AI: Weekly Summary. RTZ #437
…week ending August 2, 2024
Google ‘acqui-hires’ Character.ai, making three such deals: Looks like Character.ai’s team and employees are going to Google. Not Elon Musk’s xAI as previously reported as a possibility. This makes the third such large AI ‘acqui-hire’ deal, following the template set by Microsoft with Inflection, and Amazon with Adept. It likely won’t be the last given the ongoing race to scale LLM AI models, trust, and importantly Applications and services to the next levels of capabilities. More here.
Meta shuts down AI celebrity chatbots: While Character.ai with its ‘AI Chatbots’ saw the above outcome, Meta is winding down its big foray into ‘AI celebrity chatbots. Other companies of course continue to focus in this arena, including AI ‘digital twins’. The Meta AI celebrity chat bots were introduced with much fanfare not too long ago. The company instead is ramping up AI Studio, focusing on ‘Creator tools’ for the burgeoning Creator Economy online. More here.
Apple Intelligence release update: Apple’s roll out plans for ‘Apple Intelligence’ across its platforms and devices saw progress, with beta releases to Developers. And while some Apple Intelligence features seem to be delayed a bit, the general plans and deployments seem to be on track. Apple continues to have a uniquely differentiated AI strategy vs its peers, with its focus on its unique set of platforms, tech stack, and ecosystem of apps and services. More here.
Big Tech Earnings Results on track: Big Tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Apple and others reported generally good results in another earnings season, while reiterating their ongoing commitments to record AI investments. While each received different reception on post-earnings trading, the general message continues to be confidence by management of the companies on their ongoing AI outlays, and planned AI deployments. The broader backdrop of course is the increasing focus on AI Scaling capex vs timing of AI revenues. More here.
Biden White House eases off Open Source AI software: After much back and forth over open source AI software, with the tech and AI industry over the past few months, the administration seems to have come down in favor of easing off AI open source models and infrastructure software. This is a tail-wind for much of the AI industry, and particularly for Meta. The company continues to see strong reception for its Llama 3.1 LLM AI models, from small to large. This regulatory tweak now evens out the playing field for LLM AI infrastructure in the US between open and closed. More here.
Other AI Readings for weekend:
Pluses and Minuses of AI Synthetic Data with new AI papers: More here.
OpenAI’s long-awaited Voice GPT-4 Omni is finally in the hands of early users. Some impressive video examples f it in action here.
Thanks for joining this Saturday with your beverage of choice.
Up next, the Sunday ‘The Bigger Picture’ tomorrow. Stay tuned.
(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)