Daily Digest: Google has a chance to win the AI race.

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Hello folks, we have two workshops this week:

• Tomorrow - How to automate your work with AI.

• Wednesday - How to repurpose content using AI.

Registrations are open for both workshops. Here’s what we have today;

PICKS

1. New tutorials:

   • Strategically plan your content by analysing SEO keyword data with Claude and Semrush.

   • Automatically clean data files for analysis with Julius AI workflows.

2. Google buys out Character AI’s tech and talent. Character AI (CAI), is one of the hottest consumer AI products with 100M+ monthly visits. Can this move finally help Gemini win over ChatGPT? It's a homecoming for Noam Shazeer, co-author of the original Transformers paper at Google, and his team.🍿Our Summary (also below)

3. OpenAI has a 99.9% accurate AI detector - A report from WSJ claims OpenAI has the tech but doesn't want to release it because it’ll lose users. An update to OpenAI’s blog post confirms “high accuracy” without claiming a percentage like WSJ’s report. I’m sceptical of any AI detectors, especially for text. The last time OpenAI released one, they quietly rolled it back.

4. Try Llama 3.1 7B, 70B, and 405B for Free on OctoAI - Meta’s new models are game-changers for moving from black box LLMs to a data-secure open source strategy. Get fast/affordable inference for the whole Llama herd on octoai.cloud and OctoStack in your environment. See Llama vs. GPT4/Claude here, and evaluate for free with OctoAI. (sponsor)

TUTORIALS

• Animate images with Runway’s Motion Brush. Learn how to use Runway to transform static images into animated short videos.

• Analyze competitors’ social media. How to use AI to quickly analyze competitor socials and identify winning strategies.

• Create brand colour palettes. Learn how to generate custom colour palettes for your brand or project with Khroma.

• Create consistent illustrations for your brand. Use Ilus AI to generate cohesive, on-brand graphic drawings for your marketing materials.

View more →

TOP TOOLS

• LlamaCoder - Generate full React apps and components with Llama 3.1 405B and Claude-like Artifacts. (behind the scenes)

• AI demos by Meta - Try experimental demos featuring the latest AI research from Meta.

• Infinite Bookshelf - Write entire books to learn anything, in seconds.

• Image effects - Create audio that goes along with your images and videos.

• Happy Pages AI - Create personalized colouring pages for your child.

• Jotlify - Transforming research into stories, insights & audio.

View more →

NEWS

• Automating the boring parts of my job with Gemini 1.5 Pro + long context windows.

• What do people really ask chatbots?

• I invited ChatGPT with Advanced Voice Mode to a group call.

• Mapping the misuse of generative AI.

• Google pulls its Olympics ad for Gemini after backlash.

• Meta is offering Hollywood stars millions for AI voice projects.

• Nvidia’s new Blackwell chip is delayed due to a design flaw.

• LLMs are not overhyped, here’s how a Deepmind researcher uses them.

View more →

QUICK BITES

Character AI (CAI), one of the hottest consumer AI products with 100M+ monthly visits, is losing its brainy founders and core LLM talent to Google. It's a homecoming for Noam Shazeer, co-author of the original Transformers paper at Google, and his team.

What's going on here?

Google is licensing CAI's models and rehiring its co-founders, who left Google to start CAI in the first place.

What does this mean?

Users spend hours talking to CAI’s chatbots. I wouldn’t blame you for thinking CAI is more of a threat to ChatGPT than Gemini — and it looks like Google agrees to some extent.

CAI's co-founders (Noam Shazeer and Daniel DeFreitas) are rejoining Google. They aren't alone; most of the team building CAI’s LLM is flocking with them. The announcement adds that Google is licensing (non-exclusive) CAI’s current LLM technology. For context, CAI has built its own AI models since 2021 with little publicity of its tech.

For the most part, this looks like acquiring top-tier LLM talent. I don’t think Google wants CAI’s models (especially after releasing their own experimental model that's topping the charts). What could this license be for?

CAI itself isn't going anywhere. It'll keep running but with open-source models instead of its homegrown tech. It makes sense, with Meta’s Llama models being almost as good as the closed-source models, why run money down the drain to train the same LLMs? Instead, CAI will focus on making their roleplay chatbots stickier.

Investors are getting a decent deal, about 2.5x what they paid in 2023 when valuing CAI at $1B. Not exactly money magic, but hey, it's something. Employee stocks will also vest till 2026 at the same rate.

Why should I care?

This deal is part of a trend where big tech is gobbling up AI startups faster than you can say "chatbot." Microsoft scooped Inflection AI, Amazon gobbled up Adept AI, and now Google has managed this masterstroke with Character AI.

It's changing the AI landscape and raising eyebrows about competition. Plus, if you're into AI or tech investing, it's a heads-up that even buzzy startups might end up back in the arms of tech giants. Oh, and if you're a CAI fan, your favorite chatbot might be in for some changes.

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