EU AI Act Debuts, Gemini Tops Benchmarks, Open Source Projects and Claude Thinking Prompt

The European Union’s risk-based rulebook for artificial intelligence — aka the EU AI Act — has been years in the making. But expect to hear a lot more about the regulation in the coming months (and years) as key compliance deadlines kick in. Meanwhile, read on for an overview of the law and its aims.

Further Reading

GoogleDeepMind's latest Gemini (Exp 1114), tested with 6K+ community votes over the past week, now ranks joint #1 overall with an impressive 40+ score leap — matching 4o-latest in and surpassing o1-preview! It also claims #1 on Vision leaderboard.

Gemini-Exp-1114 excels across technical and creative domains:

- Overall #3 -> #1

- Math: #3 -> #1

- Hard Prompts: #4 -> #1

- Creative Writing #2 -> #1

- Vision: #2 -> #1

- Coding: #5 -> #3

- Overall (StyleCtrl): #4 -> #4

Further Reading

The open-source Qwen2.5-Coder surpasses the coding capabilities of GPT-4o and approaches that of Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Further Reading

1) Gemini app is on iPhone, here are some of our favorite mobile features to get you started.

Try the new Gemini app on your iPhone

ChatGPT for macOS can now work with your coding apps and read content from them. Here’s everything you need to know and how to set it up 👇

How to get started 

Further Reading

1) Particle launches an AI news app to help publishers, instead of just stealing their work

The media industry today may not have a very favorable view of AI — a technology that’s already been used to replace reporters with AI-written copy, while other AI companies have scooped up journalists’ work to feed their chatbots’ data demands, but without returning traffic to the publisher as search engines once did. However, one startup, an AI newsreader called Particle from former Twitter engineers, believes that AI could serve a valuable role in the media industry by helping consumers make sense of the news and dig deeper into stories, while still finding a way to support the publishers’ businesses.

2) DeepL launches DeepL Voice, real-time, text-based translations from voices and videos

DeepL has made a name for itself with online text translation it claims is more nuanced and precise than services from the likes of Google — a pitch that has catapulted the German startup to a valuation of $2 billion and more than 100,000 paying customers.

Now, as the hype for AI services continues to grow, DeepL is adding another mode to the platform: audio. Users will now be able to use DeepL Voice to listen to someone speaking in one language and automatically translate it to another, in real time.

Further Reading

1) Generative AI startup Writer raises $200M at a $1.9B valuation

Writer has raised $200 million at a $1.9 billion valuation to expand its enterprise-focused generative AI platform.

The Series C round was co-led by Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, and ICONIQ Growth, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, B Capital, Citi Ventures, IBM Ventures, and Workday Ventures.

Writer CEO May Habib says the new cash, which brings the startup’s total raised to $326 million, will be used for product development and "cementing the company’s leadership in the enterprise generative AI category."

2) Tessl raises $125M at $500M+ valuation to build AI that writes and maintains code

Many startups and larger tech companies have taken a crack at building artificial intelligence to code software. Now another new player is coming out of the shadows to throw its hat into the ring, with a mission to fix the many problems that will arise when humans and all those AIs are writing code together.

Tessl is building what it describes as an “AI native” platform that developers and their teams can use to create and maintain software, and on Thursday it opened up a waitlist for those interested in trying it out. 

Further Reading

AI-powered search engine Perplexity says it’ll begin experimenting with ads on its platform starting this week.

The site will be showing ads in the U.S. to start, and they’ll be formatted as “sponsored follow-up questions,” (e.g. “How can I use LinkedIn to enhance my job search?”). These ads will be positioned to the side of answers and labeled as “sponsored.”

Brands and agency partners participating in Perplexity’s ad program include Indeed, Whole Foods, Universal McCann, and PMG.

Further Reading

OpenAI could release an “AI agent” tool as soon as January.

That’s according to Bloomberg, which reports that OpenAI is close to launching software, code-named “Operator,” that can take direct actions on a person’s computer. OpenAI is said to be planning to initially launch Operator as a research preview through its developer API.

Operator would go up against Anthropic’s recently unveiled agent feature, Computer Use, and Google’s rumored consumer-focused agent, among others. It’s unclear whether OpenAI’s will have any advantage; Bloomberg reports that it could take the form of a general-purpose tool that executes tasks in a web browser.

Further Reading

In 2024, generative AI emerged as a key driver for business outcomes across every industry. Already this new generation of AI is having an incredible impact on our world — yet companies and industries are just scratching the surface of what’s possible as they continue to develop new use cases across every role and function.

To help guide organizations on their AI transformation journey, Microsoft recently commissioned a new study through IDC, The Business Opportunity of AI. IDC’s findings show that when organizations truly commit to and invest in AI, the return on investment (ROI) potential grows significantly.

Further Reading

Build with Claude - Anthropic’s family of state-of-the-art models with frontier safety features, cutting-edge capabilities, with multi-modality built in from the ground up. Choose from Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku to find the right mix of speed, intelligence, and cost for your use case.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet: Anthropic’s most intelligent model to date, priced for high-volume use cases
Claude 3 Opus: Powerful model for complex tasks that excels in sight-unseen scenarios
Claude 3 Haiku: Fastest, most cost-effective model preferred for scaled tasks

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