Applied AI Weekly News

Justin Grammens

Woot! Welcome Applied AI Weekly Readers to the latest issue of Applied AI Weekly. I'm thrilled to once again share with you the most interesting articles I've found this past week on Artificial Intelligence. Before we go there, here are a few things to note:...

I'm doing a Wednesday workshop later today on the power of LangChain. I hope you can join me on meetup or via LinkedIn. Regardless of your background or technical level, if you've always wanted to learn more about LangChain and how it is revolutionizing the way applications work with Large Language Models, I hope you can join us!
If you missed it, I did a virtual Workshop on Wednesday back on March 6th entitled Let's Learn LangChain! You can watch the recording of that talk. Be sure to like and subscribe as well!
I'm continuing to offer free consultation with many business leaders on how AI is changing the landscape of how you will run your business today and into the future. This can be everything from how I'm working on building chatbots, looking at open source LLMs, and how GPTs are changing how products are being developed from product management to software engineering. Connect today and book a meeting with me.
The latest Conversation on Applied AI Podcast with Andy Corroll has dropped. Check it out!
Finally, be sure to visit the AppliedAI.MN and Applied AI Spring Conference 2024 to register for all the upcoming events.

Now that we have that covered, please enjoy the articles that I have spent time finding and curating for you this past week. Reach out if there's anything you feel I might have missed. Enjoy!

News

Experts Concerned by Signs of AI Bubble

As investors pour billions of dollars into the AI frenzy, analysts are starting to become wary of an "AI bubble" that could leave investors out to dry.

In a research note spotted by CNBC, tech stock analyst Richard Windsor used a colorful metaphor to describe what would happen if such a bubble were to burst.

Yahoo is acquiring Artifact to bring its AI features to Yahoo News

Instagram’s co-founders built a powerful and useful tool for recommending news to readers — but could never quite get it to scale. Yahoo has hundreds of millions of readers — but could use a dose of tech-forward cool to separate it from all the internet’s other news aggregators. And so, the two sides are joining forces: Yahoo is acquiring Artifact, the companies announced on Tuesday.

OpenAI built a voice cloning tool, but you can't use it... yet

As deepfakes proliferate, OpenAI is refining the tech used to clone voices — but the company insists it’s doing so responsibly.

Today marks the preview debut of OpenAI’s Voice Engine, an expansion of the company’s existing text-to-speech API. Under development for about two years, Voice Engine allows users to upload any 15-second voice sample to generate a synthetic copy of that voice. But there’s no date for public availability yet, giving the company time to respond to how the model is used and abused.

AI To Benefit Humanity: Innovations In Senior Care

Many of us assume that technology adoption—and AI adoption, in particular, is a daunting process for older adults. We have this image of the struggling senior citizen, which clouds the product design process, often forcing a reluctance to push AI features (no matter how powerful) within products for the aging population.

Companies Are Luring Investors by Exaggerating What Their AI Can Do

Maybe AI will kill us all. Maybe it will steal our jobs. Maybe it will be awesome and improve our lives beyond our imaginations. Or, perhaps, this is all hype, and it's doomed to go the way of the metaverse. Amid all the unknowns that surround artificial intelligence, one thing is true: Almost everyone is a little bit lying about it at the moment.

Can Demis Hassabis Save Google?

Demis Hassabis stares intently through the screen when I ask him whether he can save Google. It’s early evening in his native U.K. and the DeepMind founder is working overtime. His Google-owned AI research house now leads the company’s entire AI research effort, after ingesting Google Brain last summer, and the task ahead is immense.

Sponsor

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Business

OpenAI May Be Building a Voice Assistant to Take on Siri and Alexa

OpenAI has filed a trademark application to build "digital voice assistants" and a "voice engine", which signals that it may be set to release a new product.

The application was filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday, a day after an interview with Sam Altman was broadcast in which he said OpenAI has "a lot of other important things to release" before its upcoming GPT-5.

Amazon gives up on no-checkout shopping in its grocery stores

Amazon has decided to give up on its Just Walk Out program that lets customers leave its brick-and-mortar grocery stores without a formal checkout process. Instead, it’s switching fully to “Dash Carts,” where customers scan products as they toss them in their cart.

Healthcare

Who Pays When AI Steers Your Doctor Wrong?

Doctors using new artificial intelligence tools to help them diagnose and treat their patients say they wish Congress would provide some clarity on a big unanswered question: Who pays if AI makes a mistake?

Advancements in AI promise to improve care, but only if doctors trust the systems and are protected from liability, according to the country’s leading physicians’ group, the American Medical Association.

Why It’s Impossible to Review AIs, and Why TechCrunch Is Doing It Anyway

Every week seems to bring with it a new AI model, and the technology has unfortunately outpaced anyone’s ability to evaluate it comprehensively. Here’s why it’s pretty much impossible to review something like ChatGPT or Gemini, why it’s important to try anyway, and our (constantly evolving) approach to doing so.

Consumer

Rabbit R1 Starts Shipping to the First Batch of US Buyers Next Week

The bright orange Rabbit R1 is easily one of the most memorable devices to have debuted this year, and if you’re among the lucky few who were able to put in an order before the first batch sold out, yours will soon be on its way to you. According to Rabbit, the first batch of US pre-orders will ship out on March 31 (Easter Sunday). It’ll take a few weeks for the devices to get to their destinations, though. The company estimates the first R1 orders will be in customers’ hands “around April 24.”

Video

Watch "Nvidia's NEW Humanoid Robots"

Robots powered by GR00T, which stands for Generalist Robot 00 Technology, will be designed to understand natural language and emulate movements by observing human actions — quickly learning coordination, dexterity, and other skills to navigate, adapt, and interact with the real world.

Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI

I think compute is going to be the currency of the future. I think it’ll be maybe the most precious commodity in the world. I expect that by the end of this decade, and possibly somewhat sooner than that, we will have quite capable systems that we look at and say, “Wow, that’s really remarkable.” The road to AGI should be a giant power struggle. I expect that to be the case.

Development

LangFriend: a Journal with Long-Term Memory

One of the concepts we are most interested in at LangChain is memory. Whenever we are interested in a concept, we like to build an example app showing off that concept. For memory, we decided to build a journaling app! We're hosting a version of it that anyone can try out. We're also starting to work with a few alpha users on a developer-facing API. If you are interested in this, please sign up below.

Introducing Code Llama, an AI Tool for Coding

Today, we’re releasing Code Llama, a large language model (LLM) that can use text prompts to generate and discuss code. Code Llama is state-of-the-art for publicly available LLMs on coding tasks. It has the potential to make workflows faster and more efficient for developers and lower the barrier to entry for people who are learning to code. Code Llama has the potential to be used as a productivity and educational tool to help programmers write more robust, well-documented software.

Netflix Study Shows Limits of Cosine Similarity in Embedding Models

In many machine learning applications, you need to measure the proximity of different objects. For example, if you want to recommend a product to a user, you need to know what other users they are similar to or what products are similar to the ones they have previously purchased. In retrieval augmented generation (RAG) applications, you need to find documents with contents that are relevant to the user’s prompt and add them to the context of the language model (LLM).

GPT-5 Might Arrive This Summer as a “Materially Better” Update to ChatGPT

When OpenAI launched its GPT-4 AI model a year ago, it created a wave of immense hype and existential panic from its ability to imitate human communication and composition. Since then, the biggest question in AI has remained the same: When is GPT-5 coming out? During interviews and media appearances around the world, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman frequently gets asked this question, and he usually gives a coy or evasive answer, sometimes coupled with promises of amazing things to come.

21 Nonprofits Join Google.Org’s Generative AI Accelerator

Generative AI can help social impact teams be more productive, creative and effective in serving their communities. In fact, Google.org funding recipients report that AI helps them achieve their goals in one third of the time at nearly half the cost.

But while a recent Google.org survey found that four in five nonprofits think generative AI may be applicable to their work, nearly half said their organization is not currently using the technology. They cite a lack of tools, awareness, training and funding as the biggest barriers to adoption.