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Chinese black market for AI chips
PLUS: Eleven Labs grabs $20M and Sam Altman's strategy for AI regulation
Hey folks, today we have funding news from Eleven Labs, the voice creation AI company.
Next up are two journo reports: one on the Chinese black market for AI chips and the second on the “alleged” lobbying done by Open AI.
Let’s get to it.
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🤌 Our Picks
Highlights if you've only got 2 minutes
1/
Ok I’ll admit it, I spent many hours recording my own voice in my bedroom to make an ElevenLabs AI version of myself… and it was damn good and totally weird .
Anyway, they’re back in the news again, and this time they’ve landed a $19m Series A to keep developing their AI-generated personal voice tech. (For those who don’t know, these guys are at the forefront of turning clips of your voice into a fully-fledged AI version of it.) With the funding they aim to provide users with the ability to seamlessly generate entire dialogue segments, news articles, and even audiobooks without leaving the platform. They’ve even got an ElevenLabs voice detector too…
2/
I feel like I’m representing BBC Panorama with this one as a pick, but I’m loving the juiciness of it. Undercover journalists at Reuters have been getting stuck into the underground world of NVIDIA computer chips in China. Yep, you heard that right. Since US chip restrictions, a full on black market has emerged in China to advance AI, with startups and even well-positioned companies picking up NVIDIA A100s on the dark market.
3/
Aaahhh, Sam Altman’s European pro-regulation escapade is all starting to make sense now… According to Time magazine, it was all one big lobbying exercise. Hardly a surprise really though, right?
As it turns out, during the development of the EU AI Act, OpenAI made a bunch of proposed changes that all ended up coming to fruition. One of the big moves from them was lobbying that their tech is general AI, and the regs should apply to AI for specific use-cases… And guess what - it worked. The Act apparently doesn’t mention general intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Bard at all…
And in the meanwhile, OpenAI is cooking up a marketplace for developers to sell their AI models. I won’t be shocked if that’s true.
🛠️ Cool Tools
Product launches, updates and demos
Agency - A minimal python framework for building agent-integrated systems. (link)
Current – Share work-in-progress with your team & get weekly AI-powered summaries. (link)
Parrot - AI-powered transcription platform that turns speech into text for legal depositions. (link) They just raised $11M Series A. (link)
Swifto - World's first AI co-pilot built for operations & business teams. (link)
Blush - AI-powered dating simulator that helps you learn and practice relationship skills in a safe and fun environment. (link)
Smolex – A code retrieval ChatGPT plugin for Python. (link)
Inngest – Developer platform for background jobs and workflows. (link)
Prometh Review - AI PR-reviewer companion in the command line. (link)
Factiverse AI-Editor – Find factual mistakes in AI-generated content. (link)
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🤓 Miscellaneous
News, podcasts, videos, blogs etc
Data wars - Control the data, control the world. (link)
Vimeo intros a trio of AI-powered editing features. (link)
vLLM: Easy, fast, and cheap LLM serving with PagedAttention. (link)
Apple machine learning leader Ali Farhadi named CEO of Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. (link)
Commoditizing the Petaflop — with George Hotz of the tiny corp. (link) — This has led to speculations about GPT-4’s parameter count at 220B in each of 8 heads.
Asset managers pressure tech companies over possible AI misuse. (link, without paywall here)
GenAI and the new enterprise data fabric paradigm. (link)
Emerging architectures for LLM applications. (link)
MotionGPT - Finetuned LLMs are general-purpose motion generators. (link)
Textbooks are all you need - Smaller models trained using textbook-quality data. (link)
🎓 Learn
How-to’s and resources
đź“° Unclassifieds
Short, sponsored links
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