Humane teases new AI wearable tech at Paris Fashion Week
Plus Meta is using public data to train a new virtual assistant
Today’s Highlights:
📰 Top Stories: Humane teases highly anticipated AI device
👀 Content: How Amazon will revamp its platform w/ AI
💰 Funding: Visa launches a new $100M generative AI ventures initiative
⚡️ Quick News Hits
Jasper AI, the popular generative AI content writing tool, valuation drops by 20% amid growth concerns.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testifies in antitrust trial, warning of Google's potential to dominate AI industry citing their dominance in online search.
Walmart introduces generative AI-powered shopping assistants for project planning and product selection.
Zapier launches Canvas, an AI-driven flowchart tool to simplify workflow planning and automation creation.
Airbnb is utilizing AI to predict potential house parties and curb disruptive behavior from problematic guests.
Spotify is reportedly working on AI-powered playlists created from user prompts.
Google introduces features to allow publishers to opt out of contributing data to AI model training while remaining searchable.
NSA establishes AI security center to oversee and promote AI development in defense and intelligence while safeguarding US AI innovations.
EU to potentially examine alleged anti-competitive abuses from AI chip manufacturers
European Central Bank explores AI to analyze vast data for improved policy decisions amid past inflation inaccuracies.
📰 Top Stories
Humane teases their highly anticipated AI-powered wearable tech
(Source: Techcrunch)
TLDR: Humane, founded by former Apple employees Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri in 2017, teases its mystery AI-powered wearable, prior to the expected Nov. 9th launch.
Backed by prominent investors like Sam Altman and supported by OpenAI as a collaborator, Humane's inaugural product, the "AI Pin," is described as a privacy-focused, screenless, standalone wearable with sensors for intuitive AI-driven interactions.
Humane aims to create a new paradigm w/ their vision for a new category of AI-driven tech, which is personal and integrated seamlessly into daily life.
The growing intersection of AI, wearables, and privacy-focused design, potentially offers users the chance to leave their smartphones behind.
Meta used public data from across its platforms to train new Virtual Assistant + Debuts a new long-form LLM
TLDR: Meta used public posts from Facebook and Instagram to train its new Meta AI virtual assistant. They also unveiled a new AI model called Llama 2 Long, built for longer form inputs and larger datasets.
Llama 2 Long was developed by extending the original Llama 2 AI model with a significantly larger dataset of long text sources. Key modifications were made to the positional encoding to allow the model to attend to longer sequences of text efficiently.
In order to prioritize consumer privacy, Meta excluded private and sensitive content, specifically refraining from using private chats from its messaging services as training data for its virtual assistant. The majority of data used for training was publicly available.
This approach comes amidst criticisms of companies using scraped internet data without permission for training AI models, raising copyright infringement concerns.
Samsung to manufacture chips from AI chip startup Tenstorrent
(Source: Reuters)
TLDR: Samsung's contract chip manufacturing division has secured a contract w/ Tenstorrent, a Canadian startup specializing in AI chips and aiming to challenge NVIDIA’s dominance.
Tenstorrent focuses on developing products for data centers while expanding into other sectors, such as automotive.
Tenstorrent plans to utilize Samsung's advanced 4nm manufacturing process to produce its chiplet product, named Quasar. While Tenstorrent's other chips are based on RISC-V, Quasar is not.
👀 Interesting Reads and Content
Deep Dives
Inside Project Nile: Amazon's secret AI-powered plan to change the way you shop online. (Business Insider)
Artists Are Losing the War Against AI (The Atlantic)
Is Your AI Model Going Off the Rails? There May Be an Insurance Policy for That (The Wall Street Journal)
The Assumptions You Bring into Conversation with an AI Bot Influence What It Says (Scientific American)
Insightful Information
AI Startups Are Facing a Reckoning (The Information)
Analysis and Critiques
How Big Tech is co-opting the rising stars of AI (The Washington Post)
How much can artists make from generative AI? Vendors won’t say (TechCrunch)
What Humans Lose When AI Writes for Us (Scientific American)
Eliminating Algorithmic Bias Is Just the Beginning of Equitable AI (Harvard Business Review)
💰 Funding News
🚨Visa launches a new $100M generative AI ventures initiative to invest in companies developing generative AI tech that will impact the future of commerce and payments.
1. Health Data Analytics Institute, a company using predictive analytics and AI tech to empower clinicians, optimize care pathways, and improve patient outcomes, raised $31M Series C led by Invus.
2. AI Clearing, an AI-powered autonomous construction progress tracking and quality control platform, raised a $14M Series A led by Prudence (Jordan Viniar, Partner).
Other Notable Investors: FJ Labs and existing investors Tera Ventures, Inovo, and Innovation Nest.
3. Kafene, an AI-powered point-of-sale financing platform that offers underserved consumers flexible purchase and lease-to-own agreements, raised a $12.6M Series B extension led by Third Prime (Wes Barton, Co-Founder and General Partner).
4. Luda, a company enabling users to train and launch unique AI agents without coding, raised $7M in funding led by Bitkraft Ventures (Scott Rupp, Partner) and Compound.
Other Notable Investors: Jeff Dean (Google's chief scientist) and Illia Polosukhin (Transformer paper co-author).
5. Nexusflow, a startup working on generative AI tech to enhance security for organizations, raised a $10.6M Seed Round led by Point72 Ventures.
They are developing an open-source large language model (LLM) called NexusRaven to retrieve data from cybersecurity sources.
6. Muir AI, a company building AI-powered supply chain decarbonization and tracking, raised a $3.25M Seed Round, led by Base10 Partners.
7. Tetricus Labs, a Yale University spinout, is developing an ML platform for more precise diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. They received a seed capital investment from Research Bridge Partners.