?? Summary of this edition:
Over the past two weeks, a multitude of remarkable events and announcements have arisen. The tech industry is accelerating at an astounding rate. Nearly every major tech company is rolling out AI products rapidly, as the race for AI dominance heats up. Furthermore, entities like the EU, US, China, and Emirates are becoming major players in the large model competition. On the academic front, institutions like Harvard and MIT continue to push boundaries, with free educational offerings and groundbreaking research. Additionally, brace yourself for some mathematical and physics breakthroughs!
?? Delve below for curated quality tech and science content...
?? Announcement
Neural networks are at the core of AI development and often appear to act like magic. On September 21st, I'll be giving a talk at
Ciklum
Speakers' Corner on Neural Networks and the Emergence of Learning. Expect a straightforward 90-minute session delving into neural network fundamentals, complemented by illustrations and live coding. This will provide a clear insight into how programmers bring these astonishing capabilities to life.
?? Tech
- Apple's "Wonderlust" event, announcing the iPhone 15 and the next Apple Watch, is set for today.
- Meta challenges Google Translate with SeamlessM4T.
- Meta introduces a way to prevent (their) GenAI (or other AI web-scraping bots) from being trained on your data.
- Microsoft is bringing AI to Windows.
- Mozilla publicly asks Microsoft if they are using users' personal data to train AI.
- Snapchat launches "Dreams", allowing users to craft AI-generated selfies.
- Rockset raised $44M to boost real-time database for the AI era.
- Google counters ChatGPT. Their Duet AI Virtual Assistant integration with Workspace puts productivity on steroids.
- Microsoft's One Drive is set for an AI upgrade, as a response to Google's Duet.
- Salesforce unveils Slack GPT, harnessing Conversational AI for work.
- The US Copyright Office initiated a public comment period on AI and copyright issues.
- IBM announces Watsonx AI fine tuning platform for businesses.
- Baidu's Cloud Qianfan 2.0 Upgrade features 42 large models, now fluent in both Chinese and English.
- AMD CEO declares the AI Market is "Skyrocketing".
- Zoom launches Zoom AI companion, a gen AI assistant that boosts collaboration and productivity. [video]
- X confirms the use of public data for AI model training.
- Top repos of GitHub as of today: facebookresearch / codellama, pythagora-io / gpt-pilot, neulab / prompt2model, nlpxucan / WizardLM, spcl / graph-of-thoughts
?? AI
- TIME AI unveils its list of the top 100 most influential people in AI.
- 128k context Llama available. Access the model here.
- Hugging Face introduces Falcon 180B, the largest open-source language model ever with 180 billion parameters, developed by the Technology Innovation Institute in UAE.
- Google launched a supercool AI copywriting tool, TextFX.
- Google Cloud is set to incorporate support for AI models by Meta and Anthropic.
- ElevenLabs comes out of Beta and releases Eleven Multilingual v2 - a Foundational AI Speech Model for nearly 30 languages.
- DeepMind presents SynthID: A cutting-edge AI defense against deepfakes.
- Code Llama (34B-instruct), a state-of-the-art LLM for coding, is now available on HuggingChat.
- OpenAI rolls out a comprehensive guide for teachers and educators on leveraging ChatGPT.
- Qwen-VL: Venturing into the realm of large vision-language models with multifaceted capabilities.
- AudioLDM 2 - dives into holistic text-to-audio generation, encompassing sound effects, human dialogue, and music, all enhanced with in-context learning.
- LegalBench: Establishing a benchmark for assessing legal reasoning in LLMs.
- MIT researchers propose AskIt: A unified programming interface for programming with LLMs.
? Engineering
- AI gave a paralyzed woman her voice back.
- Robot can fly a plane by reading the manual.
- DeepMind's latest AI model adeptly directs robotic actions it has never trained to do.
- Through collaboration with VMware, Nvidia opens the gates to GenAI for enterprises and further enhances its alliance with Google Cloud to elevate AI computing and services.
- Introducing Apollo: Your humanoid robotic coworker.
- Backed by Microsoft, D-Matrix’s Corsair C8 outperforms Nvidia's H100 in pivotal tests, utilizing a GPU-analogous card laden with 256GB RAM.
?? Space
- NASA's oxygen-producing experiment, MOXIE, successfully concludes its Mars Mission.
- Rethinking the Beginning: Why the Big Bang might not be the inception of our Universe.
- While the concept isn't novel, this recent article offers an engaging perspective on why Gravity isn't instantaneous.
- The discovery of the most ancient magnetic galaxy provides insights into the Milky Way's past.
?? Science
- Harvard University is offering a complimentary program in ML and Data Science that covers: Python, Data Visualization, Probability, Statistics, and ML.
- Quantum-Inspired Machine Learning: A Survey
- MIT controls Quantum Randomness for the first time.
- Decades-old Math Conundrum Resolved: The Einstein Tile Problem.
- MIT's breakthrough: An ultra-low-power system for long-distance underwater communication.
- Shift in ocean colors observed in various regions of the Earth.
- New physics-based self-learning machines could replace current artificial neural networks and save energy.
- Novel, physics-driven self-learning machines could supplant existing artificial neural networks, leading to energy saving.
?? Ending note
In the midst of the digital age, information is abundant, but quality can sometimes be scarce. The digital landscape, further amplified by the emergence of LLMs, has given everyone a voice. While this democratization of content creation is empowering, it has also made distinguishing between the signal and the noise quite challenging.
This is precisely why I embarked on this newsletter journey: to sift through the vastness of articles and curate quality insights. Think of this as a distilled, recurrent tech digest that will, over time, also serve as a chronicle of the ever-evolving tech panorama.
I really value your input and would love your help in making this newsletter even better. If you find any cool articles, feel free to send them my way! I promise to give a shoutout to everyone who pitches in.
??Here's to navigating the tech realm together!
