., the developer of Udio AI, for alleged copyright infringement. The lawsuits, filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), claim the companies unlawfully used copyrighted sound recordings to train their AI models, seeking damages up to $150,000 per infringed work.
Uncertain Future for Websites in an AI-Dominated Internet
Jeremiah Owyang predicts that traditional websites may become obsolete, replaced by AI agents as the primary navigators of the internet. These agents will perform tasks, conduct research, and manage resources for users, interfacing with websites via APIs rather than manual clicks. For human visitors, websites will dynamically generate personalized views using generative AI. This shift towards AI-focused web interactions marks a significant transformation in how users engage with online content. I agree with Jeremiah 100% and have been saying the same thing to anyone who will listen – I went on the record Sept 2023 – because of a post Jeremiah shared. Jeremiah is on the shortlist of people I recommend everyone follow. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jowyang/ | https://x.com/jowyang His thoughts on SEO and whether or not to block AI crawlers are equally important.
OpenAI Acquires Multi to Enhance Remote Control of Computers
OpenAI recently acquired Multi, a startup focused on enabling remote control of computers. Multi’s innovative approach, inspired by their prior work with Remotion, envisions desktop computers as inherently multiplayer systems where people and applications operate on equal footing. Their exploration into collaborative computing aligns with OpenAI’s vision of working with computers using AI, marking a significant step in redefining human-computer interaction. This acquisition underscores the importance of integrating AI seamlessly into our daily digital workflows, promising enhanced productivity and collaboration.
GPT-4o’s New Capabilities: Interacting with the World
Roman Huet, Head of Developer Experience at OpenAI, demonstrated GPT-4o’s innovative ability to interact with the physical world. Utilizing a webcam, GPT-4o can understand and interpret visual information, identifying objects and reading text in real-time. This advancement showcases the expanding capabilities of AI, moving beyond text-based interactions to more dynamic, real-world applications.
Gemini 1.5 Pro Doubles Memory – Introduces 2 Million Token Context Window
Google AI has announced new features for Gemini 1.5 Pro, including a 2 million token context window and code execution capabilities – accessible to everyone. The previous 1 million token window could handle 1 hour of video, 11 hours of audio, codebases with over 30,000 lines of code and/or over 700,000 words. This implies double that for the new version.
Unitree’s Affordable Robots: A Step Towards Humanoid Household Helpers
Chinese company Unitree is making strides in robotics, selling advanced robots for just $1,300. Positioned to potentially lead in creating humanoid household helper robots reminiscent of those in sci-fi movies, Unitree’s robots undergo rigorous daily training driven by reinforcement learning. Their training regimen includes extreme tests, aiming to ensure the robots can provide friendly and reliable service to humans. (see demo link below).
Amazon Considers Monthly Fee for Revamped Alexa Service
Amazon plans a major overhaul of its Alexa service, introducing a generative AI-powered “Remarkable Alexa” with two service tiers. A monthly fee of $5 to $10 may be charged for the fancy version. This marks the first significant update since Alexa’s 2014 launch. The enhanced Alexa is expected to offer advanced functionalities, such as composing emails and ordering food from a single prompt. However, challenges such as AI hallucinations and employee morale persist, raising questions about customer willingness to pay for services currently free.
Must-see demos – these are the ones to click if you only a few moments
#1 Roman Huet, Head of Developer Experience at OpenAI, shows a live demo of how GPT-4o can interact with the world through a webcam, understanding what it sees and reads
#2 Creative Style Transfer by GoEnhance AI” – a dancer’s movement animates anything in real time
#3 “Daily Training of Robots Driven by RL Segments of daily training for robots driven by reinforcement learning. Multiple tests done in advance for friendly service humans.😊 The training includes some extreme tests, please do not imitate. #AI #Unitree #AGI #EmbodiedIntelligence
Top 67 Links of The Week Ending 06/28/2024
Agents and Copilots
Meta
“Today we’re announcing Meta LLM Compiler, a family of models built on Meta Code Llama with additional code optimization and compiler capabilities. These models can emulate the compiler, predict optimal passes for code size, and disassemble code. They can be fine-tuned for new
OpenAI
Finding GPT-4’s mistakes with GPT-4 | OpenAI
OpenAI’s new “CriticGPT” model is trained to scrutinize GPT-4 outputs | Ars Technica
“Two big lessons in the new OpenAI paper on training AI to detect AI bugs, 1) Cyborgs rule: AI detected more bugs than humans alone, but humans & AI working together had lower hallucination rates… 2)…for now: human error rates were also high. And read the highlighted conclusion.
“OpenAI just acquired this startup that basically lets someone remotely control your computer… i think we can all guess how this might fit in with ChatGPT desktop… 👀👀👀👀
Multi Blog – Multi is joining OpenAI
Amazon
Report: Amazon developing AI chatbot that would compete with ChatGPT and others – GeekWire
Exclusive: Amazon mulls $5 to $10 monthly price tag for unprofitable Alexa service, AI revamp | Reuters
Anthropic
“In the best benchmark of AI that we have (which is still not a very good benchmark) Claude 3.5 has tied GPT-4. This only happened once before, I think, where Claude 3 briefly beat GPT-4 in the fall, until the latest version from OpenAI’s model took the lead back.” / X
“🔥Breaking News from Chatbot Arena @AnthropicAI Claude 3.5 Sonnet has just made a huge leap, securing the #1 spot in Coding Arena, Hard Prompts Arena, and #2 in the Overall leaderboard. New Sonnet has surpassed Opus at 5x the lower cost and competitive with frontier models
“A new, one hour podcast with Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic released 2 days ago. Always interesting to listen to what Dario has to say. (Especially now, when Sonnet 3.5 is nr.1) Link in the next post:
Anthropic CEO Says We’ll Need More Than UBI to Solve Inequality – Business Insider
Collaborate with Claude on Projects \ Anthropic
“You can now organize chats with Claude into shareable Projects. Each project includes a 200K context window, so you can include relevant documents, code, and files.
“just built a fully automated Wojak meme generator in Glif in 5 min: Claude 3.5 block generates the meme as JSON ComfyUI block uses a Wojak Lora to generate a fitting image JSON extractor + Canvas Block ties it all together input “AI entrepreneur” 💀
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
“The insiders at OpenAI (everyone), Microsoft (CTO, etc.), and Anthropic (CEO) have all been saying that they see no immediate end to the scaling laws that models are still improving rapidly. Take that information how you will, but we will learn whether it is true quite soon.” / X
“We gave a tiny body to gpt-4o Fully autonomous, give it just one prompt Robot sees > thinks > does > repeat Can also: • pick up trash • shake hands • talk with you All for $200 off-the-shelf Building a bigger version What should we have it do?
“Look at that 👀 Actual benchmarks have become too easy for recent models, much like grading high school students on middle school problems makes little sense. So the team worked on a new version of the Open LLM Leaderboard with new benchmarks. Stellar work from @clefourrier
Audio
ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs launches iOS app that turns text into audio with AI | VentureBeat
“Today we’re launching the ElevenLabs iOS app! It lets you listen to any article, book, or doc using our AI generated voices. Check it out 🚀
OpenAI
“We’re sharing an update on the advanced Voice Mode we demoed during our Spring Update, which we remain very excited about: We had planned to start rolling this out in alpha to a small group of ChatGPT Plus users in late June, but need one more month to reach our bar to launch.” / X
“‼️A Reddit user (“u/RozziTheCreator”) got a sneak peek of ChatGPT’s upgraded voice feature that’s way better and even generates background sound effects while narrating ! Take a listen 🎧
Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR)
Other AR/VR News
Dreaming It and Building It With New GenAI Suite
We’re so excited that Lens Studio 5.0 has officially graduated from Beta and is now the go-to Snap AR development platform. The rebuilt Lens Studio is designed for productivity, modularity, and speed. Because Lens Studio users have a unique mix of creative design talent and technical development skills, we’ve added new capabilities that simplify logistics, so you can carry out more Lens creation in one platform.
Autonomous Vehicles
Waymo
Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco
Chips, Hardware, and Infrastructure: Week Ending 06/28/2024
Exclusive: China’s ByteDance working with Broadcom to develop advanced AI chip | Reuters
Consumer Products: Week Ending 06/28/2024
I am using AI to automatically drop hats outside my window onto New Yorkers
Ethics/Legal/Security AI
“Yes robots.txt is not law. It’s a negotiated norm from the pre-AI era. Note the next turn of the ratchet is agents operating the website on behalf of user. OpenAI and other firms are heading here. Who’s going to pay for impression linked ads then?” / X
“Not enough IT security people know how much AI has compromised traditional approaches to security. They are perfect spear phishing machines, solid autonomous hacking systems, and great at voice & video cloning with just a few seconds of audio. And this is just the public stuff.
Generative AI Can’t Cite Its Sources – The Atlantic
“This paper shows a GPT-4 powered team of agents can hack websites by finding and exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities They test the system on real-world vulnerabilities that were discovered after training cut-offs and find it performs well.
Sony, Warner, Universal Sue Suno, Udio For Training AI on Copyrighted Music – Bloomberg
“The RIAA sues AI music services Suno and Udio over alleged mass copyright infringement and claims they have tried to hide the scope of their infringement (@miarsato / The Verge)
Google AI
Gemma
“Google just dropped Gemma 2 27B & 9B Both are showing interesting performances: – 27B beats Llama3 70B, Qwen2 72B and Command R+ in LMSYS Chatbot Arena – 9B beats Mistral 7B and Llama3 8B on various benchmarks Can’t wait to see the evals on the Open LLM Leaderboard with
Google launches Gemma 2, its next generation of open models
Gemini
“Today, we’re opening up access to the 2 million token context window on Gemini 1.5 Pro for all developers. 🚀 To help reduce costs for tasks that use the same tokens across multiple prompts, context caching is now available in the Gemini API. →
“That feeling when you wake to see Google casually dropped a 2 million token context window for all users 😎
Imagery
Other Image News
Meet Figma AI: Empowering Designers with Intelligent Tools | Figma Blog
We’re introducing a suite of AI-powered features to help you push past creative blocks and bring your best ideas to life.
Multimodality
Claude
“just built a fully automated Wojak meme generator in Glif in 5 min: Claude 3.5 block generates the meme as JSON ComfyUI block uses a Wojak Lora to generate a fitting image JSON extractor + Canvas Block ties it all together input “AI entrepreneur” 💀
OpenAI
“We are seeing the first practical benchmarks for AI vision: 1) A challenging real-life chart benchmark on chart reading Charxiv, shows humans get 80% right. Claude 3.5, the best LLM, gets 60% 2) Chatbot Arena compares which AI vision answers humans prefer. GPT-4o wins this one.
OpenAI
OpenAI’s GPT-5 Pushed Back To Late 2025, But Promises Ph.D.-Level Abilities – Tech
“Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says it won’t be until GPT-6 in 2 years time that AI models will be able to follow instructions and take consistent action
OpenAI acquires Rockset | OpenAI
AI has the opportunity to transform how people and organizations leverage their own data. That’s why we’ve acquired Rockset, a leading real-time analytics database that provides world-class data indexing and querying capabilities.
Open Source AI
DeepSeek
“Deepseek Coder v2 Is The New Open-Source King And Beats The Best Gemini Model. Deepseek-coder has officially put OSS in third position, just behind OAI and Anthropic. It excels at coding and reasoning and scores very high on Livebench AI, the ONLY benchmark you can’t game! –
Nvidia
“🤖 From this week’s issue: @nvidia announced Nemotron-4 340B, a family of open models that developers can use to generate synthetic data for training large language models.
Publishing
HeyGen Raises $60M Series A to Scale Visual Storytelling for Businesses | HeyGen Blog
PEACOCK UNVEILS PERSONALIZED OLYMPIC RECAPS FEATURING THE VOICE OF LEGENDARY SPORTS ANNOUNCER AL MICHAELS GENERATED WITH A.I. – NBC Sports
Instagram is starting to let some creators make AI versions of themselves – The Verge
Generative AI Can’t Cite Its Sources – The Atlantic
“This paper shows a GPT-4 powered team of agents can hack websites by finding and exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities They test the system on real-world vulnerabilities that were discovered after training cut-offs and find it performs well.
“Perplexity’s CEO responds to claims they are ignoring robots.txt and crawling websites by saying it’s the vendor they use for crawling that’s does it not them and robots.txt isn’t a law anyway. It’s interesting to watch AI companies break the social contracts the web is built on
““Perplexity is not ignoring the Robot Exclusions Protocol and then lying about it. (…) We don’t just rely on our own web crawlers, we rely on third-party web crawlers as well.”, said Perplexity cofounder and CEO Aravind Srinivas. Srinivas also noted that the Robot Exclusion” / X
INMA: GenAI use cases move news publishers towards personalisation
- Dow Jones’ risk and compliance division created a product that lets its clients build an investigative due-diligence report from several sources within minutes.
The Washington Post is working on a product that lets its readers interrogate its archives.
Yahoo is using AI to rewrite click-bait headlines if they are misleading or unduly sensational. - The Associated Press is using AI-powered search for its videos, letting clients find individual moments within a video clip, even if they have never been tagged or captioned.
- Outside Magazine built a chatbot called Scout to ask specific questions, such as: “Can you recommend a hiking trail in San Francisco under four miles with a view of water?”
- Hearst Newspapers created a quiz-generation engine called Emcee.
Robotics and Embodiment
Faces made of living skin make robots smile
“Our 6ft humanoid HumanPlus at Stanford can autonomously put on a Nike skateboard shoe, tie shoelaces, stand up and walk. Using two transformers & dual RGB vision, it integrates two recipes of general robotics end-to-end: – imitating humans in real world – large-scale RL in sim
“Nimble One has developed an innovative mobile robot for complex operation in tough environments. They have rethought mobile robots design from first principals proving that humanoids are not the only design out there. Especially when desiing for agility & dexterity.
“For the first time in history, humanoid robots are going fully operational in a commercial warehouse — and it’s happening at our @SPANX site in Atlanta, Georgia! After GXO’s successful pilot program with @agilityrobotics, we’re officially rolling out their Digit humanoids to
OpenAI
“We gave a tiny body to gpt-4o Fully autonomous, give it just one prompt Robot sees > thinks > does > repeat Can also: • pick up trash • shake hands • talk with you All for $200 off-the-shelf Building a bigger version What should we have it do?
Unitree
“Pay attention to this Chinese company – Unitree – making these robots (and selling them for a rather low $1,300). If any company today has a shot at being first to make the humanoid household helper robots that we see in sci-fi movies, it’s them.
Science and Medicine
“LLMs are accelerating science in at least one way – they are being used by non-native English speaking scientists to help write their intros & abstracts It need not be a sign of bad papers, but of getting help to make papers good. (I have Claude critique my abstracts, it helps!)
Video
Luma
“Kung Fu Cats @LumaLabsAI
Runway
“Thank you @runwayml for early access to Gen-3! I’ve only had it for an hour and it’s amazing! Here’s a test…
“Runway Gen-3 has serious range. Pretty wild what you can do with text-to-video. I usually prefer image-to-video and video-to-video AI to exert greater control, but this has me stoked.
“Yep, gen-3 is dope. Spent time with access to Runway’s alpha. A few of my fave generations + observations 🧵
“More than 15 hours since Runway Gen-3 model is out. Creators are dropping wild videos like ripe pears. Check 11 of them:” / X
https://x.com/_Borriss_/status/1807134368122511547
he 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/2024/06/28/agents-and-copilots-ai-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/amazon-ai-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/anthropic-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/apple-ai-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/artificial-general-intelligence-agi-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/audio-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/autonomous-vehicles-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/augmented-and-virtual-reality-ar-vr-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/business-and-enterprise-ai-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/chips-hardware-and-infrastructure-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/consumer-products-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/education-ai-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/ethics-legal-security-ai-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/google-ai-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/imagery-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/international-ai-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/openai-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/open-source-ai-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/perplexity-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/07/29/podcasts-youtube-op-eds-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/publishing-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/rag-retrieval-augmented-generation-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/robotics-and-embodiment-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/science-and-medicine-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/video-news-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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/2024/06/28/tech-papers-training-and-development-week-ending-06-28-2024/
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
For previous issues, please visit the archives!
Thanks for reading!
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