AI News

After appointing an interim CEO earlier this month, Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, is implementing significant shifts in its product strategy. The company plans to reduce investments in several products, including its VPN, Relay, and Online Footprint Scrubber. Additionally, Mozilla will be shutting down Hubs, the 3D virtual world launched in 2018, and scaling back its support for the mozilla.social Mastodon instance. These changes will result in approximately 60 layoffs, as reported earlier by Bloomberg.

In a week where gadget enthusiasts are captivated by Apple's Vision Pro, an innovative startup is vying for attention with its unique augmented reality device. Today, Singapore-based Brilliant Labs unveiled its latest product, Frame, a pair of sleek AR glasses featuring a built-in multimodal AI assistant named Noa. This groundbreaking product has already attracted interest and investment from John Hanke, CEO of Niantic, the company behind popular AR games like Pokémon GO, although Brilliant Labs chose not to disclose the funding amount from Hanke.

In his keynote address at Nvidia’s GTC 2024 event, CEO Jensen Huang emphasized the term “AI factory” repeatedly. He remarked, “In the last Industrial Revolution, the essential resource for factories was water,” highlighting a transformation central to industrialization.

Since the launch of ChatGPT, I can hardly recall a meeting with prospects or customers where the topic of generative AI wasn’t raised. Businesses are eager to explore how they can harness this technology, from enhancing internal efficiency to innovating external products and services. Companies across all sectors are racing to implement generative AI solutions to remain competitive.

There has been a wave of uncertainty surrounding the use of AI to bring John Lennon’s voice back to life in what Paul McCartney describes as “the last Beatles record.” This project goes beyond the superficial AI imitations populating platforms like Soundcloud today; it aligns more closely with a practical application of machine learning for noise reduction.

Title: Revolutionizing Robotics: The Next Frontier in Artificial Intelligence

The management upheaval at OpenAI last month reached a swift conclusion with co-founder Sam Altman being reinstated less than a week after his unexpected dismissal. This period also marked a significant enhancement of Microsoft's involvement, as the tech giant secured a seat on OpenAI's board for the first time since it invested billions in the startup earlier this year. This closer relationship is now under scrutiny by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the U.K., which is investigating whether Microsoft and OpenAI are in a “relevant merger situation.”

The European Union's AI Act, a comprehensive risk-based framework for regulating artificial intelligence applications, has successfully cleared a significant hurdle after Member State representatives voted unanimously today to affirm the final text of the draft law.

Microsoft Bing is introducing an innovative “Deep Search” feature, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, aimed at delivering users more relevant and thorough responses to complex search queries. Importantly, Microsoft clarifies that Deep Search will not replace Bing's traditional web search; instead, it serves as an enhancement, enabling users to explore the web more deeply.

The founders of the innovative community-driven product creation platform, Off/Script, are making a bold move into AI-designed merchandise. Launched by Jonathan Brun and Justine Massicotte, the company has introduced its mobile app, enabling anyone to conceptualize, share, and monetize product mock-ups, bringing their creative visions to life. Users can design a wide array of items ranging from clothing and high-end handbags to home décor, furniture, and electronics.

This morning, Google unveiled AlphaCode 2, the latest edition of its code-generating model developed by DeepMind, alongside the introduction of the Gemini generative AI framework. AlphaCode 2, which utilizes a variant of the Gemini system (Gemini Pro) specifically fine-tuned on coding contest data, boasts significant enhancements over its predecessor, according to Google.

Losing personal items can be incredibly frustrating, especially when they are merely left behind in places like airports or sports stadiums, making retrieval difficult. My friend Caitlin is experiencing this firsthand; she’s yet to recover her phone lost at Oktoberfest on September 27, even after receiving confirmation in November that it was found.

Pinterest is enhancing its commitment to body type diversity with a new consumer-facing tool that allows users to filter search results by different body types. Initially focused on women's fashion and wedding ideas, this feature builds on Pinterest's body type technology introduced earlier this year. This innovative computer vision technology analyzes shape, size, and form to identify a variety of body types within Pinterest's extensive library of over 5 billion images, serving as the AI backbone for this new front-end tool. Pinterest aims to create a more inclusive search experience while addressing the well-documented harms of body size discrimination, which affected approximately 34 million Americans in 2019, according to the Campaign for Size Freedom.

With a significant investment of $2 billion from Google, Anthropic positions itself alongside OpenAI to capitalize on a leadership role in the artificial intelligence sector. As major tech players rush to invest, we see a trend emerge: those with the capacity to innovate are building, while others are opting to invest.

Yasmeen Ahmad from Google Cloud discussed the nuances of large language models (LLMs) at VB Transform, emphasizing that bigger isn't always better. Smaller, domain-specific models can excel with quality data. Techniques like fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented generation enhance LLMs, especially in multimodal contexts. Effective interactions are key for LLMs to provide accurate insights, evolving towards “agentic AI” that mimics human decision-making. The future of AI is rapidly unfolding, promising transformative capabilities for businesses.