Elon Musk launches xAI to unlock the secrets of the universe (and rival OpenAI)

? Today’s Highlights

• ?? News: Elon Musk launches xAI to unlock the secrets of the universe (and rival OpenAI)
• ?? Funding: Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Prolific, CarePredict, and Jirav
• ?? Tools: Interact with your docs w/ this specialized chatbot + never miss another Slack message

?? Today's Top Stories

Elon Musk launches AI firm xAI as he looks to take on OpenAI

(3 min read) (Source: Reuters)

TLDR: Elon Musk announced the launch of his AI startup, xAI. Musk's vision for xAI involves creating a "maximally curious" AI that seeks to understand the true nature of the universe, rather than explicitly programming morality into the system.

• xAI is led by Musk and supported by a team of experienced research engineers who have backgrounds in renowned companies such as Google Research, Google DeepMind , OpenAI , Microsoft Research , and Tesla . The team specializes in the development of large language models, deep learning, and neural networks.
• The xAI website announced a Twitter Spaces event, and the startup has registered X.AI Corp with Musk as the sole director. Noteworthy figures like Dan Hendrycks , a specialist in AI safety, will advise the xAI team.

IBM watsonx is now available to help meet enterprises' AI for business needs

(7 min read) (Source: IBM)

TLDR: IBM is rolling out Watsonx, an enterprise-ready AI and data platform, featuring watsonx.ai studio for foundation models, watsonx.data for data storage, and watsonx.governance for responsible AI workflows.

• Clients and partners can deploy specialized models or build their own on Watsonx, with over 150 users shaping the platform across various industries.
• Watsonx enables AI builders to leverage pre-trained models, address data challenges with watsonx.data, and expand use cases beyond NLP, with a focus on governance and compliance.

Shopify to launch AI assistant for merchants

(2 min read) (Source: Reuters)

TLDR: Shopify will launch an AI assistant called "Sidekick" for merchant support and sales trend analysis, enabling store updates and discounts, with a release expected in the near future. Check out the announcement below:

OpenAI's GPT-4 faces decline in performance, suddenly got 'lazier' and 'dumber.

(7 min read) (Source: Business Insider)

TLDR: OpenAI 's GPT-4, once hailed as the world's most powerful AI model, has faced criticism for degraded performance and decreased reasoning capabilities.

• Speculation suggests that OpenAI may be implementing a Mixture of Experts (MOE) approach, creating smaller expert models within GPT-4 to reduce costs while maintaining performance. The new system assigns queries to specialized expert models and combines their results, potentially sacrificing some quality for cost efficiency.

Google’s AI-powered notes app is now called NotebookLM, and it’s launching today

(3 min read) (Source: The Verge)

TLDR: 谷歌 's AI note-taking tool, Project Tailwind, is now NotebookLM. Users can ask questions and create content based on their documents. It focuses on user-generated data to improve responses and fact-checking while addressing AI's tendency to provide inaccurate information.

• NotebookLM targets students, summarizing class notes and providing insights on specific topics. It is in early stages, accessible through a waitlist, with a focus on user privacy. Google sees it as a potential future of Google Drive.

?? Funding Alerts – #aitools

1.? Recursion , a clinical-stage biotech company using AI to industrialize drug discovery, received a $50M investment from 英伟达 to accelerate the development of its AI foundation models for biology and chemistry.

• Recursion plans to optimize and distribute these models to biotech companies using NVIDIA cloud services, leveraging their expertise and BioNeMo cloud service for generative AI in drug discovery.

2. Prolific , a UK scale-up connecting researchers with verified fairly paid participants is using AI to improve and train their models. They raised ￡25M in a funding round co-led by Partech ( Omri Benayoun ?? , General Partner) and Oxford Science Enterprises ( Sam Harman , Investor Director).

• Prolific plans to use the funding to enhance its AI offerings, expand its presence in the United States, and develop highly specialized research groups accessible through its platform. This will enable feedback and improvements on AI-generated code, among other applications.

3.? CarePredict - a tech company specializing in senior care solutions utilizing AI, predictive analytics, and wearable devices - raised $29M in a Series A-3 investment round co-led by SV Health Investors ( Gregory Madden , Managing Partner) and Aspire Capital Partners, LLC , with existing investors Secocha Ventures and Las Olas Venture Capital also participating.

• CarePredict plans to use the funding to expand nationwide and serve Medicare Advantage and value-based care, building on its success in regional markets. The investment will support the further development and deployment of its innovative technology that autonomously identifies early signs of health issues in older adults, enabling preventive care and improving overall well-being.

4. Jirav , an all-in-one financial planning and analysis (FP&A) solution, raised $20M in a Series B funding round led by Cota Capital ( Kevin Jacques , Partner), with participation from Born Capital , Alumni Ventures , Information Venture Partners , and Bluefish Ventures.

• Jirav helps SMBs and accounting firms with budgeting, forecasting, dashboarding, and analytics
• Jirav plans to use the funds to accelerate product development, expand its customer base among SMBs, mid-market companies, and accounting firms, and hire exceptional talent to support its growth in the financial planning and analysis space.

?? Trending Tools – #aitools

• beehiiv released a suite of new AI tools for newsletter operators. Unlock the power of AI directly within beehiiv's text editor to optimize content creation, streamline processes, and boost output.
• Logically.app is an AI-powered document interaction platform. Get superior document summarization, interactive translation, and advanced question-answering capabilities. Unlock 5x quality and 10x coverage compared to other AI chatbots. Free and pay-as-you-go.
• Spoke.ai (acq. by Salesforce) is an AI-powered solution for Slack. Cut through the noise with AI summarization, creating instant context in long threads and busy channels. Customize and schedule AI-Digests to stay informed while protecting focus time. Privacy and ethical AI practices are at the core of Spoke.ai's design.
• GPT WebApp Generator, by Wasp , helps AI bring your web app idea to life. Describe your concept in plain English and get a full-stack React & Node.js codebase with built-in auth, Tailwind CSS, and easy deployment. Start building with just a few sentences!
• Ana by TextQL is your personal, privacy-first AI data analyst. Get actionable insights in seconds with Ana's data cleaning, correlation finding, outlier identification, and visualization capabilities. Take control of your data while enjoying speed, accuracy, and security.

?? More Reading:

• Google stole data from millions of people to train AI, lawsuit says (Popular Science)
• Bill Gates isn’t too scared about AI (MIT Technology Review)
• AI Junk Is Starting to Pollute the Internet (The Wall Street Journal)
• An e-commerce CEO is getting absolutely roasted online for laying off 90% of his support staff, after an AI chatbot outperformed them (Business Insider)
• AI Is an Existential Threat—Just Not the Way You Think (Scientific American)
• Making algorithm used in AI more human-like (The Harvard Gazette)

?? Fresh Content

1. The inner mechanisms of many AI models are still a mystery, even to the people who created them. Researchers haven’t been able to peer into the “Black Box” that is AI to explain precisely how it works or how it might evolve. The Unexplainable Podcast from Vox explored this topic in the first episode of a two-part series, The Black Box. (Spotify)

2. Kevin Scott , CTO of 微软 , sat down with Mira Murati , CTO of OpenAI , on Microsoft’s Behind the Tech podcast to discuss what inspired the innovative tech leader to delve into science and technology, how she became interested in AI, and how OpenAI is deploying their technology responsibly for developers and consumers. (YouTube)

?? Research:

• ChatGPT can write a paper in an hour — but there are downsides (Nature)

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Transition to Zero-Waste Business?

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