Top 10 AI News #weekly
With 39 companies raising $100 million or more, AI deals dominated venture funding, accounting for 28% of all venture capital in Q3, totaling $18.9 billion.
The largest deal was OpenAI's $6.6 billion round, the biggest venture deal ever, valuing the company at $157 billion.
American physicist John Hopfield and AI expert Geoffrey Hinton were awarded the coveted prize this week. Considered the "godfather of AI," Hinton's research in 2012 laid the groundwork for today's neural networks — but in 2023, he quit his job at Google to join a chorus of critics sounding alarm bells about the technology.
Prior to leaving Google and joining the likes of Elon Musk and other luminaries in signing an open letter calling for a pause on AI development, Hinton took to CBS News to warn that the world had reached a "pivotal moment" in terms of the technology.
ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, the San Francisco-based company synonymous with bringing generative artificial intelligence (AI) into the spotlight, will open its second office in Asia in Singapore later in 2024.
The Singapore office – the company’s fourth international branch – will focus on advancing regional collaboration, including work with national AI programme AI Singapore on generative AI models that are tuned to understand and reflect cultures and languages in South-east Asia.
OpenAI’s expansion here signals the start-up’s long-term plans to tap Singapore’s growing pool of tech talent and deepen its roots in the region, acting as a hub for its Asia-Pacific (Apac) partners.
The company promises that its AI copilot, Joule, will support 80% of its most-used business tasks by year end.
SAP’s promised collaboration between its AI copilot, Joule, and other agents will become reality in the fourth quarter of 2024, the company announced at its 2024 TechEd conference Tuesday.
The company first discussed the new functionality at its Sapphire conference in June, announcing that Joule would offer an integration with Microsoft Copilot enabling users to, for example, query their Outlook calendar from Joule.
At TechEd, SAP said that Joule will include multiple autonomous AI agents, each expert in a particular function, that will collaborate to execute complex workflows.
"We are infusing Joule with multiple autonomous AI agents that will combine their expertise across the business functions to collaboratively accomplish complex workflows," said Muhammad Alam, head of product engineering at SAP, during a media briefing. "This will free workers to collaborate in areas where human ingenuity is best suited."
Google is rolling out the “Ask Photos” feature to select users. The Gemini-powered feature is reportedly rolling out for users in the US as a server-side update and appearing in the Google Photos app, meaning it does not matter which version of Google Photos the user has. The American technology company opened the waitlist for access in September this year, allowing users to sign up on Google’s website. The feature was unveiled at Google I/O 2024 in May.
Ask Photos allows users to pose questions in natural language directly within Google Photos, utilising Google’s Gemini AI models. The app will display results based on the content of the photos, along with the image that best matches the answer. It also enables searches for people, pets, and more.
Tesla's long-awaited Robotaxi has finally been revealed.
Elon Musk showed off Tesla's upcoming driverless taxi at its "We, Robot" on this Thursday evening.
The unveiling took place on a lot in Warner Bros. Discovery's movie studio in Burbank, California. The location allowed Tesla to show off its autonomous driving capabilities without running into any unexpected situations with traffic.
Uber Technologies will roll out an AI assistant powered by OpenAI's technology to help drivers transition to electric vehicles, as part of its efforts to lower emissions.
The ride-hailing company has advocated a shift to EVs for several years and has pledged $800 million to support its driver partners' switching entirely to EVs by 2040.
The AI assistant, based on OpenAI's GPT-4o, was unveiled at Uber's Go-Get Zero event in London on Tuesday. The chatbot is set to launch early next year in the United States and will later expand to other locations.
It will provide personalized answers tailored to the driver's city and eligible incentives, Uber said. The company will also expand the chatbot's use to answer queries beyond EVs in early 2025.
Taiwanese semiconductor maker MediaTek has launched the Dimensity 9400 chipset, bringing improved performance across the board. Notably, the new-generation flagship chip enhances on-device artificial intelligence capabilities and supports tri-fold smartphones. Based on TSMC’s second-generation 3nm process, the Dimensity 9400 chip is up to 40 per cent more power efficient than its predecessor, MediaTek stated.
The company also indicated that the first smartphones powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 chip will be available in the fourth quarter of 2024.
More about MediaTek's launching:
MediaTek unveils Dimensity 9400 for next-generation premium AI smartphones
Also, AMD just made a big statement in the AI PC race with its Ryzen AI Pro 300 series processors
AMD has unveiled its latest weapon in the battle to dominate the burgeoning Copilot+ PC market with the launch of the Ryzen AI Pro 300 series.
Specifically catered toward enterprise users, the move by AMD looks to arm businesses with more powerful AI chips to bolster on-device AI and security capabilities.
More about AMD'S statement about its Ryzen AI Pro 300 series processors:
AMD just made a big statement in the AI PC race with its Ryzen AI Pro 300 series processors
It will offer a free web-based app starting next year, aimed at helping the creators of images and videos to get credit for their work used in AI systems.
In addition to indicating that they authored the content, the creators can also use the free app to signal if they do not want their work to be used by AI training systems that ingest huge amounts of data, the company said.
Karim Beguir, CEO of Instadeep, discusses the transformative potential of biology AI, like its current state to GPT in 2020. Since its $550 million acquisition by BioNTech, Instadeep has enhanced BioNTech's processes, particularly in histology. Beguir emphasizes the strategic alignment with BioNTech, focusing on AI for therapeutics and vaccines while maintaining flexibility to innovate across various industries.
Best Article(s) #weekly
Top 10 Best AI Content Detectors 2024
More than ever, authenticity and originality in digital content have never been as important as they are nowadays. In other words, since the AI generated texts have become increasingly popular, AI content detectors are in great need. Today we’ll look at the top ten AI detecting tools in the market that are developed to help indie hackers, content creators, educators, and businesses safeguard their work against plagiarism and verify the authenticity of their content. Learn how these innovative AI detecting solutions can enable you to protect the integrity of your content in a world powered by AI.
Top 10 Best AI-powered Smart Home Devices 2024
Image a home where everything works together smartly, making your life easier and safer. With the latest smart home AI devices, everything becomes a reality.
From AI-powered robots, smart pillow, lights, vacuums to AI smart mirrors, this article will guide you through the top rated smart home AI gadgets that are leading the charge in home automation. Join us as we explore the future of smart living and top 10 home electronic AI gadgets that are changing the way you live.
Generative AI’s Act o1: The Reasoning Era Begins
The annual report (By Sonya Huang) that Sequoia recently issued on generative AI has a number of very critical takeaways:
1. A new scaling law has started: The release of O1 represents a significant advancement in general reasoning capabilities accomplished through "inference-time computation." This is the "AlphaGo moment" for generative AI and an important turning point in the scaling law of large models. The more inference time we give to the model, the significantly better the model's reasoning will become. This will further drive usability at the application layer.
2. Rethinking SaaS: SaaS will go from Software as a Service to Service as Software. That simply carries on the echo of my statement last year: one sells work, not software. SaaS will move to sell the results to selling the final delivery results.
3. The domain-specific know-how will gain significant importance: Cognitive architecture is referred to in the report, which can be elaborated as the know-how of the different industries. It's crucial to integrate the know-how with the model capabilities to solve the problem from end to end; this would be key in building the data feedback loop and achieving the transition from co-pilot to auto-pilot.
Machines of Loving Grace - How AI Could Transform the World for the Better
Anthropic CEO's lengthy article predicts a positive future for strong artificial intelligence. It describes his thoughts on the definition of strong AI and elaborates on the potential positive impacts of strong AI on humanity in five areas. The narrative is extremely rigorous, with a detailed reasoning process in each domain.
State OF AI Report 2024
The State of AI Report analyses the most interesting developments in AI. We aim to trigger an informed conversation about the state of AI and its implication for the future. The Report is produced by AI investor Nathan Benaich and Air Street Capital.
Key takeways from the 2024 Report include:
- Frontier lab performance begins to converge and proprietary models lose their edge, as the gap between GPT-4 and the rest closes. OpenAI o1 put the lab back at the top of the charts - but for how long?
- Planning and reasoning take priority in LLM research, as companies explore combining LLMs with reinforcement learning, evolutionary algorithms, and self-improvement to unlock future agentic applications.
- Foundation models demonstrate their ability to break out of language, supporting multimodal research across mathematics, biology, genomics, the physical sciences, and neuroscience.
- US sanctions have limited effects on Chinese labs’ ability to produce capable models, as a combination of stockpiles, approved hardware, smuggling, and cloud access allow them to build highly performant (V)LLMs. Meanwhile, China’s efforts to build a domestic semiconductor industry remain scrambled.
- The enterprise value of AI companies has hit $9T, as public companies experience a bull market for AI exposure. Investment in private AI companies also increased, but by an order of magnitude less, despite GenAI megarounds in the US.
- A handful of AI companies begin to generate serious revenue, including foundation model builders and start-ups working on video and audio generation. However, as models get cheaper as part of the corporate land-grab, questions around long-term sustainability go unanswered.
- The pseudo-acquisition emerges as an off-ramp for AI companies, as some companies struggle to find a viable business model as staying at the frontier proves costly.
- The existential risk discourse has cooled off, especially following the abortive coup at OpenAI. However, researchers have continued to deepen our knowledge of potential model vulnerabilities and misuse, proposing potential fixes and safeguards.
Best Prompt(s) #weekly
Meta Prompt for OpenAI Prompt Generator
Official meta prompt for OpenAI Prompt Generator, which lets you generate prompts, functions, and schemas from just a description of your task.
Best Open Source Alternatives to Proprietary Software#weekly
OpenAI Swarm Multi-Agent Framework
OpenAI Swarm is an educational framework exploring ergonomic, lightweight multi-agent orchestration. Learn about its features, pricing, pros, and cons. Perfect for developers!
Bolt.new - AI web development agent
Bolt.new is an AI web development agent that lets you prompt, execute, modify, and deploy full-stack apps straight from your browser without local setup.
This Week's Summary
In this week's edition of AI Weekly News, we have explored a range of exciting advancements and insights in artificial intelligence. Highlights include the launch of the OpenAI Swarm Multi-Agent Framework, which aims to enhance collaborative AI capabilities, and the latest updates from tech giants like Google and Tesla.
We also delve into thought-provoking articles, such as Sequoia's report on the Generative AI's Act O1 and Dario Amodei's vision for a positive future with strong AI. Additionally, the State of AI Report 2024 reveals key trends, including the growing enterprise value of AI companies.
