May 30, 2023

#49: Google AI Ads, Microsoft AI Copilots, Cities and Schools Embrace AI, Top VC’s Best AI Resources, Fake AI Pentagon Explosion Picture, and NVIDIA’s Stock Soars

1 hour 1 minute

Google Introduces AI-Powered Ads

Google just announced new AI features within Google Ads, from landing page summarizations to generative AI helping with relevant and effective keywords, headlines, descriptions, images, and other assets for your campaign.

Microsoft Rolls Out AI Copilots and AI Plugins

Two years ago, Microsoft rolled out its first AI “copilot,” and this year, Microsoft introduced other copilots across core products and services, including AI-powered chat in Bing, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and others across products like Microsoft Dynamics and Microsoft Security.

Cities and Schools Embrace Generative AI

We see some very encouraging action from schools and cities regarding generative AI. According to Wired, New York City Schools have announced they will reverse their ban on ChatGPT and generative AI. Additionally, the City of Boston's chief information officer sent guidelines to every city official encouraging them to start using generative AI to understand its potential.

AI Resources from Andreessen Horowitz

Andreessen Horowitz recently shared a curated list of resources, their “AI Canon,” they’ve relied on to get smarter about modern AI. It includes papers, blog posts, courses, and guides that have had an outsized impact on the field over the past several years.

DeepMind’s AI Risk Early Warning System

In DeepMind’s latest paper, they introduce a framework for evaluating novel threats–misleading statements, biased decisions, or repeating copyrighted content–co-authored with colleagues from a number of universities and organizations.

OpenAI’s Thoughts on the Governance of Superintelligence

Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever recently published their thoughts on the governance of superintelligence. They say that proactivity and mitigating risk are critical, alongside special treatment and coordination of superintelligence.

White House Takes New Steps to Advance Responsible AI

Last week, the Biden-Harris Administration announced new efforts that “will advance the research, development, and deployment of responsible artificial intelligence (AI) that protects individuals’ rights and safety and delivers results for the American people.” This includes an updated roadmap and a new report on the risks and opportunities related to AI in education.

Fake Image of Pentagon Explosion Causes Dip in the Stock Market

A fake image purporting to show an explosion near the Pentagon was shared by multiple verified Twitter accounts on Monday, causing confusion and leading to a brief dip in the stock market. Based on the actions and reactions of the day, are we unprepared for this technology?

Meta’s Massively Multilingual Speech Project

Meta announces their Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) project, combining self-supervised learning, a new dataset that provides labeled data for over 1,100 languages and unlabeled data for nearly 4,000 languages, as well as publicly sharing models and code so that others in the research community can build upon Meta’s work.

More Funding Rounds

Anthropic raised $450 million in Series C funding. Figure Raises $70M Series A to accelerate robot development, fund manufacturing, design an end-to-end AI data engine, and drive commercial progress. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has raised $115 million in a Series C funding round for Worldcoin which aims to distribute a crypto token to people "just for being a unique individual."

NVIDIA Stock Soars on historic earnings report

Nvidia’s stock blew past already-high expectations last Wednesday in its earnings report. Dependency on Nvidia is so widespread that Big Tech companies have been working on developing their own competing chips, much like Apple spent years developing its own chips so it could avoid having to rely on — and pay — other companies to outfit its devices.

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