This Week’s Cover
The cover this week celebrates ElevenLabs voice isolator, which removes background noise from audio files. A man stands singing in front of a jet engine. The image was prompted with MidJourney “an classically dressed opera singer performing in front of the engine of a jumbo jet airplane –chaos 30 –ar 4:3 –style raw –personalize qko3v53 –v 6.1” and upscaled using Magnific.ai. The font this week was suggested by GPT-4o to match the ElevenLabs logo. GPT’s multimodal engine looked at the logo and determined “The font resembles a modern, geometric sans-serif typeface. It appears similar to fonts like Montserrat, Proxima Nova, or Avenir, which are known for their clean and rounded letterforms.” I went with Proxima Nova.
The theme for the category image is noise in keeping with the ElevenLabs tool. MidJourney and I both struggled with a templated approach, so I went with free association for each category, trying to achieve a noisy element along with something related to the category. As usual, I don’t allow for too many do-overs. The point is to see how well I can generate a “one shot” prompt. I’d give myself and MidJourney both a B this week. Here is a gallery of all of the noise covers from this week!
Executive Summary: Week Ending 07/05/2024
AI Search Tool Perplexity Unveils Pro Search for Advanced Problem-Solving
Perplexity has upgraded its Pro Search feature, introducing multi-step reasoning, allowing it to break down intricate problems and provide detailed, well-researched answers. This version also boasts enhanced math and programming capabilities, powered by the integration of the Wolfram|Alpha engine, enabling it to solve complex problems with greater speed and accuracy. While Quick Search offers fast and reliable answers, Pro Search provides deeper, more comprehensive insights, making it an ideal tool for thorough research and complex problem-solving. Every week Perplexity seems to be hit with lawsuits and/or vitrolic op-eds for bad practices. While I’m not convinced Perplexity is ready for prime time, the agentic elements of advanced search (step by step problem solving) are powerful to watch.
Pro Search: Upgraded for more advanced problem-solving
Meta Updates Labels for AI-Generated Images After Photographer Complaints
Meta is revising its “Made with AI” labels to “AI info” following widespread criticism from photographers. The initial labels, intended to identify AI-generated content, were mistakenly applied to images with minor modifications, such as retouching in Photoshop, which led to confusion and complaints. The change aims to provide clearer context as Meta refines its approach in collaboration with industry partners. However, the new “AI info” labels will not specify the specific AI tools used, merely offering a general explanation about the presence of AI elements. This adjustment follows Meta’s earlier efforts to address concerns raised by its Oversight Board regarding manipulated media.
Meta changes its labels for AI-generated images after complaints from photographers
Morgan Stanley Introduces AI-Powered Assistant for Wealth Advisors
Morgan Stanley continues its AI adoption with “Debrief,” an OpenAI GPT-4-powered assistant designed to streamline financial advisors’ workflow. The assistant automatically logs meeting notes, drafts emails, and provides summaries. Set to be deployed to around 15,000 advisors by early July, Debrief promises to reclaim thousands of hours for client engagement and critical tasks.
Morgan Stanley OpenAI-powered assistant to roll out for wealth advisors
Google Translate Expands with 110 New Languages
Google Translate is expanding its language offerings with the addition of 110 new languages, utilizing the advanced capabilities of its PaLM 2 large language model. This update includes widely spoken languages like Cantonese and Punjabi (Shahmukhi), as well as lesser-known ones like NKo and Manx. The expansion aims to break down language barriers for over 614 million speakers worldwide, covering about 8% of the global population. Notably, this update represents Google’s largest inclusion of African languages to date, featuring languages such as Fon, Kikongo, and Wolof. The effort aligns with Google’s commitment to supporting the 1,000 most spoken languages globally.
Google Translate adds 110 languages in its biggest expansion yet
Eleven Labs Launches AI Voice Isolator
Eleven Labs introduced their new AI Voice Isolator, designed to extract crystal-clear speech from any audio. This tool is particularly useful for film, podcast, and interview post-production, as it effectively removes background noise such as street sounds and mic feedback. Users can easily upload their audio files and enhance the clarity of vocals, ensuring professional-quality results. The Voice Isolator aims to streamline the editing process, offering a straightforward solution for cleaner and more polished audio content.
Demo Video: “Introducing Voice Isolator. Remove unwanted background noise and extract crystal clear dialogue from any audio to make your next podcast, interview, or film sound like it was recorded in the studio. Try it free: https://elevenlabs.io/voice-isolator
Amazon Starts “AGI Autonomy Division” and Agents Program, Hiring Executives from Adept Instead of Acquiring
The tech giant recruited Adept’s co-founder and CEO David Luan, along with other top team members, to enhance its AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) division. Luan will lead Amazon’s “AGI Autonomy” division, reporting to senior VP Rohit Prasad. Amazon’s non-exclusive licensing agreement includes Adept’s AI models and datasets, aiming to accelerate the development of digital agents that automate software workflows. This move is part of Amazon’s broader strategy to compete with rivals like Microsoft and Google in the AI space. Despite Adept continuing to operate independently, the deal reflects a growing trend of tech giants acquiring talent and technology from innovative startups to strengthen their AI capabilities (potentially to avoid antitrust attention).
Amazon hires execs from AI startup Adept and licenses its technology
Amazon hires founders from well-funded enterprise AI startup Adept to boost tech giant’s ‘AGI’ team – GeekWire
Top 65 Links of The Week (by topic in alphabetical order)
Amazon
Amazon Investigates Perplexity AI Over Potential Data-Scraping Violations | PCMag
Apple
Apple to Get OpenAI Board Observer Role as Part of AI Agreement – Bloomberg
Audio
Hilarious voice chat gone off the rails. “It’s just a lot of pressure … “
ElevenLabs
“@AndroidAuth ElevenLabs announced a new ‘Iconic Voices’ feature It allows users to have text read by AI-generated voices of Hollywood stars Most notably, the co. reached licensing agreements for the AI voices of Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds, and more
Listen to your favorite books and articles voiced by Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds and Sir Laurence Olivier | ElevenLabs
“Introducing ElevenLabs Iconic Voices. Listen to your favorite books and articles voiced by Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds and Sir Laurence Olivier on our Reader App. The app is completely free to download and use. Get it here:
Autonomous Vehicles
Waymo
“NEW: Phoenix police officer pulls over a driverless Waymo car for driving on the wrong side of the road leading the nonexistent driver to roll the windows down to speak with the police. This is hilarious. Waymo has since released a statement, apparently blaming the incident
Business and Enterprise
AI Is Likely to Displace More Finance Jobs Than Any Other Sector, Citi Says – Bloomberg
Robinhood Acquires Pluto, AI Investment Research Platform – Robinhood Newsroom
AI’s $600B Question | Sequoia Capital
AI is disrupting Customer Support. Salesforce is feeling the pinch.
Consumer Products
Leak Confirms Apple’s Work On ‘Home Accessory’ – MacRumors
Kuo: Apple to begin mass production of AirPods with cameras by 2026 – 9to5Mac
Ethics/Legal/Security
A Hacker Stole OpenAI Secrets, Raising Fears That China Could, Too – The New York Times
OpenAI’s ChatGPT Mac app was storing conversations in plain text – The Verge
Mitigating Skeleton Key, a new type of generative AI jailbreak technique | Microsoft Security Blog
“There’s a ton of capabilities in multimodal vision models that we don’t see because the guardrails are holding. LLMs can clearly do facial recognition, break CAPTCHAs, etc They won’t hold forever. If your security depends on a visual signal, start thinking about your options.” / X
“I genuinely worry about “gain of function research” with AI. Bioweapons obsession (centered, for example, by SB 1047) leaves us in an awkward spot. Creating teams of cracked researchers & engineers trying as hard as they can to generate novel, dangerous bioweapons to prove” / X
“According to a newly leaked report from @androidauth, Google is planning a new feature called ‘Pixel Screenshots’ for the Pixel 9. The AI tool will allow users to search and summarize manually captured screenshots, without being ‘always-on’ like the Copilot Plus’ Recall feature
Apple could announce a Google Gemini deal this fall – The Verge
International
The Underground Network Sneaking Nvidia Chips Into China – WSJ
Locally Run Models
“This is fast. Chrome running Gemini locally on my laptop. 2 lines of code.
“This is open source AI Anyone with a computer can do this in a couple of hours Next year anyone with a phone can do it in a few minutes The year after in a few seconds
“@AndroidAuth Nomic AI launched GPT4All 3.0, the latest version of the leading open-source local LLM desktop app. The new version of the desktop app supports thousands of open-sourced models that you can run on all major operating systems, completely local and private.
“Announcing GPT4All 3.0: The Open Source Local LLM Desktop App – Supports 1000’s of models and all major operating systems – Major UI/UX Improvements – Local File Chat with LocalDocs
“Google just announced its largest-ever expansion of Google Translate, adding support for 110 new languages enabled by the company’s PaLM 2 LLM model. The new languages represent over 614M speakers, covering about 8% of the global population.
Google Translate adds 110 languages in its biggest expansion yet
“What’s noteworthy in the newly released Gemma 2 LLMs? The main theme is that they explore techniques w/o necessarily increasing the dataset sizes but rather focus on developing relatively small & efficient LLMs. The are 3 main design choices to create the 2B & 9B models:
Meta
“📣 New research from GenAI at Meta, introducing Meta 3D Gen: A new system for end-to-end generation of 3D assets from text in <1min. Meta 3D Gen is a new combined AI system that can generate high-quality 3D assets, with both high-resolution textures and material maps end-to-end,
Meta drops ‘3D Gen’ bomb: AI-powered 3D asset creation at lightning speed | VentureBeat
Meta 3D Gen | Research – AI at Meta
“@AndroidAuth Meta just announced Meta 3D Gen. It’s a new AI system that can generate detailed, high-quality 3D assets from text descriptions… in less than a minute Insane amount of potential applications for this in sectors like video games, VR, product design, etc
Multimodality
“How hard is it to make a pigeon detection app? Apparently really easy. – Download a pigeon dataset:
Open Source
Meta/Llama
“Meta’s anticipated Llama-3-405B model is reportedly displayed in a recent WhatsApp update. The new version may be close to launching.
“The only question is whether it will be open weights. If so, then we have the first open-ish GPT-4 class model. If it goes like other open model releases, there is going to be a burst of rapid innovation, much of it good, but some bad (expect quality phishing attacks at scale).” / X
Meta drops AI bombshell: Multi-token prediction models now open for research | VentureBeat
Qwen
“Qwen2 is the top model on the new @huggingface Open LLM Leaderboard. “Qwen2-72B-Instruct, one step above other models, scoring 43.02 on average (notably thanks to its performance in math, long-range reasoning, and knowledge). The current second-best model, Llama-3-70B-Instruct
Other Open Source News
“@AndroidAuth Nomic AI launched GPT4All 3.0, the latest version of the leading open-source local LLM desktop app. The new version of the desktop app supports thousands of open-sourced models that you can run on all major operating systems, completely local and private.
“Announcing GPT4All 3.0: The Open Source Local LLM Desktop App – Supports 1000’s of models and all major operating systems – Major UI/UX Improvements – Local File Chat with LocalDocs
“We are thrilled to announce Sentient’s $85M seed round, co-led by @foundersfund with @peterthiel, alongside @PanteraCapital and @hiFramework. This marks a pivotal step in aligning AI development toward a community-built open AGI platform. Our vision at Sentient is to ensure AI
Text2Bricks: Fine-tuning Open-Sora in 1,000 GPU Hours | lego – Weights & Biases
Publishing
Time strikes a deal to funnel 101 years of journalism into OpenAI’s gaping maw
Google AI Overviews: New Research Study by SE Ranking
Comparing pre and post-rollout results on 100K keywords
“THE LITTLE TECH AGENDA Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz July 5, 2024 Little Tech is our term for tech startups, as contrasted to Big Tech incumbents. Little Tech has run independent of politics for our entire careers. But, as the old Soviet joke goes, “You may not be interested” / X
Robotics and Embodiment
“Menteebots are mentored by people. On their first day in a new place, the owner or co-worker needs to show them around. This involves following a person in an unfamiliar environment while avoiding obstacles.
Wild looking robotic dog
“『視覚障害者のための6脚ロボット盲導犬』 高い飼育コストや長期訓練などによる盲導犬不足問題を解消する策として期待される
“Agility Robotics just signed a multi-year deal with GXO Logistics to bring the company’s humanoid robots to warehouses The agreement is the first Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) deal and ‘formal commercial deployment’ of the humanoids Are subscription-based robots the future?
GXO Signs Industry-First Multi-Year Agreement with Agility Robotics — Agility Robotics
“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
“UCSD introduced CARMEN, short for Cognitively Assistive Robot for Motivation and Neurorehabilitation. It’s a small, tabletop robot to help people with mild cognitive impairment learn skills to improve memory, attention, and executive functioning at home
“Unitree H1 Breaking humanoid robot speed world record [full-size humanoid] Evolution V3.0 🥰 The humanoid robot driven by the robot AI world model unlocks many new skills! Strong power is waiting for you to develop! #Unitree #AI #subject3 #BlackTech
“The first human patient to receive the Neuralink implant, @ModdedQuad, mentioned that he might be able to control an Optimus robot using Neuralink during the study, hopefully within the next few months or a year.
Figure
“NEWS: Figure + BMW Group’s Spartanburg Plant → Fully autonomous → AI-driven vision model → Neural Networks for all grasps More details below:
Watch: Figure’s 01 humanoids now working at BMW’s car plant in US
Science and Medicine
“Eureka Health introduced Eureka, the world’s ‘first AI doctor’ The tech offers personalized care, lab orders, and medication adjustments under physician supervision According to early tests, It’s 90x faster than most care in the US
Face screening tool detects stroke in seconds – RMIT University
Mind-reading AI recreates what you’re looking at with amazing accuracy | New Scientist
Video
Runway
“Gen-3 Alpha Text to Video is now available to everyone. A new frontier for high-fidelity, fast and controllable video generation. Try it now at
“Runway Gen-3 videos are next level. 7 impressive ones:” / X
“Runway Gen-3 highlight reel. Everything made with text-to-video. – Strong prompt adherence; can do trippy transitions – Impressive humans; though control is limited – Can do realistic volumetric and particle effects – Nicely integrates HUDs and AR elements – Often blends live
“Lmao. Gen-3 can generate retro 16-bit video games on your theme of choice. Here’s 1776 🇺🇸
Runway, an AI Video Startup, in Talks With General Atlantic for $4 Billion–Valuation Fundraise — The Information
Synthesia
Synthesia’s hyperrealistic deepfakes will soon have full bodies | MIT Technology Review
The Rest of Video News
Incredible demo
“🤣 on the AI internet, you can be anyone you want to be
Twitter/X/Grok
Elon Musk: Grok 2 AI Arrives in August | PCMag
https://www.pcmag.com/news/elon-musk-grok-2-ai-arrives-in-august
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/2024/07/05/agents-and-copilots-ai-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/amazon-ai-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/anthropic-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/apple-ai-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/artificial-general-intelligence-agi-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/audio-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/autonomous-vehicles-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/08/06/augmented-and-virtual-reality-ar-vr-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/business-and-enterprise-ai-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/chips-hardware-and-infrastructure-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/consumer-products-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/ethics-legal-security-ai-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/google-ai-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/imagery-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/international-ai-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/locally-run-ai-models-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/meta-ai-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/microsoft-ai-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/mobile-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/multimodality-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/openai-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/open-source-ai-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/perplexity-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/podcasts-youtube-op-eds-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/publishing-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/rag-retrieval-augmented-generation-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/robotics-and-embodiment-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/science-and-medicine-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/science-and-medicine-news-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/twitter-x-grok-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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/2024/07/05/tech-papers-training-and-development-week-ending-07-05-2024/
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!
Leave a Reply