🗓️WEEKLY AI ROUNDUP: April 13th

ALSO: Meta tests AI in India and Africa

Estimated Read Time: 3 minutes

Time for the Weekly Roundup! Antitrust issues! Self driving taxis! $1B AI startups! We’ve got it all this week, plus Meta’s making some new moves internationally.

• The Weekly Roundup.

• Adobe Firefly loses their ethical superiority.

• Meta expands their AI to India and Africa.

🗓️Weekly AI News Recap

🚷Amazon walked back on cashier-less stores. Turns out those fully “automated” stores were partly operated by over 1,000 employees in India, who reviewed customer purchases. Now they’re removing the “Walk Out” feature from large US stores.

📉Reports have released after Stability AI’s CEO, Emad Mostaque, left the company. The reports say he ran the company dry with high spending, missed promised goals to investors, and ultimately had trouble securing funding. The result: Stability had less than $4M in the bank in October 2023.

📞OpenAI updated their Custom Model, a service which helps companies train and create their own AI for their company. This is likely how companies will utilize AI in the future; custom models trained for their specific data with a solid AI model as the foundation.

🇨🇳Microsoft’s threat team reports China is using AI agents to spread disinformation during elections. The goal is to sway elections and public opinion in China’s favor. Personally I think this goes both ways. AI warfare will be a whole new realm for governments to tackle.

📵Sam Altman and Jony Ive are teaming up to create an AI personal device. They are currently seeking $1B in funding. The device will NOT look like a phone, but it will likely utilize OpenAI’s voice technology.

🚗Tesla’s Robotaxis will be unveiled in August. The taxis will reportedly have no steering wheel and no pedal. RIP Uber drivers.

🤖Microsoft opens London AI team using the poached staff from Anthropic. The team is the latest in a series of UK focused AI investments. The London team will compete with Google Deepmind for AI workers in the area.

👀Grok started a sensational fake news story that spread like wildfire. The fake news stated Iran attacked Israel, which ironically may happen in real life now. But this still showcases the dangers of relying on AI without fact checking.

🤓Llama 3 is updating next month. Meta’s LLM will receive a substantial update next month and remain open source. A smaller version is expected to arrive within the next week or so.

🤯Immediately after… Gemini Pro 1.5 and ChatGPT-4 Turbo released to the wider public. Gemini Pro is available to Google AI Studio members and GPT-4 Turbo is now available to all paid GPT subscribers.

🥊The US plans to invest over $6B into domestic chip production in an effort to ween of dependance on Chinese and Taiwan manufacturers.

🚨UK anti-trust officer blows the alarm over big tech’s iron grip on powerful AI. They mention Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Nvidia as the key figures controlling almost all of AI. They’re especially concerned over partnerships between these companies, and they would strengthen their monopolies.

As of market close 04.13.2024.

Adobe’s Firefly was trained on Midjourney images 😂. Adobe constantly bragged how “safe” Firefly was. It didn’t need to risk infringing on other image’s copyright in order to train. Basically they were ethically superior. Well… that was a lie. It’s been revealed that Adobe used images from several other AI image generators, like Midjourney, to train Firefly. These images counted for at least 5% of the training material. We’ve reached full circle guys. AI now trains on AI. Guess this is the end, huh? 🫠

What is Adobe Firefly? Firefly is Adobe’s AI solution across all of their programs, such as Photoshop. You can basically circle an area on an image, type “make a house on a lake” and it’ll use AI to generate something new into the already existing image.

Freepik launched the latest version of their image generator to the public. It now features real time image generation and infinite scroll. Having tried it for a bit, it’s definitely FAST. Gotta make an account to try it though. Check it out here.

🌍Meta trials it’s AI chatbot in Africa and India

What happened: Meta is experimenting with its new AI chatbot, Meta AI, in India and parts of Africa. This is obviously in response to OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google’s recent AI efforts.

The details:

• Meta AI has been introduced in WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger in Africa and India.

• India has over 500 million users on Facebook.

• Africa is expected to have a massive population and economic boom (generally, not just in tech).

• Meta’s AI can handle user queries, generate photorealistic images from text, and assist in search functionalities.

• Meta hopes integrating AI into their popular apps will give them an edge over OpenAI.

Why it matters: Meta’s attempting to integrate AI into the most widely used social media apps in the world. While they’ll have some catching up to do, their integration could make Meta’s AI the most popular in the world one day.

🦸Everybody’s a comic artist now…

Source: Midjourney

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