Our 78th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
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Check our text version of this news roundup over at lastweekin.ai.
This week:
(00:00) Intro(01:40) Walmart is using fully driverless trucks to ramp up its online grocery business(05:20) AI startup funding hits record high of $17.9B in Q3 / Robot orders by companies surge as labor shortages linger(09:50) University of Waterloo AI Researchers Introduce A New NLP Model ‘AfriBERTa’ For African Languages Using Deep Learning Techniques  (12:40) AI skin cancer diagnoses risk being less accurate for dark skin – study(16:55) Israel escalates surveillance of Palestinians with facial recognition program in West Bank(22:15) Tesla vehicle in ‘Full Self-Driving’ beta mode ‘severely damaged’ after crash in California(26:15) CMU opens first AI maker space to let students 'sharpen the cutting edge of AI'(28:25) Machine Learning Shushes Stressed Dogs(31:05) Outro
 
Music: Deliberate Thought, Inspired by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Record High AI Funding, AfriBERTa, Facial Recognition in the West Bank, Tesla FSD Beta Crash, AI for Stressed Dogs

Weekly summaries and discussion about the most interesting developments in AI, deep learning, robotics, and more!

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Our 168th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
With guest host Gavin Purcell from AI for Humans podcast!
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
Email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekin.ai and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter + Response to listener comments / corrections
Tools & Apps
(00:08:00) OpenAI says Sky voice in ChatGPT will be paused after concerns it sounds too much like Scarlett Johansson
(00:16:14) Microsoft’s Copilot assistant is getting a GPT-4o upgrade + Recall is Microsoft’s key to unlocking the future of PCs
(00:21:36) ElevenLabs Launches AI-Voiced Screen Reader App
(00:22:40) Adobe Lightroom gets a magic eraser, and it’s impressive
(00:25:07) Microsoft, Khan Academy provide free AI assistant for all educators in US
(00:27:40) Microsoft Paint is getting an AI-powered image generator that responds to your text prompts and doodles

Applications & Business
(00:29:16) OpenAI founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman go on the defensive after top safety researchers quit
(00:36:58) OpenAI, WSJ Owner News Corp Strike Content Deal Valued at Over $250 Million
(00:41:27) CoreWeave Raises $7.5 Billion in Debt for AI Computing Push
(00:44:13) Google announced Trillium, its sixth generation of Tensor processors.
(00:45:09) Inflection AI reveals new team and plan to embed emotional AI in business bots
(00:47:01) Data-labeling startup Scale AI raises $1B as valuation doubles to $13.8B

Projects & Open Source
(00:48:35) Abacus AI Releases Smaug-Llama-3-70B-Instruct: The New Benchmark in Open-Source Conversational AI Rivaling GPT-4 Turbo
(00:52:24) Introducing New Chatbot Arena Category: Hard Prompts
(00:54:56) Microsoft brings out a small language model that can look at pictures

Research & Advancements
(00:56:05) New Anthropic Research Sheds Light on AI's 'Black Box'
(01:04:03) Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models
(01:08:14) SpeechVerse: A Large-scale Generalizable Audio Language Model
(01:09:05) CAT3D: Create Anything in 3D with Multi-View Diffusion Models
(01:11:17) Coin3D: Controllable and Interactive 3D Assets Generation with Proxy-Guided Conditioning
(01:12:10) SpeechGuard: Exploring the Adversarial Robustness of Multimodal Large Language Models

Policy & Safety
(01:15:01) World’s first major law for artificial intelligence gets final EU green light
(01:17:18) Colorado governor signs sweeping AI regulation bill
(01:22:10) Senators Propose $32 Billion in Annual A.I. Spending but Defer Regulation
(01:23:25) Google DeepMind launches new framework to assess the dangers of AI models
(01:25:05) Tech giants pledge AI safety commitments — including a ‘kill switch’ if they can’t mitigate risks

Synthetic Media & Art
(01:28:32) Sony Music warns tech companies over ‘unauthorized’ use of its content to train AI
(01:32:34) Hollywood agency CAA aims to help stars manage their own AI likenesses
(01:38:28) What Do You Do When A.I. Takes Your Voice?

(01:42:01) Outro + AI Song

#168 - OpenAI vs Scar Jo + safety researchers, MS AI updates, cool Anthropic research

Our 167th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
With guest host Daliana Liu (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dalianaliu/) from The Data Scientist Show!
And a special one-time interview with Andrey in the latter part of the podcast.
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
Email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekin.ai and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Timestamps + links:
Intro / Banter
Tools & Apps
(00:03:42) OpenAI releases GPT-4o, a faster model that’s free for all ChatGPT users
(00:12:06) Project Astra is the future of AI at Google
(00:18:06) Google is redesigning its search engine — and it’s AI all the way down
(00:19:39) Google unveils Veo and Imagen 3, its latest AI media creation models
(00:23:36) Google Unveils Music AI Sandbox Making Loops From Prompts
(00:26:27) Anthropic AI Launches a Prompt Engineering Tool that Generates Production-Ready Prompts in the Anthropic Console

Applications & Business
(00:31:02) OpenAI’s Chief Scientist and Co-Founder Is Leaving the Company
(00:35:15) Mike Krieger joins Anthropic as Chief Product Officer
(00:36:28) $16k G1 humanoid rises up to smash nuts, twist and twirl
(00:41:02) GM's Cruise to start testing robotaxis in Phoenix area with human safety drivers on board
(00:42:52) US agency probes Amazon-owned Zoox self-driving vehicles after two crashes
(00:43:58) Waymo’s robotaxis under investigation after crashes and traffic mishaps

Projects & Open Source
(00:44:48) Introducing PaliGemma, Gemma 2, and an Upgraded Responsible AI Toolkit
(00:46:24) Falcon 2: UAE’s Technology Innovation Institute Releases New AI Model Series, Outperforming Meta’s New Llama 3
(00:48:00) License to Call: Introducing Transformers Agents 2.0

Research & Advancements
(00:49:22) The Platonic Representation Hypothesis
(00:53:08) SUTRA: Scalable Multilingual Language Model Architecture

Policy & Safety
(00:54:46) Bipartisan Senate bill on AI security would bolster voluntary cyber reporting processes
(00:56:17) U.K. agency releases tools to test AI model safety
(00:57:25) Protesters Are Fighting to Stop AI, but They’re Split on How to Do It

Synthetic Media & Art
(00:58:54) Google’s invisible AI watermark will help identify generative text and video
(01:00:50) How One Author Pushed the Limits of AI Copyright
(01:03:27) Stellaris gets an DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it's 'ethical' and 'we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves'
(01:04:46) At the AI Film Festival, humanity triumphed over tech

(01:06:37) Daliana Interviews Andrey
(01:42:00) AI Outro Song

#167 - GPT-4o, Project Astra, Veo, OpenAI Departures, Interview with Andrey

Our 166th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
Email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekin.ai and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Timestamps + links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
Tools & Apps(00:04:23) ElevenLabs previews music-generating AI model
(00:09:31) Mysterious “gpt2-chatbot” AI model appears suddenly, confuses experts
(00:13:00) SoundHound AI and Perplexity Partner to Bring Online LLMs to Next Gen Voice Assistants Across Cars and IoT Devices
(00:14:50) Stability AI sows gen AI discord with Stable Artisan
(00:16:35) Apple Will Revamp Siri to Catch Up to Its Chatbot Competitors
(00:18:54) Alibaba rolls out latest version of its large language model to meet robust AI demand

Applications & Business(00:19:34) OpenAI and Stack Overflow partner to bring more technical knowledge into ChatGPT
(00:17:31) New Microsoft AI model may challenge GPT-4 and Google Gemini
(00:31:08) Wayve, an A.I. Start-Up for Autonomous Driving, Raises $1 Billion
(00:32:00) Motional delays commercial robotaxi plans amid restructuring
(00:33:54) The rise of the Chinese AI unicorns doing battle with OpenAI

Projects & Open Source(00:35:25) Prometheus 2: An Open Source Language Model Specialized in Evaluating Other Language Models
(00:40:12) DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Model
(00:44:31) OpenVoice V2: Evolving Multilingual Voice Cloning with Enhanced Style Control and Cross-Lingual Capabilities
(00:45:20) Granite Code Models: A Family of Open Foundation Models for Code Intelligence
(00:46:00) Hugging Face launches LeRobot open source robotics code library
(00:48:50) Vibe-Eval: A new open and hard evaluation suite for measuring progress of multimodal language models

Research & Advancements(00:50:02) Google DeepMind’s Groundbreaking AI for Protein Structure Can Now Model DNA
(00:57:20) xLSTM: Extended Long Short-Term Memory
(01:06:35) StoryDiffusion: Consistent Self-Attention for Long-Range Image and Video Generation
(01:07:55) Chain of Thought Empowers Transformers to Solve Inherently Serial Problems
(01:11:48) KAN: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

Policy & Safety(01:13:20) US lawmakers unveil bill to make it easier to restrict exports of AI models
(01:17:30) OpenAI’s Model Spec outlines some basic rules for AI
(01:20:18) Robot dogs armed with AI-targeting rifles undergo US Marines Special Ops evaluation
(01:25:15) OpenAI Releases ‘Deepfake’ Detector to Disinformation Researchers

Synthetic Media & Art(01:28:15) Audible’s Test of AI-Voiced Audiobooks Tops 40,000 Titles
(01:32:30) TikTok will automatically label AI-generated content created on platforms like DALL·E 3
(01:33:23) Katy Perry's Fan-Made AI Image Is So Real It Fooled the World Into Thinking She Was at the Met Gala
(01:35:32) South Korean woman falls for deepfake Elon Musk, loses $50K in romance scam 
(01:37:18) Why young Russian women appear so eager to marry Chinese men

(01:40:18) AI Outro Song

#166 - new AI song generator, Microsoft's GPT4 efforts, AlphaFold3, xLSTM, OpenAI Model Spec

Our 165th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
Email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekin.ai and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Timestamps + links:
Tools & Apps(00:01:27) GitHub releases an AI-powered tool aiming for a 'radically new way of building software'
(00:07:05) China unveils Sora challenger able to produce videos from text similar to OpenAI tool, though much shorter
(00:12:23) ChatGPT’s AI ‘memory’ can remember the preferences of paying customers
(00:14:21) Rabbit R1 review: Avoid this AI gadget
(00:18:30) Amazon Q, a generative AI-powered assistant for businesses and developers, is now generally available
(00:19:54) Yelp’s Assistant AI bot will do all the talking to help users find service providers

Applications & Business(00:21:31) Video of super-fast, super-smooth humanoid robot will drop your jaw
(00:25:22) Tesla’s 2 million car Autopilot recall is now under federal scrutiny
(00:29:32) Tesla shares soar as Elon Musk returns from China with FSD 'Game Changer'
(00:32:11) OpenAI inks strategic tie-up with UK’s Financial Times, including content use
(00:35:21) OpenAI Startup Fund quietly raises $15M
(00:37:00) Huawei backs HBM memory manufacturing in China to sidestep crippling US sanctions that restrict AI development

Research & Advancements(00:39:20) Capabilities of Gemini Models in Medicine
(00:45:34) Let's Think Dot by Dot: Hidden Computation in Transformer Language Models
(00:52:20) NExT: Teaching Large Language Models to Reason about Code Execution
(00:55:08) SenseNova 5.0: China’s latest AI model surpasses OpenAI’s GPT-4
(00:57:20) Octopus v4: Graph of language models
(01:00:28) Better & Faster Large Language Models via Multi-token Prediction

Policy & Safety(01:03:15) Refusal in LLMs is mediated by a single direction
(01:09:19) Rishi Sunak promised to make AI safe. Big Tech’s not playing ball.
(01:15:09) DOE Announces New Actions to Enhance America’s Global Leadership in Artificial Intelligence
(01:18:21) The Chips Act is rebuilding US semiconductor manufacturing, so far resulting in $327 billion in announced projects
(01:20:50) Analysis-Second global AI safety summit faces tough questions, lower turnout
(01:24:03) Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, and more join the federal AI safety board

Synthetic Media & Art(01:26:30) Air Head creators say OpenAI's Sora finicky to work with, needs hundreds of prompts, serious VFX work for under 2 minutes of cohesive story ↺
(01:29:50) Eight newspaper publishers sue OpenAI over copyright infringement

#165 - Sora challenger, Astribot's S1, Med-Gemini, Refusal in LLMs

Our 164th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
Email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekin.ai and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Timestamps + links:
Tools & Apps
(00:04:02) Meta, in Its Biggest A.I. Push, Places Smart Assistants Across Its Apps
(00:07:26) Microsoft launches Phi-3, its smallest AI model yet
(00:15:35) The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses have multimodal AI now
(00:17:32) OpenAI winds down AI image generator that blew minds and forged friendships in 2022
(00:18:44) Baidu claims 200 million users for Ernie chatbot after only 13 months
(00:21:13) The new Adobe Photoshop gets an in-app image generator, major Generative Fill upgrades

Applications & Business
(00:22:22) Intel & The Pentagon Deepen Ties To Develop World’s Most Advanced Chips
(00:27:58) Meta Says It Plans to Spend Billions More on A.I.
(00:31:36) OpenAI CEO Sam Altman invests in solar power firm Exowatt to fuel AI datacenters
(00:33:58) Google consolidates AI-focused DeepMind, Research teams
(00:36:22) Microsoft and OpenAI bet $100 billion to free themselves from the shackles and overreliance on the world's most profitable semiconductor chip brand for AI chips

Projects & Open Source
(00:39:03) Apple releases OpenELM: small, open source AI models designed to run on-device
(00:44:12) Snowflake launches Arctic, an open ‘mixture-of-experts’ LLM to take on DBRX, Llama 3

Research & Advancements
(00:48:08) The Instruction Hierarchy: Training LLMs to Prioritize Privileged Instructions
(00:55:11) Groq’s breakthrough AI chip achieves blistering 800 tokens per second on Meta’s LLaMA 3
(00:59:52) Microsoft shows off VASA-1, an AI framework that makes human headshots talk, sing
(01:01:59) Intel Builds World’s Largest Neuromorphic System to Enable More Sustainable AI

Policy & Safety
(01:05:11) Deepfakes of Bollywood stars spark worries of AI meddling in India election
(01:08:51) LLM Agents can Autonomously Exploit One-day Vulnerabilities
(01:15:27) The Necessity of AI Audit Standards Boards
(01:19:45) A Mechanism-Based Approach to Mitigating Harms from Persuasive Generative AI
(01:22:45) COERCING LLMS TO DO AND REVEAL (ALMOST) ANYTHING
(01:26:40) China acquired recently banned Nvidia chips in Super Micro, Dell servers, tenders show

Synthetic Media & Art
(01:29:08) Drake threatened with lawsuit over diss track featuring AI Tupac

Record High AI Funding, AfriBERTa, Facial Recognition in the West Bank, Tesla FSD Beta Crash, AI for Stressed Dogs

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