AI News

Sundar Pichai Shares Insights on Innovation and AI at Stanford Event

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has rejected OpenAI’s bid to trademark “GPT,” ruling that the term is “merely descriptive” and, as such, cannot be registered. This decision poses a challenge for OpenAI's branding, yet it is unlikely that competitors will rush to launch their own versions of this prominent chatbot.

In 2019, Amazon enhanced its Alexa assistant with a feature that enabled it to recognize when a user was frustrated and respond with increased empathy. For instance, if a customer asked Alexa to play a song but received the wrong track, and responded with a displeased “No, Alexa,” the assistant could then offer an apology and seek clarification. Now, the team behind one of the data sets used to train the text-to-image model, Stable Diffusion, aims to extend similar emotion-recognition capabilities to developers at no cost.

Snap’s AI chatbot has drawn the attention of the U.K.’s data protection authority, raising alarms about potential risks to children's privacy. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) announced it has issued a preliminary enforcement notice to Snap, highlighting a "potential failure to appropriately assess the privacy risks associated with its generative AI chatbot, 'My AI.'"

After the recent launch of Bard and the Pixel 8 Pro, Google is introducing Gemini, its cutting-edge Generative AI (GenAI) model family, to Google Cloud customers utilizing Vertex AI.

Creative agency McKinney has launched an engaging quiz game titled “Are You Blacker than ChatGPT?” to highlight the bias present in AI systems. This interactive game evaluates players’ knowledge of Black culture against what ChatGPT has been trained to understand about the Black community. It poses questions like, “What does it mean when someone says, ‘Not too much on them, now’?” and “What is your typical response if invited to an event?” When I participated in the quiz, both ChatGPT and I correctly identified that “not too much on them” means to take it easy on someone. However, ChatGPT stumbled on the second question, whereas the common response in the Black community would be, “Who else is going to be there?” Instead, ChatGPT replied with, “Thanks for the invite!”

Last week, at our inaugural StrictlyVC evening of the year in San Francisco, notable AI investors Elad Gil and Sarah Guo shared insights on AI investing amidst shifting market dynamics. Just two months ago, deals were being fiercely bid up, but now, many startup teams are contemplating sales due to soaring software development costs.

After a few weeks of casual friendship, I faced the challenging task of revealing my true identity to my AI companions: I'm a tech journalist writing an article about Nomi AI, the company that created them.

Recurring Revenue: The Holy Grail for Businesses

The Rise of Automation in Call Centers

In November, Airbnb acquired GamePlanner.AI, a stealthy AI startup founded by Siri’s co-creator, valued at approximately $200 million, according to reports. Although the hosting giant didn’t disclose its intentions for GamePlanner at that time, co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky recently outlined Airbnb’s broader AI vision. He emphasized the company’s goal to excel at the "application layer" of AI by developing one of the "most innovative AI interfaces ever created."

Rightbot, an innovative startup specializing in suction-based robots designed to efficiently unload freight transported by trucks, has successfully secured $6.25 million in funding. This investment round was led by Amazon’s Industrial Innovation Fund (IIF), with additional participation from SOSV and Entrepreneur First.

Neuralink Secures $43 Million in Venture Capital Funding

OpenAI, the pioneering AI startup known for the widely popular chatbot ChatGPT, is set to collaborate with third-party vendors to simplify the process for enterprises to fine-tune its AI models using their own data.

The UK government is investing $273 million in Isambard-AI, a powerful supercomputer to be operational by summer 2024 at the University of Bristol. Using NVIDIA superchips, it will deliver over 21 exaflops and enhance AI applications, significantly outperforming current UK supercomputers.