We begin this week with three thematic discussions. Generative AI myths reviews the recent Stargate rumors and why journalists are so easily co-opted into publishing stories that may have a seed of truth shrouded in impractical, nonsensical claims. We also discuss three news items highlighting how generative AI is transforming the search market and the coalition of companies that want to displace NVIDIA from its generative AI throne.

That is followed by an onslaught of news from the past two weeks. We have an LLM rundown that includes announcements from Anthropic, X.ai, Databricks, and AI21 Labs, as well as a dedicated section on OpenAI announcements. Funding highlights include HeyGen and Hailo. There is also news from Adobe, Opera, Samsung, Open Interpreter, and Financial Times.

Generative AI News Top Stories of the Week 🔦

• Sam Altman is Not Raising $7T, Microsoft is Unlikely to Build a $100B Supercomputer, and the Spectre of Dark GPUs

• Search In Transition - Ads for Perplexity, No Login for ChatGPT, Google Subscriptions

• Perplexity Will Embed Ads in Generative AI Search Engine: Report

• ChatGPT No Longer Requires Log-In as OpenAI Tries to Broaden Generative AI Chatbot User Base

• NVIDIA's High Margins Eyed by a Coalition of Competitors and Customers

Generative AI Product Garden 🪴

• Open Interpreter, Do Engines, and Using LLMs to Enable Actions

• Grok-1.5 Closes Gap with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, Aces Long Context Window Retrieval

• X.AI Showcases Grok-1.5 Generative AI Model Ahead of X Chatbot Upgrade

• AI21 Labs Debuts an Open-Source Model With High Token Throughput

• AI21 Debuts Hybrid Structure Generative AI Model Jamba

• Databricks Claims a Performance Lead with a New Open LLM

• Opera Browser Experiments With On-Device LLM Support

• Adobe Rolls Out Firefly Services and Custom Generative AI Models for Content Creation

• Character AI’s Generative AI Chatbots Learn to Speak Aloud

• BixbyGPT? Samsung Looks to Generative AI for Voice Assistant

OpenAI Updates

• OpenAI Hints at Alexa and Siri Rival With New ‘Voice Engine’ Trademark Filing

• OpenAI Enhances Generative AI Model Fine-Tuning and Custom Model Services

• OpenAI Gears Up for Mid-Year Launch of GPT-5: Report

• ChatGPT Adds Editing Tools to DALL-E Synthetic Images

• Artists Take Sora for a Test Drive While OpenAI Courts Hollywood for Text-to-Video

Generative AI Funding Fountain and Money Gusher 💰⛲️

• Amazon Completes $4B Anthropic Investment, Links Up with Accenture

• HeyGen is About to Close $60M on a $500M Post Valuation

• Generative AI Video Startup HeyGen Closing in on $60M Funding Round

• Chipmaker Hailo Raises $120M and Unveils New On-Device Generative AI Accelerator

Generative AI in the World 🌎

• Financial Times Launches Generative AI Chatbot for Subscribers Powered by Anthropic’s Claude 3 LLM