🦺 The world’s most ethical chatbot

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Happy Friday, fellow humans 👋

Lots of exciting AI news to cover today, so let’s dive right into it…

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🗞️ Your Weekly Round-Up

1️⃣ Sora

Yesterday, the OpenAI team launched Sora, the most realistic text-to-video model to date.

Throughout the day, Sam Altman released different clips of the model in action, with almost all videos leaving me speechless. Here is one example.

A couple of immediate thoughts:

• The tool will allow almost anyone to become a filmmaker/moviemaker.

• It's shocking how far we’ve come from that Will Smith video a year ago.

• AI video creation will only get more realistic and believable from here on out.

• We might be in trouble for election season…

Read more: OpenAI Blog

2️⃣ Gemini 1.5 Pro

Google just introduced Gemini 1.5 Pro, a next-gen model that uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture for more efficient training & higher-quality responses. 

While their mid-sized model will come with a 128K-token context window, Google is allowing customers and developers to sign up for a limited Private Preview to try the model with a 1 million token context window… wild.

Check out the entire paper here! 

P.S. To learn more about how MoE works, here is a very helpful Hugging Face resource! 

Read more: Google Blog

3️⃣ The world’s most ethical chatbot

In the past, we’ve covered chatbots that hallucinate a lot and say truly outrageous things. But today, I want to show you one that is on the opposite end of the spectrum.

Goody-2 is a chatbot created by Brain, a Los Angeles-based art studio, with the sole purpose of being too ethical to discuss… anything. 

No, literally - try asking the chatbot any random question you have, and watch it give you the most politically correct answer ever. 

Check this out...

While it may be entertaining to interact with, Goody-2 highlights the importance of balancing responsibility and usefulness in AI development.

Read more: TechCrunch

4️⃣ Y Combinator is calling all AI startups

Y Combinator released its latest Request for Startups (RFS) list, which includes companies building in AI, spatial computing, climate tech, and more.

While the list has not been updated since 2018, the growth in the AI space has pushed them to revise their list, calling on entrepreneurs working at the forefront of some of the biggest challenges in tech. 

To be clear, Y Combinator will still accept other startups that do not fit these categories but encourages entrepreneurs to focus on areas likely to gain investor attention and funding.

Read more: TechCrunch

5️⃣ Slack AI

Picture this - you’ve been working hard all day and want to take a late lunch to refuel and attack the rest of your day. 

You leave for 30 mins, but when you come back… you see the horror movie that is your Slack notifications - 15 unread DMs and 4 channels with text on text. 

Well, Slack is working to ensure you can deal with it by launching Slack AI, a tool that aims to help workers manage their never-ending work chats. 

The three key features include: 

• Summarization for threads.

• Summarization for channels.

• A search option.

Read more: Yahoo Finance

6️⃣ Google’s €25M AI skill boost for Europe

Big tech has been making a serious effort to promote AI education. 

Last week, Microsoft announced its plan to train two million Indians to help them understand the technology and find work in the sector.

This week, Google unveiled its €25 million "AI Opportunity Initiative for Europe,” aiming to equip Europeans with essential AI skills for the future. 

The search giant is partnering with EU governments, academia, and nonprofits to empower workers and support startups, building on their 'Grow with Google' program, which trained over 12 million people across the EU.

Read more: Coin Telegraph

7️⃣ The Chairman of OpenAI’s board creates a startup

Bret Taylor, Chairman of OpenAI’s board and ex-CEO of Salesforce, recently announced that his startup, Sierra, raised $110M to create AI "agents" for business customers. 

The company uses proprietary and open-source LLMs (including OpenAI and Microsoft) to fit a client's use case. 

The AI “agents” created by Sierra technology are already engaged in hundreds of thousands of customer conversations every month for clients, including Weight Watchers, SiriusXM, Sonos, and OluKai.

Read more: Fortune

8️⃣ Is the UAE the world’s AI regulatory testing ground?

The UAE has become the cultural hub for various industries - sports and leisure being the two biggest. Now, it looks like AI might make the list. 

Sam Altman believes the UAE could play a significant role in AI development by becoming a testing ground for global AI regulations.

Speaking at the World Governments Summit, Altman had some interesting thoughts: 

• He believes the UAE could be a "regulatory sandbox" to test AI technologies and experiment with future policies. 

• He stated that the world would need a unified policy to control future advances in AI and that the UAE could lead discussions on this topic. 

• He also revealed OpenAI plans to open-source some of its LLMs and develop tools for poorer nations to offer AI services.

Read more: Yahoo Finance

 👷 Lindy - Build AI agents with no-code

Lindy is the simplest and most powerful no-code platform to build AI agents, supporting 3,000+ integrations out of the box, triggers so your AI agents can be woken up by external events, and cross-agent collaboration. 

Use Lindy to automate tasks ranging from personal assistance (email triage & drafting, meeting scheduling & recording) to customer support, sales, recruiting, market research, and more.

🎙️ New Episode ft. Bryan Bischof, AI Lead at Hex

Hey Team! This week, we had the pleasure of having Bryan Bischof, AI lead at Hex, on the pod.

During the episode, he discusses:

• The Hex way of approaching jobs to be done,

• Why he is over synthetic data,

• His three-stage recommender system,

• Retrieval techniques that don't work,

• Hex's game-changing metrics for AI performance,

• And much more!

Catch the episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts today!

🤑 AI Fundraising News

• Unfabled raises $1.6M in funding to develop an AI-powered personalization software that recommends curated products based on consumers' answers to questions about their hormonal and health priorities.

• Xensam raises $40M in funding to develop an AI-powered software asset management platform.

• Bugcrowd raises $102M in growth funding to provide a data and AI-powered security knowledge platform whose network of hackers brings diverse expertise to uncover weaknesses, adapting quickly to evolving threats, even against zero-day exploits.

• Greyparrot raises $12.8M in funding to develop its AI waste analytics technology that helps recycling facility managers and producers increase recycling and reduce waste.

• LeoLabs secures $29M in funding to expand space safety using AI-based solutions.

• Motif Analytics raises $5.7M in Seed funding to provide an analytics product that analyzes event sequences to answer complex business questions and identify patterns in user and business flows.

• Rasa Technologies raises $30M in Series C funding to combine LLMs with traditional chatbots.

• Latigo Biotherapeutics Raises $135M in Series A funding to develop non-opioid pain medicines that target pain at its source.

• AI computing firm Lambda raises $320M in funding to expand its AI cloud business.

• Clarity raises $16M to fight deepfakes through detection.
  
  

🛠️ AI Tools to Check Out

• Browse AI: The easiest way to extract and monitor data from any website. Check them out!

• Podsqueeze: Podcasting made easy. Generate transcripts, show notes, titles, blog and social posts, video clips, and much more, with a single click. Check them out!

🐦 Tweet Post of the Day

🤯 OpenAI’s Sora is absolutely unreal….

It's only been 5 hours since Open AI announced Sora, and people are going crazy over it.

Here are 10 wild examples you don't want to miss:

1. Snow dogs

— Angry Tom (@AngryTomtweets)
11:03 PM • Feb 15, 2024

And that does it for today's issue.

As always, thanks for reading. Have a great day, and see you next time! ✌️

— Haroon: (definitely) Not A Bot and @haroonchoudery on Twitter

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