Sep 21, 2024

AI-Powered Toy Bear Can Tell Stories in Over 30 Languages

AI-powered storytelling teddy bear debuts: Skyrocket has introduced Poe the AI Story Bear, an innovative toy that combines artificial intelligence with traditional bedtime storytelling. Poe utilizes OpenAI's language models to generate unique stories based on children's input, offering a personalized and interactive storytelling experience. The bear employs AI speech technology from ElevanLabs to narrate stories in a synthetic voice, enhancing the immersive quality of the experience. Children can customize their stories through the companion app, Poe AI Bear: Story Creator, selecting themes, characters, and locations, and even inserting themselves into the narratives. Key features and functionality: Poe's capabilities extend beyond...

read Sep 20, 2024

SonicJobs Make AI Agents that Apply to Jobs for You

Revolutionizing job applications with AI: SonicJobs has developed AI Agents that streamline the job application process, significantly improving conversion rates and user experience. The problem with traditional job applications: The current job application process is inefficient and costly, with US companies spending $15 billion annually on talent acquisition. Industry-wide, only 5% of job seekers who click on a job posting complete the application. The main cause of abandonment is redirection from job platforms to company sites, resulting in a 70% bounce rate. SonicJobs' innovative solution: The company has created AI Agents that allow candidates to complete job applications directly on...

read Sep 20, 2024

You Can Now Search Google Chrome History with Natural Language

AI-powered search revolutionizes Chrome's browsing history: Google Chrome introduces an experimental feature that allows users to search their browsing history using natural language queries, enhancing the way users interact with their past online activities. The new feature, called "History search, powered by AI," enables users to find previously visited websites using everyday language instead of relying on exact keywords or website addresses. Example queries include asking about a recently viewed ice cream shop, comfortable walking shoes, or vegetarian pasta recipes, demonstrating the feature's versatility in understanding context and intent. How it works: Chrome locally stores and encrypts URL, page title,...

read Sep 20, 2024

Your Favorite K-Pop Hits May Actually Be Illicit AI Clones

AI-generated music floods YouTube: A recent study by musicMagpie titled "Bop or Bot?" has uncovered a staggering 1.63 million AI-generated cover songs on YouTube, with K-pop groups bearing the brunt of this phenomenon. K-pop dominance in AI-generated content: The study reveals that K-pop artists account for 35% of the top 20 most-streamed AI-generated artists, highlighting the genre's particular vulnerability to this trend. Blackpink leads the pack with 17.3 million views of AI-generated content, followed by Justin Bieber with 13 million views, and Kanye West with 3.4 million views. This widespread proliferation of AI-generated music spans across genres and even includes...

read Sep 20, 2024

Michael Dell Shares Leadership Lessons and Thoughts on the Future of AI

AI's transformative potential: Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies, envisions artificial intelligence and generative AI as catalysts for a profound shift from computation to cognition, promising to accelerate scientific discovery and enhance human capabilities. Dell's customers across various industries are actively exploring AI applications in areas such as drug discovery, clinical trials, documentation, and supply chain forecasting. The CEO believes that AI will augment rather than replace human capabilities, emphasizing its potential to boost productivity and efficiency across sectors. Data management in the AI era: Dell predicts that most data will be created and utilized in the physical world, with...

read Sep 20, 2024

How Generative AI Will Reshape B2B Sales

The AI revolution in B2B sales: Generative AI is set to dramatically transform the landscape of B2B sales over the next decade, offering unprecedented productivity gains and reshaping traditional sales strategies. McKinsey estimates that generative AI could add between $0.8 and $1.2 trillion in productivity across sales and marketing sectors. While only 21% of companies have fully adopted generative AI for B2B sales, 85% of those using it are highly enthusiastic about its potential. The technology promises to augment sales capabilities, automate routine tasks, and enable sales professionals to focus on higher-value activities. Three pathways to transformation: McKinsey lays out...

read Sep 20, 2024

Workday Unveils AI Platform Illuminate With 4 Specialized Agents

Workday unveils AI-powered platform and agents: Workday has introduced Illuminate, its next-generation AI platform, along with four specialized AI agents and a Workday Assistant, as part of a comprehensive three-year AI strategy. Key features of Illuminate: The new AI platform leverages Workday's vast database of business transactions to provide real-time AI assistance within workflows, offering users a virtual team of AI experts. Generative AI capabilities help accelerate tasks such as writing knowledge pieces, job descriptions, and contracts. The platform includes automation tools for auto-filling, document scanning, prompting, and anomaly detection. Illuminate aims to streamline HR and financial processes by integrating...

read Sep 20, 2024

Suno Releases ‘Covers,’ an AI Feature to Reimagine Songs in New Genres

AI-powered musical transformation: Suno has introduced a new feature called Covers that allows users to reimagine existing songs in different genres, preserving the original melody while altering the musical style. The Covers feature, currently in beta, can transform various audio inputs, including produced tracks and casual recordings, into multiple musical forms. Users can select a song from their library and choose the "Cover Song" option to process the track into a new style. The AI-powered tool can also add genre-appropriate lyrics to instrumental tracks, though Suno recommends users refine the generated lyrics for coherence. Expanding creative possibilities: Suno's new feature...

read Sep 20, 2024

LinkedIn is Training its AI Models on Your Data — Here’s How to Opt Out

LinkedIn's AI training initiative: LinkedIn has implemented a new policy that allows the company to use user data for training generative AI models, with users automatically opted in without explicit consent. The professional networking platform introduced a new privacy setting and opt-out form before updating its privacy policy to reflect this change. LinkedIn states that it uses generative AI for features such as writing assistance, but the extent of data usage and potential applications remains unclear. This move follows a recent admission by Meta that it has been scraping non-private user data for AI model training since 2007. Opting out...

read Sep 20, 2024

AI Voice Calling Scams are on the Rise – Do You Have a Secret Phrase?

AI voice cloning scams gaining traction: A recent survey by a UK bank reveals a concerning trend in the rise of AI-generated voice cloning scams, with 28% of respondents reporting they have been targeted. Voice cloning scams involve criminals using AI technology to create convincing imitations of friends or family members' voices, claiming to be in urgent need of financial assistance. The advancement of AI technology has made it possible to generate realistic voice imitations using as little as three seconds of source material, often easily obtainable from social media videos. These scams represent an evolution of older text-based fraud...

read Sep 20, 2024

AI HW Summit Showcases Offer a Glimpse of What’s to Come for AI Hardware

AI Hardware Landscape Evolves: The 2024 AI HW Summit in the Bay Area showcased significant advancements and fierce competition in AI hardware technology, reflecting the rapid pace of innovation in the field. Companies like Cerebras, Groq, and Samba Nova engaged in a "food fight" over claims of being the "fastest inference on the planet," presenting benchmark results for various sizes of Llama 3.1 models. The competition highlights the increasing importance of inference speed in AI applications, with companies pushing the boundaries of hardware capabilities to gain a competitive edge. Optical Interconnects Gain Traction: Optical fabric solutions are emerging as a...

read Sep 20, 2024

EA’s Codeless Development System Generates Entire Games from Prompts

AI-powered game creation: Electronic Arts (EA) has unveiled a concept for an innovative AI system that could potentially revolutionize video game development by allowing users to create games from scratch without coding. EA showcased the "Imagination to Creation" program at its Investor Day event in New York City, demonstrating the system's ability to generate games based on user prompts. The concept video featured the creation of a Minecraft-inspired maze game, with users able to modify various aspects such as setting, character appearances, and gameplay mechanics in real-time. The system promises to make game creation accessible to those without technical skills,...

read Sep 20, 2024

AI Agents are the Next Big Thing — Don’t Build Your Own, Advisors Say

AI agents gaining traction, but challenges abound: Agentic AI, designed to run specific functions without human intervention, is becoming increasingly popular among enterprises looking to automate workflows and leverage generative AI capabilities. Forrester has named AI agents as one of its top 10 emerging technologies for the year, highlighting their potential impact on business operations. However, the analyst firm warns that three-quarters of organizations attempting to build AI agents in-house will fail, citing the complexity of the process and the lack of specialized expertise in many companies. Forrester predicts that companies unable to build their own AI agents will turn...

read Sep 20, 2024

New AI Model from MIT Reveals the Structures of Crystalline Materials

AI breakthrough in crystallography: MIT chemists have developed a new generative AI model called Crystalyze that can determine the structures of powdered crystalline materials from X-ray diffraction data. The model could significantly accelerate materials research for applications in batteries, magnets, and other fields by solving structures that have remained unsolved for years. Crystalyze uses machine learning trained on data from the Materials Project database, which contains information on over 150,000 materials. The AI model breaks down the structure prediction process into subtasks, including determining lattice size and shape, atom composition, and atomic arrangement within the lattice. How Crystalyze works: The...

read Sep 20, 2024

iOS 18.1 Public Beta is Live — Here are the Apple Intelligence Features Available

Apple's AI revolution begins: Apple has released the public beta for iOS 18.1, introducing a suite of Apple Intelligence features that leverage artificial intelligence to enhance user experience across various applications. Compatibility and availability: The new AI-powered capabilities are currently limited to iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max models, with future expansion planned for all iPhone 16 devices. Public betas for iPadOS 18.1 and macOS Sequoia 15.1 are also available, offering Apple Intelligence features on compatible tablets and computers. Apple Intelligence is launching initially in the United States, with plans to expand to other English-speaking countries by the end of...

read Sep 20, 2024

The Brains and Brawn of AI Models and How to Understand Their Output

Recent insights from a talk by Devavrat Shah shed light on conceptual frameworks for understanding and regulating artificial intelligence systems. The mind and muscle of AI: Cognitive output, whether from humans or AI, can be viewed as a combination of learning capability (mind) and mechanistic automation (muscle). The 'mind' component represents the learning aspect, involving data interpretation and logical reasoning. The 'muscle' refers to the brute-force application of assessment to data, or what Shah terms 'mechanistic automation'. This conceptual framework helps in distinguishing between AI systems that simply process large amounts of data and those that demonstrate more sophisticated learning...

read Sep 20, 2024

Microsoft’s New GRIN-MoE AI Model Excels at Math and Coding

Microsoft's GRIN-MoE AI model has emerged as a powerful contender in the field of artificial intelligence, particularly excelling in coding and mathematical tasks while offering enhanced scalability and efficiency for enterprise applications. Innovative architecture and approach: GRIN-MoE, which stands for Gradient-Informed Mixture-of-Experts, employs a novel technique to selectively activate only a small subset of its parameters at a time, resulting in improved performance and resource efficiency. The model uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, routing tasks to specialized "experts" within the system. GRIN-MoE utilizes SparseMixer-v2 to estimate the gradient for expert routing, overcoming traditional challenges in MoE architectures. With 16×3.8 billion...

read Sep 20, 2024

New Study Shows AI Can Predict Lung Cancer from Digitized Tissue Samples

Artificial intelligence advances lung cancer prediction: A new study published in Cell Reports Medicine demonstrates how AI can accurately predict lung cancer from digitized patient tissue samples, showcasing a promising application of machine learning in medical diagnostics. Key findings and implications: Researchers from the University of Cologne developed an AI-based computational pathology platform capable of analyzing hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained tissue sections for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The AI algorithm outperformed previous studies in constructing precise segmentation maps, achieving a Dice score of 88.5% for epithelial-only tumor segmentation. This study marks the first AI-based algorithm for necrosis density quantification...

read Sep 20, 2024

Bugs in Meta’s AI Ad Tools are Costing Customers a Lot of Money

Meta's ad platform faces widespread issues: Media buyers report significant challenges with Meta's advertising tools, including targeting errors and budget overruns, potentially costing clients substantial amounts of money. Ongoing platform bugs and disruptions: Meta's ad platform has experienced numerous issues since Memorial Day, with some buyers encountering problems as frequently as every other week. A Meta-maintained website tracking Facebook Ads Manager issues has noted at least a dozen disruptions since Memorial Day, including four classified as "major disruptions." Media buyers report various problems, such as improper ad loading and daily budgets being depleted within hours. Some advertisers estimate losses in...

read Sep 20, 2024

1X’s New AI Model Uses Generative World Data to Train Robots

Robotics breakthrough in generative world models: 1X Technologies has developed a new generative model to enhance robot training efficiency in simulated environments, addressing a key challenge in robotics. The model aims to bridge the "sim2real gap" by learning to simulate the real world using raw sensor data collected directly from robots. This approach differs from traditional methods that rely on hand-authored digital twins and rigid body simulators, which often have inaccuracies in physics and geometry. The data used to train the model comes from thousands of hours of video and actuator data collected from 1X's EVE humanoid robots performing various...

read Sep 20, 2024

OpenAI Expands o1 AI Model Access to Education and Enterprise

OpenAI's o1 AI models are now available for enterprise and education users, offering advanced reasoning capabilities that compete directly with Anthropic's offerings. These models represent a significant leap in AI problem-solving abilities, with potential to transform industries reliant on complex data analysis and decision-making. The big picture: OpenAI's release of o1-preview and o1-mini models to ChatGPT Enterprise and ChatGPT Edu customers marks a pivotal moment in AI development, focusing on deep reasoning and complex problem-solving capabilities. The o1 models are designed to imitate human thought processes, allowing them to tackle intricate problems in fields like mathematics, coding, and scientific research....

read Sep 20, 2024

What IT Leaders Should Know About Google’s NotebookLM Upgrade

AI-powered research tool evolves: Google's NotebookLM, initially launched in July 2023, has expanded its capabilities and found increasing applications in enterprise settings. NotebookLM allows users to upload various file types, including PDFs, websites, Google Docs, and Google Slides, into a single notebook for easy information management. The tool utilizes Google's Gemini AI to answer questions about the documents within the notebook, enhancing research and analysis capabilities. Since its general availability in the U.S. in December 2023, NotebookLM has seen growing adoption among corporate teams for sharing research and information. New audio generation feature: Google has introduced a novel capability that...

read Sep 20, 2024

AI Social Network SocialAI Is Meant to Be a Safe Space for Controversial Ideas

AI-powered social feedback app launches: SocialAI, a new iOS application created by Michael Sayman, offers users a unique platform to post text and receive AI-generated comments from various bot characters. Concept and functionality: The app presents itself as a private social network where users can obtain millions of AI-generated comments providing feedback, advice, and reflections on their posts. Users can select from a range of AI character archetypes to interact with, including Fans, Trolls, Skeptics, Odd-balls, Doomers, and Visionaries. The application utilizes OpenAI's technology alongside custom AI models to generate bot responses. Posts on SocialAI are private by default, allowing...

read Sep 20, 2024

Are AI Agents The New Apps? HubSpot and Salesforce Think So

AI agents: The new frontier in marketing and customer engagement: Salesforce and HubSpot, two leading marketing and customer intelligence platforms, are embracing AI agents as the future of customer interaction and marketing automation. Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot's CTO and co-founder, declared at the company's INBOUND conference that "Agents are the new apps." Adam Evans, Salesforce's Senior Vice President, echoed this sentiment, stating that "Wave three of AI is here. And it's agents." This shift aligns with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's vision of an AI-first company, as promised last year. The evolution of AI in business: Salesforce's Evans outlines three distinct waves...

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