OpenAI DevDay Highlights: Here's What You Missed!

Welcome, AI entrepreneurs & enthusiasts.

OpenAI's DevDay may have skipped the spectacle this time with no live stream — but don't worry because we still have the play by play from the event and are here to share the key takeaways.

With four new major developer-focused announcements, we’ve got a big one today. Let’s get into it…

In today’s AI news:

• OpenAI makes 4 major announcements at DevDay
• Microsoft Copilot gets voice, vision upgrade
• Durk Kingma Joins Anthropic
• More AI & tech news

Read time: 4 minutes

OpenAI makes 4 major announcements at DevDay

The News: OpenAI just held its DevDay 2024 event, unveiling a suite of new API features and improvements designed to make its AI systems more accessible, efficient, and cost-effective for developers to build with.

The details:

• Realtime API enables speech-to-speech application building using the same model that powers Advanced Voice, with the ability to choose from six voices.
• Model Distillation simplifies fine-tuning smaller models using outputs from larger ones, making training more accessible to developers.
• Prompt Caching reduces costs by nearly 50% across models and speeds up responses by up to 80% when reusing recent input tokens in API calls.
• New Vision Fine-Tuning allows models to be trained with both images and text, allowing developers to optimize tasks like image recognition and analysis.

Why it matters: While this year’s DevDay may have lacked the traditional hype of a typical OpenAI event, the releases are still set to have a tremendous impact. These API updates not only enable the creation of entirely new, exciting experiences but also lower the barrier to entry, for builders across OpenAI’s platform.

If you'd rather listen to these updates, feel free to tag along in our podcast here.

Microsoft Copilot gets voice, vision upgrade

The News: Microsoft just announced a slew of AI upgrades coming to its Copilot assistant for Windows PCs, including new vision and voice capabilities, personalization enhancements, a re-release of the controversial Recall feature, and more.

The details:

• Copilot Voice allows users to interact with natural speech, adding conversational and intuitive communication similar to OpenAI’s Voice Mode.
• Copilot Vision enables the AI to understand and interact with web content a user is viewing, offering context-aware help within the Microsoft Edge browser.
• ‘Think Deeper’ gives Copilot new enhanced reasoning capabilities using chain-of-thought reasoning powered by OpenAI’s o1 model.
• Microsoft’s ‘Recall’ feature is set to return, requiring an opt-in with upgraded privacy and security measures.
• Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman highlighted Copilot’s ability to ultimately ‘act on your behalf’ and adapt to user’s personal preferences and needs.

Why it matters: Microsoft is bringing the heat with these major Copilot upgrades, levelling up the assistant to align with the latest cutting-edge AI features across the industry — while bringing users one step closer to a truly agentic experience.

Durk Kingma Joins Anthropic

The News: Durk Kingma, co-founder of OpenAI, has officially joined Anthropic. His focus is on contributing to their mission of responsible AI, and he’s excited to collaborate with a talented team, including many familiar faces from his days at OpenAI and Google.

The Details:

• With a strong background in machine learning, Kingma has experience as a doctoral fellow at Google and was a foundational member of OpenAI's research team.
• During his time at OpenAI, Kingma helped develop key generative AI models, such as DALL-E 3 and ChatGPT, significantly advancing the capabilities of AI.
• His arrival is part of a broader talent acquisition trend at Anthropic, which has recently attracted other key figures from OpenAI, including Jan Leike and John Schulman.

Why It Matters: Kingma's move to Anthropic is yet another strategic gain for the company as they build out a highly experienced team focused on responsible AI development. Anthropic aims to differentiate itself by putting safety first, in contrast to other players in the AI space. As more top talent shifts towards organizations prioritizing ethics in AI, the industry trend suggests a growing emphasis on innovation paired with responsibility—crucial for shaping the future of AI applications safely and effectively.

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QUICK HITS

Pika Labs unveiled Pika 1.5, a new video generation model upgrade featuring enhanced effects, realistic movement, longer clip creation, and cinematic capabilities.

Anyscale unveiled major upgrades to its AI platform at Ray Summit 2024, including a GPU-native Ray architecture, RayTurbo for enhanced performance, Ray Data for unstructured data processing, and more.

U.S. AI chipmaker Cerebras officially filed for an IPO, with the Sam Altman-backed Nvidia competitor expected to be valued at between $7-8B.

Meta released the open-source code and developer suite for its Segment Anything Model (SAM) 2.1, an upgraded version of its image and video segmentation tool.

Nvidia introduced NVLM 1.0, an open-source family of multimodal models that achieve SOTA performance on vision-language and text tasks.

Pinterest launched Performance+, a suite of new AI tools for advertisers that includes the ability to create background images for products and automation features for ad campaigns.

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