News/New Launches
Amazon Unveils Metis: The E-Commerce Giant’s Answer to ChatGPT
Amazon is reportedly developing its own AI chatbot codenamed "Metis" to compete with ChatGPT, signaling the company's ambition to catch up in the rapidly advancing AI race. Key features of Metis: The AI chatbot is said to offer conversation through text and image-centric answers, with capabilities to share links, respond to follow-up queries, and generate its own images: Metis may utilize retrieval augmented generation, allowing it to find and offer information beyond its original training data, such as providing up-to-date stock prices. Amazon reportedly envisions Metis as an AI agent capable of working autonomously by analyzing new data and making...
read Jun 25, 2024Startup Helps Authors License Work to AI, Navigating Rights in New Era
A startup called Created by Humans is launching to help book authors license their work to AI companies, aiming to create a framework for AI rights and broker deals between authors, publishers, and AI firms. Filling a void in the market: Created by Humans seeks to address the lack of universal permissioning and monetization systems for creative content used to train large language models: The startup is one of several emerging to help creators navigate the complex landscape of licensing their work for use in AI technologies. Co-founder and CEO Trip Adler brings years of experience working with book authors...
read Jun 25, 2024Substrate Unveils Platform to Democratize AI Development for Enterprises
Substrate, a startup founded by industry veterans, has emerged from stealth to launch an AI development platform that aims to democratize AI for enterprises by providing a unified solution for building, deploying, and managing machine learning models and pipelines. Lego blocks approach to AI development: Substrate's platform enables developers to create complex AI workflows by stitching together high-quality, curated open-source models, making it easier and more cost-effective for enterprises to harness advanced AI capabilities: The platform addresses accuracy, cost, and latency issues by breaking down complex problems into smaller, more manageable pieces that are easier to solve, similar to how...
read Jun 24, 2024AI Chatbot with Emotions Sparks Debate on Human-Like AI Future
A new AI chatbot app with emotional intelligence raises questions about the future of human-like AI interactions. Key details about Hume AI's EVI chatbot for iOS: Hume AI, a US-based research lab focused on AI optimized for human well-being, has launched an iOS app called Hume: Your Personal AI, featuring an emotional AI chatbot named Kora. The app integrates Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet large language model to power the chat functionality, promising improved humor recognition compared to other AI models. Hume's "empathetic AI" approach involves making the chatbot's voice responses more lifelike and allowing it to analyze the user's tone...
read Jun 21, 2024Best Buy Bets Big on AI, Training 30,000 Employees for Microsoft Laptops Launch
Best Buy trains 30,000 employees to sell and support Microsoft's new AI-powered laptops, marking the retailer's most significant product launch training effort in a decade as it seeks to reverse declining sales trends. Preparing for the AI revolution: Best Buy is investing heavily in employee training to capitalize on the growing demand for AI-enabled devices: The retailer has trained over 30,000 employees so far to sell and repair Microsoft's new Copilot+ AI laptops, which went on sale Tuesday. Best Buy has exclusive sales rights to more than 40% of the Copilot+ PC models, including the OLED Surface Pro, highlighting the...
read Jun 21, 2024Amazon’s AI Alexa Upgrade: Smarter Assistant, Steeper Price
Amazon plans an AI-powered Alexa upgrade, potentially transforming the voice assistant landscape, but it comes at a price. Key details of the revamped Alexa: Amazon is gearing up to launch a new, AI-supercharged version of Alexa as early as August, aiming to enhance the voice assistant's capabilities and user experience: The paid version of Alexa might not require users to say "Alexa" repeatedly when making requests, streamlining interactions and enabling more natural conversations. The advanced Alexa will be capable of handling multiple requests in a single prompt, such as composing a brief email and placing a food order through Uber...
read Jun 21, 20245 AI Tools Transforming Journalism: Realistic Images, Videos, Music, and More
Generative AI has become a transformative force across industries, enabling the creation of realistic images, videos, music, and more. As an AI journalist, I use five key AI tools daily to enhance my work and explore the potential of this technology: Leonardo AI: A versatile platform for generating photorealistic images; Leonardo AI offers a user-friendly interface with granular control over image generation, allowing users to create high-quality, customizable images across various styles and genres. The platform's custom styles and fine-tuned models, such as the impressive Phoenix, enable the creation of images that rival those produced by industry leader Midjourney. Leonardo...
read Jun 20, 2024Niloom.ai Launches Generative AI Platform for AR/VR Content Creation
Niloom.ai launches generative AI platform for creating AR/VR content, aiming to revolutionize the spatial computing ecosystem by making sophisticated content creation accessible to creators of all technical backgrounds. Key features and capabilities: Niloom.ai's comprehensive platform integrates over 100 features, enabling users to generate, prototype, edit, and publish AR/VR experiences quickly and cost-effectively: Users can create individual assets such as 3D models, images, music, sound effects, and AI-driven voices using simple text or speech prompts. The platform offers advanced editing tools, including live collaboration, precision editing, version control, testing, and simulation. Creators can capture a bird's eye view of entire projects...
read Jun 19, 2024ElevenLabs Releases Open-Source AI Tool to Create Sound Effects for Videos
ElevenLabs releases open-source tool for generating sound effects in videos, showcasing the potential of its recently launched Sound Effects API and aiming to simplify the creative process for developers and filmmakers in the rapidly evolving AI video generation space. Key features of the Video to Sound Effects app: ElevenLabs' new open-source tool allows users to generate sound effect samples for their videos quickly and easily: Users can upload a video, and the app extracts four frames at one-second intervals, sending them along with a prompt to OpenAI's GPT-4o to create a custom text-to-sound effects prompt. The generated prompt is then...
read Jun 19, 2024AI Pioneer Ilya Sutskever Launches New Company to Tackle the Most Critical Problem of Our Time: Safe Superintelligence
Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI, launches new AI company focused solely on developing safe superintelligence, raising questions about the future of AI safety research and the competitive landscape. Key details of Sutskever's new venture: Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) was founded just one month after Sutskever's departure from OpenAI, where he served as chief scientist: Sutskever co-founded SSI with ex-Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross and former OpenAI engineer Daniel Levy. The company's singular mission is to build "safe superintelligence" or "SSI", which they believe is the most important technical problem of our time. Unlike OpenAI's nonprofit origins, SSI is designed from...
read Jun 10, 2024Perplexity Releases New AI Content Creation Tool “Pages”
Driving The News: The launch of Perplexity Pages marks a significant development in the world of content creation. With its customizable features, adaptable structure, and visual enhancement capabilities, Pages streamlines the process of crafting in-depth articles, reports, and guides. The platform's growing library of user-generated content and seamless sharing options further contribute to its potential to revolutionize the way knowledge is shared online. Big Idea: Perplexity Pages is a revolutionary tool that simplifies the process of transforming research into visually appealing and comprehensive content, empowering creators from various fields to easily share their knowledge with the world. Why This Matters:...
read Apr 25, 2024AI Coding Startup Augment Out of Stealth with $252M
The rapid rise of AI-powered coding tools is transforming the software engineering industry, with a growing number of developers embracing these technologies to boost productivity and quality. Case in point: A recent StackOverflow survey found that 44% of software engineers are already using AI tools as part of their development process, and 26% plan to do so soon. Industry analysts at Gartner estimate that over 75% of developers will utilize coding assistants by 2028. Go deeper: Former Microsoft developer Igor Ostrovsky, who co-founded the AI coding platform Augment, believes that AI can significantly improve software quality, team productivity, and the...
read Apr 24, 2024Microsoft’s Latest Small Model Phi-3 Has Big Potential
Tiny but Mighty: The Phi-3 Small Language Models with Big Potential Sometimes the best solutions come from unexpected places. That's the lesson Microsoft researchers learned when they developed a new class of small language models (SLMs) that pack a powerful punch. The Case in Point: Large language models (LLMs) have opened up exciting new possibilities for AI, but their massive size means they require significant computing resources. Microsoft's researchers set out to create SLMs that offer many of the same capabilities as LLMs, but in a much smaller and more accessible package. The researchers trained the Phi-3 family of SLMs...
read Apr 11, 2024OpenAI’s New Customization Tools Optimizing GPT-4 for Enterprise
OpenAI's 'Year of the Enterprise' Includes New Tools for Increasing AI Accuracy As OpenAI sets its sights on the enterprise market, the company is introducing new customization options for its GPT-4 API to better serve the needs of business customers. These tools aim to provide more accurate and reliable generative AI models for corporate use cases. Case in point: OpenAI is allowing customers to connect to third-party platforms to share information on fine-tuning, save fine-tuned models during additional training without retraining the entire model, and access a new user interface to compare model performance and quality. Go deeper: The OpenAI...
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