This Week in NLP #308
Keep up with what happened in NLP in the week ending Friday 11th October 2024.
Above the Fold
Overwhelmed? Here’s our pick for five things to know about this week.
Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for their foundational contributions to artificial neural networks and AI technologies. [VentureBeat]
OpenAI’s financial projections imply that losses will triple to US$14B in 2026. [The Information]
OpenAI is lessening its reliance on Microsoft because it isn’t moving fast enough to supply servers. [The Information]
OpenAI is adopting a public benefit structure to prevent hostile takeovers. [The Financial Times]
And OpenAI’s talent exodus gives rivals an opening. [Wired]
Now read on for everything else that happened in NLP this week.
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This Week’s Topics:
The Generative AI Wars
Amazon plans to develop AI agents for personalized shopping assistance. [Wired]
Anthropic's new Message Batches API offers cost-effective batch processing, making advanced AI models more accessible to businesses and altering AI pricing strategies. [VentureBeat]
Apple's first AI features will launch on iOS 18.1 for select devices on October 28, starting with Writing Tools and Siri redesign. [TechRadar]
Character.ai will focus on enhancing its consumer products rather than developing LLMs. [Seeking Alpha]
Cohere has launched a set of improved fine-tuning features for its latest Command R LLM. [Cohere]
Google has expanded its Gemini-powered Gmail Q&A feature to iOS, enabling users to search emails and information using AI-driven queries. [Engadget]
Google's Gemini AI is set to replace Google Assistant in handling WhatsApp and Spotify requests by integrating personalized Gemini Extensions. [TechRadar]
Google's AI image generator Imagen 3 is now free for all Gemini users. [TechRadar]
Inflection AI and Intel launched Inflection for Enterprise, an enterprise-grade AI system offering customizable, secure AI solutions with improved performance and a commercial API for developers. [Inflection AI]
Meta AI is expanding to six more countries, including the UK, but not in the EU. [Engadget]
Microsoft's Phone Link app is introducing AI-powered Suggested Replies for quick messaging, using cloud AI models. [digitaltrends]
In addition to securing US$6.6B in new funding, OpenAI has established a new US$4B credit facility. [OpenAI]
OpenAI offers Free tier ChatGPT users a 10-minute monthly preview of Advanced Voice mode. [TechRadar]
OpenAI has introduced Canvas, a new ChatGPT feature for side-by-side editing of AI-generated content, competing directly with Anthropic's Claude Artifacts. [VentureBeat]
Tim Brooks, co-lead of OpenAI's Sora video project, has left for Google DeepMind amid Sora’s struggles and OpenAI’s series of high-profile resignations. [TechCrunch]
If OpenAI becomes a for-profit company, Microsoft could significantly benefit from its investment, though regulatory and valuation challenges may arise. [Yahoo Finance]
OpenAI is expanding globally by opening new offices in multiple cities, including NYC, Seattle, Paris, Brussels, and Singapore. [TechCrunch]
Salesforce is challenging Microsoft in AI copilots with its advanced autonomous agents, focusing on enhancing customer experience and developer support. [Verdict]
Vodafone and Google have expanded their partnership with a 10-year deal to offer AI-powered devices and services across Europe and Africa, leveraging Google’s Gemini models. [Computer Weekly]
Elon Musk held a recruiting event at OpenAI's original headquarters to attract engineers to xAI. [The Verge]
Hardware
AMD has introduced AI-infused chips across its product lines. [VentureBeat]
China Telecom is training LLMs on domestically produced chips from Huawei and others to bypass US export restrictions on high-end GPUs. [TechRadar]
Core42 has expanded its AI Cloud offering in the UAE by deploying Nvidia H100 GPUs. [Business Wire]
Foxconn is building a massive facility in Mexico to manufacture Nvidia's GB200 superchips, crucial for the Blackwell computing platform. [Yahoo Finance]
Hewlett Packard unveiled the HPE ProLiant Compute XD685, designed for efficient AI model training using AMD EPYC processors and Instinct accelerators. [Business Wire]
Inflection AI is replacing Nvidia GPUs with Intel's Gaudi 3 accelerators for its enterprise platform, offering improved performance and cost-efficiency. [The Register]
Intel's new Core Ultra 200S series processors enhance AI and gaming performance with improved efficiency, reduced power usage, and advanced connectivity features for desktop PCs. [VentureBeat]
Intel's Arrow Lake H laptop chips, arriving in Q1 2025, will feature powerful Xe GPUs for AI workloads but have slower NPUs than Lunar Lake processors. [Engadget]
Microsoft's new H200 v5 series Azure VMs enhance AI workload performance and efficiency by boosting GPU utilization, enabling improved LLM inferencing and training. [TechRadar]
Nvidia and Foxconn are constructing Taiwan’s largest supercomputer, Hon Hai Kaohsiung Super Computing Center, using Nvidia Blackwell chips. [VentureBeat]
Nvidia has highlighted the energy efficiency of its new Blackwell chips, emphasizing their ability to significantly reduce power demands for AI computing. [Yahoo Finance]
Swedish startup ZeroPoint aims to revolutionize memory compression technology, potentially saving tech giants billions in server costs while reducing reliance on high-memory GPUs. [TechRadar]
It’s Only a Model
Betterworks has launched a private LLM to enhance its AI-powered performance management tools. [insideAI News]
Black Forest Labs’ FLUX1.1 [pro] has launched with improved speed, image quality, and API integration. [Black Forest Labs]
Fujitsu and Cohere have launched Takane, a Japanese-language LLM for private cloud use. [BetaKit]
Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B, now production-ready and free via Google AI Studio and API, excels in speed, cost-efficiency, and high-volume tasks like chat and transcription. [Google]
Inflection AI is leveraging novel RLHF approaches to differentiate its AI models with emotional intelligence and actionable empathy for enterprise applications. [VentureBeat]
Landbase has launched GTM-1 Omni, an advanced AI model designed to revolutionize businesses’ go-to-market strategies by automating complex workflows in sales and marketing. [insideAI News]
Meta's new Movie Gen model advances AI video generation by producing more realistic videos and synchronized audio from text prompts. [ZDNet]
OpenAI’s Whisper Large v3 Turbo is now available on GroqCloud, offering faster multilingual speech recognition with enhanced accuracy and 216x real-time speed. [Groq]
Pyramid Flow is a new open-source AI video generation model developed by researchers from Peking University and collaborators, offering high-quality video production using a novel pyramidal flow matching technique. [VentureBeat]
Researchers at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed LLaMA-Omni, an efficient LLM for speech and text, outperforming similar models with less data and compute. [InfoQ]
Walmart is developing and testing a retail-focused LLM, Wallaby, to enhance customer and employee experiences through AI-driven applications. [VentureBeat]
Writer's Palmyra X 004 is a highly efficient, enterprise AI model excelling in function calling and workflow automation. [VentureBeat]
Whose Data?
Adobe is launching a free web app that expands Content Credentials, enabling creators to attribute, protect, and opt-out content from AI models. [The Verge]
ByteDance is rapidly gathering web data with its Bytespider crawler, potentially to develop its own LLM amid US concerns over data access. [Mashable]
Hearst has partnered with OpenAI, allowing content from over 60 publications like Cosmopolitan and Elle to be used in ChatGPT, with citations and links provided. [Engadget]
Meta uses photos and audio from Ray-Ban smart glasses to train its AI, raising privacy concerns for users who utilize the Look and Ask feature. [TechRadar]
OpenAI's partnerships with publishers have decreased the rate of its web crawler being blocked, as publishers no longer see a need to do so. [Wired]
The LLM Ecosystem
The AI Platform Alliance has expanded to include diverse industry members to enhance AI inference solutions with open, economical, and sustainable approaches. [VentureBeat]
ApertureData's ApertureDB streamlines multimodal AI data management and retrieval. [VentureBeat]
Baidu's Baige 4.0 and Qianfan 3.0 enhance AI computing, model efficiency, and enterprise application development. [Analytics India Magazine]
Cloudflare has upgraded its Workers AI platform with advanced GPU infrastructure for faster inference, larger models, and global accessibility. [Pipeline]
Databricks announced Databricks Apps, enabling enterprise developers to quickly build secure, production-ready data and AI applications with a template-based experience. [VentureBeat]
Dataiku's LLM Guard Services suite offers a code-free, scalable framework to ensure cost-effective and reliable generative AI deployment. [insideAI News]
Google's new partnership with Sequoia Capital offers AI startups up to US$500k in cloud credits. [Yahoo Finance]
H2O.ai announced a collaboration with AI Verify to enhance safe AI deployment by contributing to an open-source toolkit and providing AI system testing and governance tools. [Business Wire]
And H2O.ai and Singtel's Digital InfraCo have partnered to deliver secure, scalable Generative AI-as-a-Service across APAC. [Business Wire]
Hugging Face released Open LLM Leaderboard v2 to enhance model benchmarking, improve score normalization, and address data contamination. [InfoQ]
And Hugging Face's openai-gradio package simplifies AI development, allowing developers to create AI-powered web apps quickly using minimal code and reducing infrastructure complexity. [VentureBeat]
Kolekti has launched Narus, a secure AI chat platform for generative AI management ensuring safe AI adoption and data oversight for businesses. [EIN Presswire]
KPMG Switzerland and LatticeFlow AI have partnered to enhance AI risk assessments and compliance with emerging regulations, focusing on mission-critical and business-critical AI use cases. [Business Wire]
LangChain’s LangGraph has introduced long-term memory support in Python and JavaScript, allowing agents to store and recall information across conversations. [LangChain]
Metomic has launched an AI-driven data classification solution that automates data management workflows to enhance security and compliance across Google Workspaces. [siliconANGLE]
Moveworks launched Agentic Automation, a platform enabling developers to build complex AI automations efficiently without relying on traditional integration tools. [insideAI News]
OpenAI's .NET library features support for GPT-4o models and full API integration. [InfoQ]
Parallels Desktop 20 introduces advanced AI capabilities, including AI-ready virtual machines and enhanced tools for improved performance across macOS, Windows, and Linux platforms. [TechRadar]
PayPal enhanced its Cosmos.AI platform to support generative AI using LLMs, integrating vendor, open-source, and tailored features for rapid application development. [InfoQ]
RunPod has partnered with vLLM to enhance AI performance by combining their cloud computing platform with vLLM’s efficient PagedAttention algorithm for open-source AI applications. [Business Wire]
Snorkel AI has enhanced its Snorkel Flow platform with new tools for AI data development, improving enterprises’ ability to create specialized AI/ML models efficiently. [Business Wire]
Sonar announced AI Code Assurance and AI CodeFix to enhance AI-generated code quality, security, and developer productivity. [insideAI News]
Teradata announced new VantageCloud Lake and ClearScape Analytics features enabling enterprises to rapidly implement cost-effective generative AI solutions using open-source LLMs. [Business Wire]
And Teradata announced a collaboration with Nvidia to enhance its Vantage platform with NVIDIA AI for accelerating AI workloads and developing innovative AI applications. [Business Wire]
Vespa.ai, an AI applications platform provider, now supports ColPali, a new open-source model enhancing visually rich document retrieval by optimizing vector representations for LLMs. [Business Wire]
Other LLM Sightings
Amazon's AI-powered Shopping Guides, available on its mobile site and apps, help US customers find tailored product recommendations and insights for over 100 product types. [The Verge]
Police departments in East Palo Alto and other California cities are using Axon's AI tool, Draft One, for report writing, raising concerns about AI’s role in criminal justice and reliability. [The Guardian]
CallMiner announced CallMiner AI Assist, enhancing its platform with generative AI capabilities to automate tasks and improve customer experience. [Business Wire]
Creatio is partnering with Formstack to offer AI-powered data capture and document generation. [EIN Presswire]
EndlessAI's Lloyd is a smartphone-based AI assistant offering real-time video analysis without extra hardware. [VentureBeat]
Goodnotes has introduced AI features that read and edit handwriting, assist with math problems, and enhance note-taking capabilities. [TechRadar]
Google Cloud's Gemini Code Assist Enterprise offers customizable, secure, enterprise-focused coding assistance, aiming to compete with platforms like GitHub Copilot Enterprise. [VentureBeat]
Mark43 announced AI-powered tools, ReportAI and BriefAI, designed to enhance efficiency, accuracy, and productivity in public safety operations by automating reports and case summaries. [Business Wire]
MIT’s AI project, Future You, lets users interact with a simulated future self to inspire introspection, goal-setting, and reduce future-related anxiety. [TechRadar]
Mitel has launched MIR Insights AI, enhancing business analytics through AI-driven communication analysis. [Business Wire]
Panorama Education has launched Solara, an AI chat tool for K-12 education, focusing on privacy, personalized support, and enhancing teaching with research-backed insights. [Business Wire]
Qualcomm's AI Orchestrator aims to simplify and personalize your life by integrating AI tools across various devices for faster, on-device processing. [TechRadar]
Quilt launched Qurator Omni, an AI assistant integrated into its platform, allowing life sciences users to easily access and analyze data via natural language queries. [Business Wire]
Samsung TVs will soon incorporate generative AI and ChatGPT features. [TechRadar]
SAP is expanding its generative AI copilot Joule to support cloud platforms, enhancing business task automation and integration of open-source LLMs. [VentureBeat]
Sembly AI’s Semblian 2.0 enhances team productivity through AI-driven, user-friendly tools that automate tasks and personalize insights. [Business Wire]
Smartsheet has partnered with AWS to launch a connector integrating Smartsheet data with Amazon Q Business, enhancing enterprise AI-driven data management and decision-making. [Business Wire]
Squarespace's Design Intelligence uses generative AI to enhance website creation by prioritizing customization and curation, aiming to improve rather than replace human design input. [TechCrunch]
Uber plans to launch an AI assistant powered by GPT-4o in 2025 to answer drivers’ electric vehicle questions. [TechCrunch]
Yext launched its expanded AI Review Generation solution, simplifying review management across over 80 sites and enhancing customer engagement and reputation management for brands. [Business Wire]
Risks and Responses
California’s AB-2013 mandates that AI companies disclose training data details by 2026. [TechCrunch]
Harvard students put facial recognition tech onto Meta's smart glasses to instantly dox strangers. [404 Media]
Nokia has joined the AI Pact to prepare for the EU’s AI Act. [Pipeline]
The Responsible AI Institute welcomed Ally, Genpact, and Kennedys as new members. [Business Wire]
Generative AI’s high energy consumption exacerbates climate issues, sparking calls for transparency and energy-efficient practices. [TechRadar]
Generative AI jailbreak attacks succeed 20% of the time, often leading to data leaks, highlighting vulnerabilities in AI security that demand real-time adaptive measures. [TechRepublic]
Conversational AI
Agora has launched a Conversational AI SDK with OpenAI's Realtime API, enabling developers to integrate human-like voice interactions and natural AI conversations into apps. [Speech Technology Magazine]
Twilio's integration of OpenAI's Realtime API enhances its platform with real-time AI voice interactions, enabling scalable conversational AI virtual agents. [Smart Customer Service]
Verint's AI-powered transcription technology significantly improved a global telecom’s customer experience, increasing NPS by 14 points and reducing complaints by 22%. [Business Wire]
Zendesk has unveiled AI-driven innovations for omnichannel support, enhancing customer experience and efficiency by automating interactions and providing real-time insights for faster issue resolution. [Business Wire]
Zoom's latest feature update centers on integrating AI Companion 2.0 into Zoom Workplace, offering enhanced AI functions tailored to specific industries. [Engadget]
Be Real
Colossyan's new Instant Avatar feature enables users to create lifelike digital avatars with custom voices for multilingual videos. [Speech Technology Magazine]
Zoom plans to release AI-animated photorealistic avatars for asynchronous communication in 2025. [TechCrunch]
Deepfake incidents are expected to surge by over 60% in 2024, with financial damages predicted to exceed US$40B by 2027. [VentureBeat]
Translation
EasyTranslate’s HumanAI solution integrates AI and human expertise for efficient, high-quality translations. [Slator]
Mars Translation has introduced MarsQA, a CAT tool that accelerates translation QA speeds by 20x. [EIN Presswire]
Meta's new AI translation tool for Instagram and Facebook Reels translates audio into different languages with dubbing and lip syncing. [TechRadar]
Wilby.ai has launched an AI-driven platform that aims to revolutionize video translation, voice cloning, and audio generation. [EIN Presswire]
Search
Algolia's updated Crawler tool simplifies and speeds up data ingestion for AI Search, providing a fast, low-code solution for efficient and accurate search functionalities. [KMWorld]
The US DOJ proposes breaking up Google and restricting data use in AI search to address antitrust abuses. [Fortune]
Google Photos’ new ‘Ask Photos’ feature uses AI for natural language search of your photo library. [TechRadar]
Google's new video search feature in Google Lens puts it ahead of Apple's yet-to-launch Visual Intelligence. [TechRadar]
And Google is launching ads in its AI-generated search summaries in the US, displaying products with commercial relevance beneath a ‘sponsored’ header on mobile. [The Verge]
OpenAI plans to launch SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine, by the end of the year, challenging Google's longstanding search dominance. [TechRadar]
Prefixbox has launched its AI Search & Filter app on Shopify, enhancing retailers’ product search and discovery with cutting-edge technology and analytics in an accessible format. [GlobeNewswire]
Health Tech
Microsoft announced new AI capabilities for healthcare, including AI agents, imaging models, data analysis tools, and a nursing documentation product, aiming to enhance patient care and reduce clinician workload. [Healthcare Dive]
NTT Data and Duke Health are partnering to develop an advanced AI-driven home care model, integrating multiple technologies to enhance patient care at home. [Business Wire]
ScribeRyte AI now offers Spanish-to-English translation for clinical notes, enhancing patient care, reducing translation costs, and improving healthcare documentation efficiency. [EIN Presswire]
Veradigm has fully integrated advanced NLP into its EHR dataset, enhancing research by transforming unstructured and structured data into comprehensive, regulatory-grade insights. [Business Wire]
Verbal, a provider of AI-enhanced virtual care operations, has launched its AI tool suite for Zoom's app marketplace. [PR Newswire]
Weave launched its AI-powered Call Intelligence product, enabling healthcare practices to improve patient experiences, operational efficiency, and revenue by analyzing call data. [Business Wire]
Wysa has launched SAFE-LMH, a platform to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of multilingual AI models in mental health. [Business Wire]
Legal Tech
Clio announced Clio Duo, an AI-integrated tool in Clio Manage, enhancing legal workflows by automating routine tasks and providing AI-driven insights. [LawSites]
Docusign has introduced AI-powered intelligent agreement management to enhance contract efficiency, risk assessment, and global language understanding. [Analytics India Magazine]
DraftWise utilizes Cohere's generative AI search to enhance its contract drafting services for large law firms. [Artificial Lawyer]
The Association of Corporate Counsel, in partnership with Everlaw, a litigation and investigation platform, has published a report highlighting generative AI’s transformative impact in corporate legal departments. [Business Wire]
FTI Consulting has launched a suite of generative AI tools for legal tasks like investigations, data breaches, and antitrust compliance. [Artificial Lawyer]
Google DeepMind and Bayer are using AI to improve efficiency by automating information retrieval and regulatory paperwork. [Yahoo Finance]
JAMS has launched JAMS Next, an AI-powered initiative to streamline dispute resolution with advanced tools like AI transcriptions, neutral searches, and virtual alternative dispute resolution services. [Business Wire]
Legau is a comprehensive generative AI legal drafting system supporting the entire drafting cycle for various legal documents. [Artificial Lawyer]
LegalOn is expanding its AI-driven contract review to the UK. [Artificial Lawyer]
Legalpioneer has released its data set of 13,000 law-related companies on GitHub under the Open Database License to promote AI exploration in legal tech. [LawSites]
Pramata and Deloitte have formed a strategic alliance to enhance contract management and analytics with generative AI. [insideAI News]
Summize has introduced its AI Redlining solution and HubSpot integration, aiming to streamline contract management and enhance efficiency for in-house legal teams. [Business Wire]
Funding
Taiwan-based startup Aiello secured US$5m to expand its hospitality-focused AI technology in Japan and Southeast Asia. [The SaaS News]
Anyformat, a Spanish startup, secured €520k in pre-seed funding to enhance its AI platform for transforming unstructured data into strategic insights. [EU-Startups]
Cisco Systems is nearing a US$23B investment in AI-specialized cloud provider CoreWeave, which is considering an IPO next year. [Verdict]
Distributional raised US$19m in Series A funding to enhance their AI testing platform. [Business Wire]
Document Crunch raised US$9m in a Series A round led by Navitas Capital to expand its AI-driven contract intelligence solutions in the construction industry. [Document Crunch]
Driver, an AI-powered platform for automating interactive documentation, raised US$8m in Seed funding to expand and accelerate product development and commercialization efforts. [FinSMEs]
ElevenLabs, specializing in AI-generated synthetic voices, is in discussions with investors for a funding round that could value it at US$3B. [TechCrunch]
EvenUp raised US$135m in Series D funding to expand its AI-driven Claims Intelligence Platform and product suite. [FinSMEs]
Kiva AI raised US$7m in Seed funding to enhance data solutions for specialized AI applications. [FinSMEs]
Stockholm-based Lovable raised US$7.5m in pre-seed funding for GPT Engineer, an AI coding assistant that enables non-developers to build websites and apps. [The Next Web]
Noetica AI, a deal terms benchmarking platform, secured US$22m in Series A funding to expand. [Business Wire]
Poolside, an AI-powered software development platform, raised US$500m in a Series B, reaching a US$3 billion valuation. [TechCrunch]
San Francisco startup Reducto raised US$8.4m in seed funding to enhance operations and develop its document conversion API. [FinSMEs]
Singulate, a generative AI marketing platform provider, raised US$2.3m in pre-seed funding to expand operations and development efforts. [FinSMEs]
Suki AI announced US$70m in funding to expand its AI healthcare solutions. [Business Wire]
Tildei raised US$6m in Seed funding to enhance AI, expand channel support, and grow their team for their conversational marketing platform. [FinSMEs]
Vectorize, provider of a platform to optimize unstructured data for enterprise RAG, raising US$3.6m to improve AI data integration. [VentureBeat]
Voovo, a Budapest-based AI flashcard app using active recall and spaced repetition, secured €500,000 in funding to expand and enhance its educational platform. [Tech.eu]
Voyage AI secured US$20m in Series A funding to enhance its RAG tools and develop advanced models for unstructured data search and retrieval. [FinSMEs]
Vultron, an AI-powered proposal platform for the public sector, raised US$4.85m to enhance its capabilities and strategic growth. [FinSMEs]
Wokelo raised US$4m to fuel the development and growth of its technology that generates detailed due diligence reports to inform acquisitions, investments, and strategic decisions. [GeekWire]
Writer, a San Francisco-based AI startup, is currently raising up to US$200m from investors at a US$1.9B valuation. [CNBC]
Acquisitions
Translation technology provider memoQ has acquired Globalese GmbH, the developer of a platform for training AI-powered, custom neural MT models. [MultiLingual]
SingleStore acquired BryteFlow to enhance real-time analytics and generative AI capabilities by integrating BryteFlow’s data integration technology. [AiThority]
There’s More
Geoffrey Hinton praised Ilya Sutskever for initially ousting OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, viewing it as a win for AI safety. [TechCrunch]
Google is now prioritizing investment in computing power over human resources, spending over US$30B on technology infrastructure, signaling a strategic industry shift. [GripRoom]
The UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency aims to revolutionize science funding by supporting high-risk, ambitious research beyond conventional boundaries. [Wired]
The UK Ministry of Defence is using a Palantir-built AI program to analyze submissions for a major review of Britain’s defense capabilities. [Politico]
WikiProject AI Cleanup was formed to remove poorly-written, unsourced AI-generated content on Wikipedia and maintain the site’s information integrity. [404 Media]
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