Hollywood actors win historic deal on AI

Striking screen actors won a historic agreement with the major studios, one which promises compensation to actors for use of their digitized likenesses. At a moment when AI is poised to displace hundreds of millions of workers, the fight over who will benefit has just begun.

Actors strike ends with historic deal on AI

OpenAI lures Google’s top AI talent with $10 million offers

Google is hemorrhaging AI talent. Once the undisputed king of AI, the company where modern AI architecture was invented in 2017, Google of late has appeared slow-footed, clumsy, and confused. OpenAI caught Google flat-footed with ChatGPT, and has never let up for a moment, shipping product after feature after upgrade after price cut. Now OpenAI is walking off with the crown jewels, luring away Google’s storied deep bench of AI superstars with eye-popping compensation in the $millions.

OpenAi lures Google’s top AI talent with mountains of cash

Dell teams with Hugging Face to deliver turnkey on-premises AI

Enterprise IT shops like on-premises solutions, to safeguard the privacy of the company data (and to safeguard the security of their jobs.) But roll-your-own AI is hard. So now Dell, with their value-priced computers, and Hugging Face, with their repository of open source AI models, are teaming up to offer preconfigured and preloaded AIs-in-a-box for the business enterprises that are not (yet) mega-corps.

Dell teams with Hugging Face to deliver turnkey on-premises AI

OpenAI pauses subscriptions due to wild demand after DevDay

OpenAI’s DevDay hit the ball out of the park. The frenzy unleashed after their launch of customizable GPTs (the Build-a-Bear Workshop of AIs), has caused demand for OpenAI’s $20/month “Plus” subscriptions to skyrocket. So much, that they have had to hit the pause button, to allow time to ramp up their infrastructure, and avoid slowdowns and blackouts in their service to users.

OpenAI pauses subscriptions due to wild demand after Developer Day

Google in talks to invest big in Character AI

Know who’s the second most popular AI site on the web? Character AI. Even more amazing, the personalized chatbot company has crazy user engagement numbers - the average user spends over 20 minutes per session, and upwards of 2 hours a day with the app. Now Google is waving bags of cash at the company, wanting to invest in the neighborhood of $200 million (which is a very nice neighborhood indeed.) Google’s AI has lost its once-shiny street cred, so it’s trying to buy its way back into the cool crowd.

Google seeks the heat of CharacterAI

Deepfake apocalypse? Nah, just fake celebrity sex vids.

The ability of AI to make convincing fakes of a person’s appearance and voice has burgeoned swiftly. Much ink has been spilled, with alarming predictions of an online world where the truth can never be known. To date, the results have been much more prosaic. Turns out, when given the awesome power to bend reality, most users opt to make fake porn videos starring their favorite celebrity. Humanity, saved once again by its own stupidity.

Deepfake apocalypse averted with fake celebrity sex vids

Vectara releases LLM Hallucination Leader Board

Semantic search company Vectara has just released a blog post entitled “Cut the Bull…” It claims to have systematically tested many of the leading LLMs for accuracy, and has created a leaderboard with the results (see below.) GPT-4 was best in class, but still made stuff up 3% of the time. The laggard in the group was Google’s Palm-chat, which had a whopping 27.2% hallucination rate.

Multimodal LLM acts as iPhone navigator

Multimodal LLMs (that can handle text, images, audio, etc. all at once) are touted as the next big wave of AI. Amid all the hype, and the eye-popping demos, one seemingly-mundane use case generally gets neglected. Multimodal LLMs can let you interact with any current software just by talking to it. This bolt-on approach may greatly accelerate the transition to an AI future, long before AI-native apps become dominant. Remember, you saw it here first.

Multimodal LLM acts as iPhone navigator

Norway’s $1.4 trillion wealth fund uses AI to deploy capital

CEO Nicolai Tangen of Norway’s colossal $1.4 trillion sovereign wealth fund recently revealed that the fund uses AI to help with capital allocation decisions. When the giant North Sea oilfield began producing revenue in the 1970s, Norway decided to put its windfall petroleum profits into a fund that could produce revenue for generations to come, long after the oilfields were depleted. Now it’s the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. So large, that it owns equity stakes in over 9,000 companies worldwide. That’s a lot to keep track of and manage, and now AI is being pressed into service to optimize returns.

Norway’s giant wealth fund uses AI to deploy capital

AI-powered stethoscope detects heart problems in pregnancy

Researchers at the Mayo Clinic and 6 teaching hospitals in Nigeria developed an AI system that combined heart sound recording and a simplified EKG tracing into a “digital stethoscope” to detect heart problems in pregnant women. The results were presented at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association this week in Philadelphia. This study highlights the positive impact that AI can have in bringing medical expertise to rural and medically underserved areas of the globe.

AI-powered digital stethoscope monitors hearts in pregnant women