Google is consolidating the teams that focus on building artificial intelligence (AI) models across Google Research and Google DeepMind.
All this work will now be done within Google DeepMind, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, said in a note to employees posted on the company’s website Thursday (April 18). — Read More
Tag Archives: Big7
Amazon CEO: “We’re deeply investing” in generative AI
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy revealed details about the company’s investments in generative AI in his annual shareholder letter published Thursday morning.
…[T]here are three distinct layers in the GenAI stack, each of which is gigantic, and each of which we’re deeply investing,” Jassy writes.
The “bottom layer” of Amazon’s AI strategy is to help developers and companies train models and produce predictions. Amazon says having its own custom AI training and inference chips will bring down costs for customers.
A “middle layer” serves companies that want to use their own data to customize existing foundational models and gain security and other features to build and scale generative AI applications.
The “top layer” is where Amazon builds generative AI applications for its own consumer businesses. For example, there’s “Rufus,” Amazon’s AI-powered shopping assistant, and the Amazon Web Services “Amazon Q.”
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AMAZON GIVES ANTHROPIC $2.75 BILLION SO IT CAN SPEND IT ON AWS XPUS
If Microsoft has the half of OpenAI that didn’t leave, then Amazon and its Amazon Web Services cloud division needs the half of OpenAI that did leave – meaning Anthropic. And that means Amazon needs to pony up a lot more money than Google, which has also invested in Anthropic but which also has its own Gemini LLM, if it hopes to have more leverage – and get the GPU system rentals in return.
We live in strange times. … Microsoft investing $13 billion in OpenAI – with a $10 billion promise last year – and now Amazon making good on its promise to invest $4 billion in Anthropic by kicking in the second traunch of $2.75 billion is a brilliant way to buy a stake in any AI startup. You get access to the startup’s models, you get a sense of their roadmap, and you get to be the first one to commercialize their products at scale.
As we have pointed out before, … [t]here is a danger of this looking like roundtripping, where the money just moves from the IT giant to the AI startup as an investment and then back again to the IT giant. (This kind of thing used to happen in the IT channel from time to time.) It would be enlightening to see how these deals are really structured. But there is a likelihood that they are really minority stakes in the AI startups for enormous sums and an actual exchange of goods and services on the part of both parties. — Read More
Facebook Is Filled With AI-Generated Garbage—and Older Adults Are Being Tricked
As AI-generated content proliferates online and clutters social media feeds, you may have noticed more images cropping up that invoke the uncanny valley effect—relatively normal scenes that also carry surreal details like excess fingers or gibberish words.
Among these misleading posts, young users have spotted some obviously faux images (for example, skiing dogs and toddlers, baffling “hand-carved” ice sculptures and massive crocheted cats). But AI-made art isn’t evident to everyone: It seems that older users—generally those in Generation X and above—are falling for these visuals en masse on social media. It’s not just evidenced by TikTok videos and a cursory glance at your mom’s Facebook activity either—there’s data behind it.
This platform has become increasingly popular with seniors to find entertainment and companionship as younger users have departed for flashier apps like TikTok and Instagram. Recently, Facebook’s algorithm seems to be pushing wacky AI images on users’ feeds to sell products and amass followings, according to a preprint paper announced on March 18 from researchers at Stanford University and Georgetown University. — Read More
Read the Paper
Google’s new AI will play video games with you — but not to win
Google DeepMind unveiled SIMA, an AI agent training to learn gaming skills so it plays more like a human instead of an overpowered AI that does its own thing. SIMA, which stands for Scalable, Instructable, Multiworld Agent, is currently only in research.
SIMA will eventually learn how to play any video game, even games with no linear path to end the game and open-world games. Though it’s not intended to replace existing game AI, think of it more as another player that meshes well with your party. It mixes natural language instruction with understanding 3D worlds and image recognition. — Read More
Google’s new Gemini model can analyze an hour-long video — but few people can use it
Last October, a research paper published by a Google data scientist, the CTO of Databricks Matei Zaharia and UC Berkeley professor Pieter Abbeel posited a way to allow GenAI models — i.e. models along the lines of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and ChatGPT — to ingest far more data than was previously possible. In the study, the co-authors demonstrated that, by removing a major memory bottleneck for AI models, they could enable models to process millions of words as opposed to hundreds of thousands — the maximum of the most capable models at the time.
AI research moves fast, it seems.
Today, Google announced the release of Gemini 1.5 Pro, the newest member of its Gemini family of GenAI models. Designed to be a drop-in replacement for Gemini 1.0 Pro (which formerly went by “Gemini Pro 1.0” for reasons known only to Google’s labyrinthine marketing arm), Gemini 1.5 Pro is improved in a number of areas compared with its predecessor, perhaps most significantly in the amount of data that it can process. — Read More
Meet ‘Smaug-72B’: The new king of open-source AI
A new open-source language model has claimed the throne of the best in the world, according to the latest rankings from Hugging Face, one of the leading platforms for natural language processing (NLP) research and applications.
The model, called “Smaug-72B,” was released publicly today by the startup Abacus AI, which helps enterprises solve difficult problems in the artificial intelligence and machine learning space. Smaug-72B is technically a fine-tuned version of “Qwen-72B,” another powerful language model that was released just a few months ago by Qwen, a team of researchers at Alibaba Group. – Read More
Amazon debuts ‘Rufus,’ an AI shopping assistant in its mobile app
Amazon announced today the launch of an AI-powered shopping assistant it’s calling Rufus that’s been trained on the e-commerce giant’s product catalog as well as information from around the web. The company says the new tool will launch to a subset of U.S. customers in beta, starting today, before expanding to more users in the weeks ahead. Customers will be able to chat with Rufus inside Amazon’s mobile app to get help with finding products, performing product comparisons, and getting recommendations on what to buy. – Read More
Meta’s next big thing is open source ‘artificial general intelligence’
Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is restructuring its artificial intelligence (AI) research teams to create artificial general intelligence (AGI), a form of AI that can match or surpass human intelligence. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, said the reorganization would help the company “speed up” its research and enhance the metaverse, the virtual world that he envisions as the future of social interaction.
Meta currently has two separate teams working on AI research: the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team, which was established in 2013, and a team dedicated to creating generative AI experiences for the users of its apps. Zuckerberg said the company would bring the two teams “closer together” as it plans to expand both groups. – Read More
Building end-to-end security for Messenger
Today, we’re announcing that we’ve begun to upgrade people’s personal conversations on Messenger to use E2EE by default. Our aim is to ensure that everyone’s personal messages on Messenger can only be accessed by the sender and the intended recipients, and that everyone can be sure the messages they receive are from an authentic sender.
Meta is publishing two technical white papers on end-to-end encryption
- Our Messenger end-to-end encryption whitepaper describes the core cryptographic protocol for transmitting messages between clients.
- The Labyrinth encrypted storage protocol whitepaper explains our protocol for end-to-end encrypting stored messaging history between devices on a user’s account.
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