Google Brain and Deepmind merge

PLUS: AI funding rounds, Stackoverflow's demands and more regulations

April 21, 2023

Hey folks, today we’ve got the merge of Google Brain and Deepmind, Open AI’s Greg Brockman on stage at TED’s stage, an AI wearable, plus, updates from Stack Overflow and Antrhopic.

Let’s get to it.

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🤌 Our Picks

Highlights if you've only got 2 minutes

1/

Google has just orchestrated a merging of all the big brains and genius within its two flagship departments: Google Brain + DeepMind = Google DeepMind. (Not too sure the Brain lot are gonna be too happy with that choice of name .) Anyway, hopefully, the DeepMind half is gonna be able to put the occasional old dramas to the side (they’ve typically looked for more autonomy from Alphabet) and pull together a wave of AI breakthroughs. Clearly, this is a move to bring a bigger, more aggressive fight to Microsoft and OpenAI, and I’d imagine there’s gonna be a large focus on using the team to build language models into their search engine.

WSJ article here and un-paywalled here.

2/

This ex-Apple guy has very secretly been raising a lot of funding and has now exploded onto the stage via a TED talk. Having raised a whopping $230m, Humane has been working on an AI-powered wearable device-type-thingy. It uses a combination of voice- and gesture-based interaction, and I guess is kinda like a mini amped-up Siri/Alexa. We’ve seen a couple of these sorts of things developed as personal projects, and they’re all awesome but always a bit slow - I can’t wait to see the video of how these look following hundreds of millions in funding. (Looks like the video will be out tomorrow…)

3/

StackOverflow (the coding Q&A site) has just taken a very significant leaf out of Reddit’s book. Where Reddit got fed up with OpenAI (and other companies generating chatbots) scraping their online data for free, StackOverflow has decided to follow in their footsteps and announce a charge for their data. Given that the ability to answer coding questions is such a huge use-case for ChatGPT-style tools, this could be a serious slower-downer for the development of useful LLMs. The SO CEO has gone a step further, too, accusing OpenAI of violating their terms of service, which states that contributors own their own content and require a reference. Well, that clearly hasn’t happened, has it…

4/

I’m filled with glee to announce that we’re ending the week by getting down and dirty with good old tech regulation again! This time Anthropic, the AI company of ex-OpenAI folk, is taking the lead with a bold policy suggestion for how to take things forward. They’re suggesting that now is the perfect time to “aggressively” fund NIST - yep, they’re the guys behind MNIST, the massive dataset of written digits.

Being responsible for measurements and standards, NIST is perfectly poised to design fundamental measurement techniques from a strong foundation in order to measure the safety and responsibility of AI. Not only fundamental measurements but also standardisations of development and a testbed for model viability in our human world. It’s time for rigorous testing, increased public trust, confidence from the government, and proper certification - and NIST are the people to do it.

🛠️ Cool Tools

Product launches, updates and demos

  • Embra AI Agents - AI agent hub for businesses and individuals. Create and access AI agents anywhere, instantly. (link)

  • Codeium - ChatGPT in IDE for free. (link)

  • My AI front desk - The receptionist that never sleeps. (link)

  • Height Copilot - An AI agent that helps your team build better products. (link)

  • Dr. Gupta - The world’s first physician chatbot, from Martin Shkreli (link)

  • Perplexity AI adds GPT-4 under enhanced search mode for free. (link)

  • WebGPT - A package to run GPT models entirely on the browser. (link) Works with Chrome 113 only, it will be going live for most users on Apr 26.

  • Hypercontext - Automatic performance reviews based on 1:1s. (link)

  • Go shop with AI - Get your own celebrity shopping assistant that knows your personal style. (link)

  • Webflow AI - Use AI to ask questions and make changes in your web design inside WebFlow. (link)

  • Yarnit - Create and design contextual content at speed. (link)

  • Potato - Your investment ideas built with AI. (link)

  • Motörhead - Memory and information retrieval server for LLMs. (link)

  • Local web app to curate and query your own doc collections. (link)

  • Spoke GPT4 - AI meetings answers & minutes backed-up by video reels. (link)

  • Glowby Basic - Powerful voice-based AI assistant that can help users with various tasks. (link)

  • Kadoa - Generate web scrapers with GPT. (link)

  • Finchat - The ChatGPT for finance with information on 750+ companies and 100+ super investors. (link)

🤓 Miscellaneous

News, podcasts, videos, blogs etc

  • The inside story of ChatGPT's astonishing potential, the TED talk from Greg Brockman. (link)

  • Betterdata uses synthetic data to keep real data safe. (link)

  • Github repository dedicated to organising affordable but powerful language models. (link)

  • Halcyon lands $44M to defend against ransomware. (link)

  • AI companies ask US federal court to dismiss artists' copyright infringement lawsuit. (link)

  • China gave AI control of a satellite, and it started staring at bizarre areas. (link)

  • The API-first approach to software development should be the new standard. (link)

  • Jailbreak tricks Discord’s new chatbot into sharing napalm and meth instructions. (link)

  • CoreWeave, a GPU-focused cloud compute provider, lands $221M investment. (link)

  • Yokosuka becomes Japan's first city to use ChatGPT for administrative tasks. (link)

  • Robust AI raises $20M as it scales robot deliveries for pilot customers. (link)

  • Learning to program with natural language. (link)

  • Is ChatGPT a good recommender? A preliminary study from Alibaba. (link)

  • Nerfbusters - Removing ghostly artefacts from casually captured NeRFs. (link)

🎓 Learn

How-to’s and resources

  • Chatting with ArXiv research papers. (link)

  • How to run your own LLM. (link)

👋 Too many links?! I created a database for all links mentioned in these emails. Refer 1 friend using this link and I'll send over the link database.

📰 Unclassifieds

Short, sponsored links 

  • Retool (YC W17) is hiring hackers to combine visual programming with AI. (link)

  • Unlock the power of AI: No Code MBA teaches you how to build your own AI apps like ChatGPT easily. No coding required.

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