This Week’s Covers
The cover this week is inspired by Andrej Karpathy’s new educational startup EurekaLabs.ai. Andrej is considered one of the greatest teachers of AI and one of the smartest minds in the field. The cover depicts Andrej as Professor Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter, projected onto a large screen in an academic building. Image created with MidJourney a university lecture hall, a whiteboard with the word “Eureka” on it –chaos 20 –ar 4:3 –style raw –v 6.1. Upscaled with Magnific.ai. I erased the word “Eureka” and masked the whiteboard in Photoshop. Andrej’s face was swapped onto Dumbledore using Picsi.ai and placed into the scene with Photoshop. The title font is Futura. I love the one student climbing over the railing. Lots of funny artifacts and hallucinations.
The category covers reflect an educational theme. I used a prompt template and it turned out all lright. a middle school art project showcasing [category topic], a small written sign says: “[category name]”. I’d give the prompt and MidJourney’s results a B+. See all covers here.
Executive Summary: Week Ending 07/19/2024
Salesforce Unveils Einstein Service Agent: A Fully Autonomous AI for Customer Service
Salesforce has introduced Einstein Service Agent, its first fully autonomous AI agent designed to transform customer service. The agent can handle a wide range of issues without preprogrammed scenarios, providing intelligent, natural-language interactions grounded in business data. Available 24/7, it autonomously engages customers across multiple channels, while adhering to privacy and security guidelines. Salesforce positions the AI agent as a means to empower human agents to focus on higher-value tasks. Salesforce
Groq’s (not Grok) Open-Source Model Outperforms Giants Using Only Synthetic Data
Groq, an AI hardware startup, has achieved a significant breakthrough with its open-source Llama models, trained entirely on synthetic data, topping the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL). The 70B parameter model reached an impressive 90.76% accuracy, surpassing leading proprietary models like GPT-4 and Claude. Groq’s success challenges the conventional belief that vast amounts of real-world data are essential for top-tier AI performance. By using ethically generated synthetic data, Groq not only addresses privacy and environmental concerns but also democratizes AI by making its high-performing models accessible through platforms like Hugging Face. This development could reshape the AI industry, pushing for greater transparency and innovation. VentureBeat
Bank of America to Invest $4 Billion in AI and New Tech in 2024
Bank of America announced plans to allocate $4 billion to new technologies this year, with a significant focus on enhancing its artificial intelligence tools for clients and advisors. CEO Brian Moynihan highlighted the bank’s AI advisor and client insights tool, which has already provided over six million insights to financial advisors in 2024. The bank’s virtual assistant, Erica, has also seen substantial engagement, reaching two billion interactions. As the second-largest U.S. bank, Bank of America is pushing forward with extensive AI initiatives, despite ranking 15th in the Evident AI Index, trailing behind major competitors. QZ
GPT-4 Demonstrates Theory of Mind Capabilities Comparable to Humans
Recent research suggests that GPT-4 models exhibit behavior consistent with human-like Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to understand and predict the mental states of others. In a comprehensive series of tests designed to measure different aspects of ToM, including understanding false beliefs, indirect requests, and irony, GPT-4 performed at or above human levels. GPT-4 had difficulties detecting faux pas, but this stemmed from GPT’s safety guardrails rather than a model limitation. Nature
Meta to Restrict Multimodal AI Models from EU Over Regulatory Uncertainty
Meta has announced that it will withhold its upcoming multimodal Llama 4 AI model, along with future multimodal models, from the European Union due to regulatory concerns. The decision comes after Meta was ordered to pause training on EU data, despite having informed regulators of its plans to use Facebook and Instagram posts for training purposes. While Llama 4, which will include audio capabilities, is in progress, Meta plans to release Llama 3’s larger text-only version in the EU. This move underscores growing tensions between U.S. tech giants and European regulators, as companies like Meta push back against the EU’s stringent data protection laws. Axios
Apple, Nvidia, Anthropic Used YouTube Video Subtitles for AI Training Without Permission
An investigation by Proof News reveals that tech giants like Apple, Nvidia, and Anthropic used transcripts from over 173,000 YouTube videos to train their AI models, often without the creators’ knowledge or consent. These companies leveraged a dataset called YouTube Subtitles, which includes transcripts from educational channels, major media outlets, and even popular YouTube personalities like MrBeast and PewDiePie. Despite YouTube’s rules against unauthorized data harvesting, these materials were extracted and used by AI companies to enhance their models. The controversy highlights ongoing concerns over the ethics and legality of using publicly available content for AI training without proper authorization. Proofnews.org
Mistral AI and NVIDIA Unveil Mistral NeMo 12B, Open-Source Enterprise Model
Mistral AI, in collaboration with NVIDIA, has launched Mistral NeMo 12B, a cutting-edge language model designed for enterprise applications. The model is optimized for tasks like chatbots, multilingual processing, coding, and summarization. Leveraging NVIDIA’s hardware, including DGX Cloud and TensorRT-LLM for accelerated performance, Mistral NeMo offers a 128K context window, enabling coherent processing of extensive data. Released under an open-source Apache 2.0 license, iIt also serves as a significant upgrade from the previous Mistral 7B model. It’s also designed to work in the cloud or on local workstations. Mistral | NVIDIA
Mistral Releases Codestral Mamba, a New Language Model for Code Generation
Mistral has introduced Codestral Mamba, a specialized language model focused on code generation, released under the Apache 2.0 license. This model builds on the capabilities of Mistral’s previous Mixtral models. Codestral Mamba offers significant advantages over traditional Transformer models, including linear time inference and the ability to handle sequences of potentially infinite length, making it particularly efficient for code productivity tasks. It has been tested for in-context retrieval on sequences up to 256k tokens and is expected to be a powerful local code assistant. The model, consisting of over 7.2 billion parameters, can be deployed using the mistral-inference SDK, TensorRT-LLM, and soon through llama.cpp. It is available for download on HuggingFace and accessible for testing on la Plateforme, where it joins its larger counterpart, Codestral 22B. Mistral
Mistral Releases MathΣtral, a Math-Focused Model
Mistral has unveiled MathΣtral, a specialized 7B model designed for advanced math reasoning and scientific discovery, released under the Apache 2.0 license. MathΣtral, which honors Archimedes on his 2311th anniversary, features a 32k context window and excels in STEM subjects. The model achieves state-of-the-art performance in its size category, with scores of 56.6% on MATH and 63.47% on MMLU benchmarks. MathΣtral was developed in collaboration with Project Numina and supports academic research by offering enhanced reasoning capabilities. The model is now available on HuggingFace for use and fine-tuning. Mistal
OpenAI Introduces GPT-4o Mini, a Compact and Cost-Efficient Model
OpenAI is set to launch “GPT-4o mini” on Thursday, a smaller and more affordable version of its powerful GPT-4o model. Touted as the most capable small model on the market, GPT-4o mini is designed to expand the accessibility of OpenAI’s chatbot technology. Although the mini model will initially focus on text, plans are in place to integrate image, video, and audio capabilities. This release is part of OpenAI’s broader strategy to lead in “multimodality,” offering diverse AI-generated media within a single tool. The model will be available to free users and subscribers of ChatGPT, with enterprise access following next week. GPT-4o Mini costs are 60 cents per 1M output tokens (roughly the equivalent of 2500 pages in a standard book). “Intelligence almost too cheap to meter.” CNBC | AiBreakfast
Skild AI Secures $300 Million to Build a ‘General Purpose Brain’ for Robots
Skild AI, a Pittsburgh-based robotics startup founded in 2023 by former Carnegie Mellon University professors Abhinav Gupta and Deepak Pathak, has raised $300 million in a Series A funding round, valuing the company at $1.5 billion. Skild AI is developing a “general purpose brain” designed to be integrated into various types of robots, enabling them to perform complex tasks in unpredictable environments. The company’s model is trained on a massive database, reportedly 1,000 times larger than those used by competitors, allowing robots to exhibit emergent capabilities—skills they were not explicitly programmed to perform. This approach positions Skild AI to compete with industry giants like OpenAI and Figure AI as it aims to revolutionize robotics and eventually achieve artificial general intelligence for robots. Twitter
AI Visuals and Charts: Week Ending 07/19/2024
via https://lifearchitect.ai/chatgpt/
via https://lifearchitect.ai/timeline/
Top 60 Links of The Week (by topic in alphabetical order)
Agents and Copilots
Meet Einstein Service Agent: Salesforce’s Autonomous AI Agent to Revolutionize Chatbot Experiences – Salesforce
“My Vision: the Rise of AI Agents I envision a future where AI agents handle most laborious tasks, saving us time and headache. -Studies have shown that many people spend 7 hours a day online, totaling 17 years of their lives. -Imagine if AI agents could manage tedious tasks
Amazon
Op-ed: Amazon says it’s time to double down on responsible AI
Anthropic
Claude by Anthropic – Apps on Google Play
“The Claude Android app is now available. Download on Google Play:
Anthropic releases Claude app for Android | TechCrunch
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
OpenAI Sets Levels to Track Progress Toward Superintelligent AI – Bloomberg
OpenAI on the steps for AI to reach human intelligence
OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster, sources say | Reuters
Broadcom (AVGO) Shares Gain on Report That It’s Discussing Chip With OpenAI – Bloomberg
Broadcom held discussions with OpenAI about producing AI chip: report (NASDAQ:AVGO) | Seeking Alpha
“OpenAI has hired former members of a Google AI chip unit as it seeks to develop its own AI chip, in possible threat to Nvidia.
Audio
YouTube Music sound search rolling out, AI radio in testing
Mixing AI Music (Suno) and AI video (Runway) : r/aiwars
Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR)
Animating images of lost loved ones to give virtual hugs
“AI的魅力 复活亲人相聚 两张照片，设置好首帧和尾帧，然后使用提示词控制 AI自动帮你脑补画面…
Chips, Hardware, and Infrastructure
Broadcom (AVGO) Shares Gain on Report That It’s Discussing Chip With OpenAI – Bloomberg
Broadcom held discussions with OpenAI about producing AI chip: report (NASDAQ:AVGO) | Seeking Alpha
“OpenAI has hired former members of a Google AI chip unit as it seeks to develop its own AI chip, in possible threat to Nvidia.
Intel
Investing in our future – Intuit Blog
“Today we will be communicating to approximately 1,800 employees, which is 10% of our workforce, that they will be leaving Intuit.”
Ethics/Legal/Security AI
“• Uncensored Models: Mythomax-l2-13b and Chronos-hermes-13b generated detailed responses without filtering, demonstrating fewer content restrictions.
Tinder® Unveils ‘Photo Selector’ AI: Feature to Make Choosing Profile Pictures Easier
“Jailbreaking an LLM requires sophisticated prompts like DAN & involves a cat and mo— Actually, all you need to do is phrase your harmful requests in past tense.”
Introducing the Coalition for Secure AI, an OASIS Open Project – OASIS Open
Trump allies draft AI order to launch ‘Manhattan Projects’ for defense – The Washington Post
How it’s Made: GenType Alphabet Creator – Google Developers Blog
GenType
How it’s Made: GenType Alphabet Creator – Google Developers Blog
GenType
Microsoft AI
“Microsoft presents SpreadsheetLLM Encoding Spreadsheets for Large Language Models Spreadsheets, with their extensive two-dimensional grids, various layouts, and diverse formatting options, present notable challenges for large language models (LLMs). In response, we introduce
Multimodality/Segmentation
“This is markerless motion capture using just one camera, powered by AI and physics-based models. Scott Unruh used our Move One iOS app to capture his movements in his living room in just a few minutes, to animate his mushroom character. It’s never been easier for 3D animators
ProDepth: Boosting Self-Supervised Multi-Frame Monocular Depth with Probabilistic Fusion
OpenAI
OpenAI Sets Levels to Track Progress Toward Superintelligent AI – Bloomberg
OpenAI on the steps for AI to reach human intelligence
OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster, sources say | Reuters
Broadcom (AVGO) Shares Gain on Report That It’s Discussing Chip With OpenAI – Bloomberg
Broadcom held discussions with OpenAI about producing AI chip: report (NASDAQ:AVGO) | Seeking Alpha
“OpenAI has hired former members of a Google AI chip unit as it seeks to develop its own AI chip, in possible threat to Nvidia.
“The OpenAI Fund and Thrive announced a new partnership to develop a hyper-personalized AI-powered health coach The coach is trained on scientific research, biometrics, and preferences, offering tailored health recommendations
“Today Sam Altman and I published a piece in TIME sharing our vision for how AI-driven personalized behavior change can transform healthcare and announcing the launch of Thrive AI Health, a new company funded by the OpenAI Startup Fund and Thrive Global, which will be devoted to
“OpenAI SORA new video example. Sora is far from being released to general user : As per OpenAI, they are continuing to slowly expand Sora testing to more creatives user only to help them understand the model’s capabilities and limitations, to create safe AI systems over time.
Open Source
“Groq’s open-source & synthetic-only model beats closed models! 🚀🧬 Groq’s Llama, trained solely on synthetic data, tops the function calling leaderboard: • 70B version: 90.76% accuracy • 8B version: 89.06% accuracy • Outperforms GPT-4 and Claude. “By achieving top performance using only synthetic data, Groq challenges the notion that vast amounts of real-world data are necessary for creating cutting-edge AI models.”
Groq’s open-source Llama AI model tops leaderboard, outperforming GPT-4o and Claude in function calling | VentureBeat – https://venturebeat.com/ai/groq-open-source-llama-ai-model-tops-leaderboard-outperforming-gpt-4o-and-claude-in-function-calling/
“Open-source models winning Math Olympiads and solving viral math problems on Twitter
Publishing
Disney Classic Song Stems Separated By AudioShake Using AI
(Interesting to see how this compares to Eleven Labs)
Robotics and Embodiment
“Exciting new work! Fast, robust, reactive, direct-from-sensor grasp-anything policies. RL really works, and it’s going to transform the entire robotics economy. DextrAH-G: Dexterous Arm-Hand Grasping
“Researchers introduced DextrAH-G, a dexterous arm-hand grasping policy trained in simulation using RL It enables a 23-motor arm-hand robot to safely and continuously grasp and transport objects using multimodal inputs
“Duke presented ClutterGen, a RL method to generate cluttered scenes to assist robot learning According to the researchers, the idea is that we can look at scene generation as a reinforcement learning problem Interesting work
“We present ClutterGen that tackles two important research problems in robotics: 1) how to generate physically compliant cluttered scene for robot learning? 2) how to stably place objects instead of the current “pick and drop” paradigm? Our key idea is to formulate physically
Science and Medicine
“The OpenAI Fund and Thrive announced a new partnership to develop a hyper-personalized AI-powered health coach The coach is trained on scientific research, biometrics, and preferences, offering tailored health recommendations
“Today Sam Altman and I published a piece in TIME sharing our vision for how AI-driven personalized behavior change can transform healthcare and announcing the launch of Thrive AI Health, a new company funded by the OpenAI Startup Fund and Thrive Global, which will be devoted to
“U.S. Rep. Jennifer Wexton debuted an AI-generated version of her voice. It allows her to continue addressing Congress despite speech limitations caused by a rare neurological condition. A perfect example of a life-changing real-world use case of AI.
Researchers track individual neurons as they respond to words | Ars Technica
Robust and interpretable AI-guided marker for early dementia prediction in real-world clinical settings
Video
“OpenAI SORA new video example. Sora is far from being released to general user : As per OpenAI, they are continuing to slowly expand Sora testing to more creatives user only to help them understand the model’s capabilities and limitations, to create safe AI systems over time.
Mixing AI Music (Suno) and AI video (Runway) : r/aiwars
“Odyssey emerged from stealth with a ‘Hollywood-grade’ AI video generation platform The startup is developing four specialized AI video models aimed at revolutionizing visual effects and storytelling capabilities
The future belongs to the dreamers
Introducing Odyssey, Hollywood-grade visual AI
“I’m excited to share @odysseyml, my new thing! 🍿 We’re building Hollywood-grade visual AI, where beautiful scenery, characters, lighting, and motion can be both generated and directed. Our mission is to deliver a better way to create movies, TV shows, and video games.”
https://twitter.com/olivercameron/status/1810335663197413406
“Another day, another new AI video generator. Haiper 1.5 can generate up to 8 seconds of high-quality video and also has an upscaler that can turn generations HD. This one is also 100% free to try (link below)
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/2024/07/20/agents-and-copilots-ai-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/20/amazon-ai-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/anthropic-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/apple-ai-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/artificial-general-intelligence-agi-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/audio-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/augmented-and-virtual-reality-ar-vr-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/business-and-enterprise-ai-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/chips-hardware-and-infrastructure-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/education-ai-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/ethics-legal-security-ai-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/google-ai-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/imagery-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/international-ai-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/locally-run-ai-models-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/microsoft-ai-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/mobile-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/multimodality-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/openai-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/open-source-ai-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/perplexity-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/podcasts-youtube-op-eds-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/publishing-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/rag-retrieval-augmented-generation-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/robotics-and-embodiment-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/science-and-medicine-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/video-news-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/twitter-x-grok-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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/2024/07/19/tech-papers-training-and-development-week-ending-07-19-2024/
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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