GSV's AI News & Updates (03/18/24)
Kyron Studio, Figure 01 Humanoids, Devin AI Software Engineer, Grok Open-Sourced, Roblox AI Tools, Smartschool, Apple's Multimodal Model, DeepMind SIMA
AIR (AI Revolution) Show on April 13-15 is the world’s leading event at the frontier of AI in EDU for educators, administrators, professionals, and AI explorers. There will be demos, exhibits, booths, workshops, hackathons, panels and more! REGISTER now, tickets are free but capacity is limited.
General 🚀
OpenAI ChatGPT + Humanoid Robot = Figure01: Figure 01 can now have full conversations with people: OpenAI models provide high-level visual and language intelligence while Figure neural networks deliver fast, low-level, dexterous robot actions. Everything in this video is a neural network.
Apple in talks with Google to embed Google Gemini behind AI features in the iPhone: By bringing Gemini to iPhone, it will not only get millions more potential users but affluent ones who might pay a premium to use advanced AI. More users means more data, and more data means a better, more valuable product. Announcement is expected to await until WWDC in June. Alphabet shares were trading more than 7% on Monday morning.
Cognition Labs releases Devin: the world’s first fully autonomous AI software engineer. Devin is a tireless, skilled teammate, equally ready to build alongside you or independently complete tasks for you to review.
Sam Altman back on OpenAI's Board after he is cleared by investigation: OpenAI named Sam Altman, its fired-then-rehired CEO, to its board of directors on Friday. It also added three women with executive experience at Sony, Meta, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Elon Musk and xAI open-source Grok: Developers and researchers can now use the ‘weights and architecture’ that power the Grok chatbot for free in their own projects. xAI joins the list of a number of growing firms, including Meta and Mistral, that have published the codes of their chatbots to the public. Technical deep dive here.
Roblox introduces AI-powered tools to boost 3D content creation: at GDC in SF today, Roblox showed off their Avatar Auto Setup and Texture Generator, which promise a new era of efficiency for creators worldwide.
Education and the Future of Work 📚
Kyron Learning announces Kyron Studio, where teachers can instantly create dialogue-based, adaptive lessons for their students: teachers and instructors can create supplemental learning content on any subject in a matter of minutes, specifying the pedagogical approach and guardrails the AI will use to deliver the lesson to the learner. The lessons can be used as they are generated, or augmented with video, visuals, or other learner-facing materials to enhance the experience.
Smartschool's AI assistant tutor secures $1.5M Pre-Seed: Yoko is an AI assistant specifically designed to help students in the US prepare for the SAT exam.
Avallain acquires AI toolset TeacherMatic: Avallain’s products enable publishers to use generative AI. UK startup TeacherMatic has developed and organised AI toolsets to support educators globally (lesson plans, flashcards, schemes of work, multiple-choice quizzes)
Microsoft launches Copilot for Security: the industry’s first generative AI solution for security and IT professionals. It includes access to the latest information on security threats and Microsoft’s 78 trillion daily signals that the company collects through its threat intelligence gathering.
LinkedIn plans to add gaming to its platform: it will be doing so by tapping into the same wave of puzzle-mania that helped simple games like Wordle find viral success and millions of players. Three early efforts are games called “Queens”, “Inference” and “Crossclimb.”
Plentiful, high-paying jobs in the age of AI: We invent new tasks for humans to do over time. Economic history has seen a continuous diversification in the number of tasks humans do. Regular humans will have plentiful, high-paying jobs in the age of AI dominance — often doing much the same kind of work that they’re doing right now.
How Are Higher Ed Instructors Using GenAI Today?: while ChatGPT remains king in terms of GenAI tools used by college professors to create content and guide lessons, other tools are emerging for specific purposes such as transcription, coding and making presentations.
Five Differences Between Human and AI Tutors: This hope for chatbots takes a serious challenge—meeting the vast and varied needs of students—and trivializes it.
I, Cyborg: Using Co-Intelligence: How Ethan Mollick used AI in his book about AI.
Startups and Tools 🛠️
The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps:
Nvidia in talks to acquire AI infrastructure platform Run:ai in massive deal: Run:ai has developed an orchestration and virtualization software layer tailored to the unique needs of AI workloads running on GPUs and similar chipsets.
Copy.ai introduces GTM AI: the first GTM AI platform with pre-built workflows that deliver instant value.
Physical Intelligence raises $70M Seed to Build a Brain for Robots: Physical Intelligence is building software intended to power robots that can learn a wide range of tasks. Their company has raised $70M from Thrive Capital, OpenAI, Sequoia Capital, Greenoaks Capital Partners, Lux Capital and Khosla Ventures.
Empathy raises $47M in Series B Funding for AI to help with the practical and emotional bereavement process: Empathy’s platform incorporates a mixture of AI and human guides to help people with all of the different aspects of the bereavement process, from counseling services and AI to help write obituaries to other service automations.
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Tech 💻
Apple Quietly Launches First Multimodal AI Model: MM1, a family of multimodal models capable of handling images and text. MM1 can follow instructions and reason across images among the model's multimodal abilities. The example below shows it can deduce how much two beers cost based on the price on the menu.
DeepMind releases SIMA, a generalist AI agent for 3D virtual environments: SIMA (Scalable, Instructable, Multiworld Agent) is an AI agent trained to learn gaming skills so it plays more like a human instead of an overpowered AI that does its own thing. SIMA will eventually learn how to play any video game, even games with no linear path to end the game and open-world games.
What I learned from looking at 900 most popular open source AI tools:
How to Evaluate Your RAG System?: explore the most effective metrics for each stage of your RAG pipeline and how to use them to evaluate your whole system.
OpenAI's Sora Made Me Crazy AI Videos—Then the CTO Answered (Most of) My Questions: How does this generative AI tech work? Why does it mess up sometimes? When will it be released to the public? What data was it trained on?
Regulation and Policy ⚖️
OpenAI Inks Deals With European Publishers Le Monde, Prisa: the startup has made a global effort to reach licensing agreements with publishers.
India drops plan to require approval for AI model launches: the revision follows India’s IT ministry receiving severe criticism earlier this month from many high-profile individuals.
Other
A ChatGPT for Music Is Here. Inside Suno, the Startup Changing Everything: Suno wants everyone to be able to produce their own pro-level songs — but what does that mean for artists?
Resources
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