WAID #11: A roundup of Top News & Developments in AI

Security concerns are taking center stage in the world of AI. Microsoft is making changes to its new on-device AI feature, Recall, following security worries. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is criticizing Apple's partnership with OpenAI, claiming it poses security risks. However, OpenAI is bolstering its team with a cybersecurity expert and strong financial performance.

This Week's Top Headlines

— Microsoft?is making changes to its new Recall on-device AI feature following security concerns — with the tool now starting off by default and gaining new encryption protections ahead of the release on June 18.

— Apple will reportedly reveal a new AI system called Apple Intelligence at WWDC, alongside a partnership with OpenAI, a flurry of new AI features, and software upgrades across its product lines.

— Elon Musk just threatened to ban the use of all Apple devices from his companies following Apple’s partnership announcement with OpenAI, claiming that the integration of ChatGPT into operating systems poses an “unacceptable security violation”. Also Elon Musk just officially withdrew his lawsuit against OpenAI one day before a key court hearing, with the previous filing having accused OpenAI of abandoning its mission of ‘developing AI for the benefit of humanity’.

— OpenAI added retired U.S. Army General and former NSA head Paul M. Nakasone to its Board of Directors, a leading cybersecurity expert who will also join the company’s Safety and Security Committee. Also OpenAI announced the addition of two new executives, with former Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar joining as CFO and Kevin Weil stepping in as CPO.

— The World AI Creator Awards and creator platform FanVue are currently running the inaugural ‘Miss AI’ contest, with over 1,500 AI-generated models competing for the world’s first AI beauty pageant.

— A photographer was disqualified from an AI image contest after winning using a real photo of a flamingo, saying he wanted to show that ‘nature can still beat the machine’.

— Brazil’s government is hiring OpenAI to leverage AI for analyzing and flagging lawsuits, aiming to reduce court-related costs and reduce that impact on the federal budget.

— An AI-powered candidate named ‘AI Steve’ is running for U.K. Parliament in next month’s general election —?creating polarizing questions around AI’s use in government affairs.

— Researchers from Google DeepMind and Harvard just created a virtual rodent powered by an AI neural network, capable of mimicking agile movements and neural activity of real-life rats with extreme accuracy.

— Euro banks worry AI will increase their dependence on US big tech. Putting such a dominant power in the middle of your supply chain a risky move...

Deals & Finance

? OpenAI has reportedly doubled its annual revenue to $3.4B over the last six months, according to The Information.

? Mistral AI has raised $640M in Series B funding. General Catalyst led this funding, valuing the company at $6B.

? Cogniny raises $100M Series C for its AI agent workforce.

? Cybersecurity startup Seven AI raises $36M led by Greylock.

? AWS announces a $230M commitment for generative AI startups.

? Danish startup Light exits stealth with $13M seed funding to bring AI to general ledgers.

? Astrocade AI, a social gaming platform, secures $12m in seed funding round.

? CampusAI Locks $10M pre-seed funding to develop AI training metaverse.

Researches

— Google DeepMind researchers published a new paper arguing that open-endedness — the ability to create new, learnable ‘artifacts’ — is the key to achieving artificial superhuman intelligence (ASI).

— A new study from the University of Michigan leveraged AI models trained on human speech to decode the meaning behind dog noises —?identifying details like breed, age, gender, and emotional state with 70% accuracy.

— Researchers from the University of Tokyo published a new study exploring a new approach to autonomous driving — leveraging robots that mimic the structure, flexibility, and senses of humans to control vehicles.

— Microsoft released a new research paper presenting DenseAV, an architecture that learns the meaning of words and sounds by watching unlabeled videos.

— Google just published two new research papers, introducing an AI model that can interpret personal health data from wearable devices and an AI agent that provides detailed insights, answer health questions, and more.

Public Speaking

Canadian PM Justin Trudeau spoke about AI’s potential, saying he believes development should not be slowed and instead focused on building for good to counter the bad.

Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick said that AI could save financial advisors 10-15 hours a week’, with the firm currently testing AI chatbot integrations from OpenAI.

OpenAI CTO Mira Murati participated in a Q&A with Fortune Magazine, addressing topics including criticism from Elon Musk, internal AI model strength, the 2023 board drama and more.

Industry Pulse

— Meta is planning to use European user data to train its AI models while navigating EU data protection laws, aiming to create tech that better reflects diverse languages and cultures.

— Robot Era showcased a demo of its XBot-L AI-powered humanoid robot successfully traversing the Great Wall of China, demonstrating advanced movement and balance capabilities.

— Anthropic posted a new blog detailing the process behind crafting its Claude AI model’s personality, using ‘Character Training’ to help instill curiosity, thoughtfulness, and diverse viewpoints.

— Perplexity is facing backlash following the launch of its new Pages feature, with accusations of generated content republishing nearly identical stories to major news outlets without attribution.

— xAI’s Grok may be gaining new image capabilities and the ability to access web search results, according to new code found within the system.

— Adobe updated its terms of service following backlash over language stating that users' work is used to train AI, with new policies going into effect on June 18th.

— Michael Kors is partnering with Mastercard to offer customers the company’s AI-powered ‘Shopping Muse’ for personalized product recommendations.

— The U.S. Air Force and Space Force launched NIPRGPT, a new AI tool designed to assist with tasks like report summarizing and coding to improve information access across operations.

— Microsoft just announced that it is ‘retiring’ the ability to create custom GPTs within its Copilot Pro subscription service, citing a shift in focus to enterprise and commercial applications.

— Apple released new details on its on-device AI models, which perform slightly above other small models like Phi-3-mini, Mistral-7b, and Gemma-7b in testing.

— Fran?ois Chollet and Mike Knoop launched ARC Prize 2024, a $1M coding competition challenging AI developers to create systems that solve new reasoning problems and advance towards AGI.

— Google announced its June Pixel update, introducing its Gemini Nano AI model for Pixel 8 and 8a users, enabling new features like enhanced transcription capabilities.

— Flyhomes debuted its AI-powered home search portal, aiming to transform real estate searches with advanced data integration and conversational AI.

— Samsung just announced a series of AI chip developments, including a new manufacturing roadmap, the latest chipmaking tech, as well as a ‘turnkey’ platform for AI chip solutions.

— Midjourney unveiled model personalization, allowing users to better tune outputs to their own styles and preferences by rating images.

— Stability AI released the open model weights for Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, with the 2B parameter text-to-image model offering advanced photorealism, prompt understanding, and typography capabilities.

— Oracle announced new cloud infrastructure deals with OpenAI and Microsoft to ‘extend Azure AI’s capacity’ and scale deployment of AI models.

— Pika Labs rolled out a new model update to its video generation platform, showcasing improved quality.

— LinkedIn introduced new AI tools to its job-search platform, including AI-powered coaches for expert advice, learning personalization for skill courses, and advanced job-search features.

— Stanford AI Lab showcased HumanPlus, a system enabling humanoid robots to autonomously learn and perform tasks by imitating human actions.

— Apparate Labs launched PROTEUS, a new real-time AI video generation model that can create realistic avatars and lip-syncs from a single reference image.

Must-Try Tools

Luma Dream Machine - Make Sora-like photorealistic video from text and images

Hubspot AI - The all-in-one AI-powered marketing solution

ChainGPT - A personal AI assistant on all crypto and blockchain-related topics

Recall - Summarize, connect, and remember online content

Khanmigo - AI-powered teacher assistant by Khan Academy

Lavender - Write better emails faster, get 2x replies with AI

Reliv - Automate QA test in 5 minutes

Capcut - All-in-one video editor and graphic design tool driven by AI

Rows - AI-powered spreadsheets connected to your business data

Ren - AI leadership coach for scalable development

Uizard Autodesigner 2.0 - Text to UI design

Namify - Generate unique business names and logos

TeamCreate - Create AI workers for various roles in finance, sales, product, and more

PyjamaHR - Hiring on autopilot with AI agents

Suno Audio Input - Generate a song from any sound

Mapify - Transform your ideas, documents, and websites into mind maps

Articles Worth Reading

— Apple’s AI strategy in a nutshell.

— Challenges of building mass-market products with AI.

— Generative AI is not going to build your engineering team for you.

— Can LLMs invent better ways to train LLMs?

— Microsoft’s Nadella is building an AI empire, OpenAI was just a step.

Stay Curious, Stay Informed!

The world of AI is constantly buzzing with innovation. This newsletter is your key to staying ahead of the curve. Let me know in the comments what AI topics pique your interest, and I'll be sure to cover them in future issues!

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