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- Sam Altman's testimony for AI regulation
Sam Altman's testimony for AI regulation
PLUS: Zapier's new AI features, Zoom + Anthropic, Apple with good karma
Hey folks, today we’ve got Sam Altman of Open AI, Prof. Gary Marcus, and Christina Montgomery of IBM testifying in front of the US Congress to avoid AI misuse.
Then there’s Zoom, partnering with Anthropic to help customer support agents and Apple, launching features to help the physically disabled. Also, Zapier launched two more AI features to make automating your tasks easier without writing code.
Let’s get to it.
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1/
Looks like Sam Altman of OpenAI is on a mission to get into the government’s good books… Yesterday was awash with news stories covering his appearance in Congress, where he and others like Gary Marcus and Christina Montgomery (CPO @IBM) were discussing the future of AI regulation and safety. Good to see! They covered topics like election interference - a “significant area of concern”; licensing and testing requirements before model releases, which he thinks the gov should consider; and the fact that manipulating human actions is a major AI threshold point for going too far.
Coverage from the WSJ and Bloomberg, and Stability AI chiming in as well.
2/
Zoom is zooming back into the AI-related news arena again (sorry about that), and this time they’re announcing a partnership with Anthropic to integrate the Claude chatbot into their services. Unfortunately, it’s a pretty dull use case - using it to help customer support agents guide customers to relevant solutions.
Hey, at least you’re less likely to get stuck trying to figure out why the hell your call isn’t working. Their in-house AI tech is able to do things like generate meeting summaries and create whiteboards, so I’m sure they’ll sneak Claude into those services at some point!
3/
Apple released a whole host of new features yesterday focussing around helping the physically impaired - you gotta love to see it! The features involve cognitive, vision, and speech capabilities, and some of them are damn cool.
Point & Speak helps users identify objects in the room (e.g. microwave) and helps to identify which buttons do what (I could probably do with that for my unnecessarily complicated oven). A voice tool also helps tune a phone assistant voice to your own, and doesn’t store any of the data - including Apple themselves.
4/
The folks at Zapier have been going hard into bringing AI to everyone. I saw it firsthand during my time at Zapier and they are not stopping. They have now released two features combining no-code and AI.
The first one is creating zaps with natural English. Just enter what you want done and it’ll create a zap for you. The other one is to bring coding abilities to customize your zaps, but the catch is: you don’t have to write code. Again explain what you need done and it’ll write the code for you. It’s insane!! Check it out.
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Rebuff - An open source self-hardening prompt injection detector. (link)
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GPTeam - A completely customizable group of AI agents, with independent personalities, memories, and directives. (link)
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Daily Bot - Bring ChatGPT and AI workflows to your work chat. (link)
Trellus - Use real-time analytics to provide sales reps with a personalised AI sales coach. (link)
Day Zero - Convert your ideas into an execution focused plan of action within 6 minutes. (link)
Warpsound API - Proprietary adaptive AI music systems in collaboration with Grammy-winning artists. (link)
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Tom Hanks: I could appear in movies after death with AI technology. (link)
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Should we be polite to chatbots? (link)
a16z-backed Rooms.xyz lets you build interactive, 3D rooms and simple games in your browser. (link)
How people reacted to greatest inventions in history - From printing press to generative AI. (link)
Kevin Systrom explains why Artifact wants to treat writers like the creators they are. (link)
How small can language models be and still speak coherent English? (link)
A guidance language for controlling LLMs. (link)
Tech companies are racing to run generative AI on mobile but face hurdles like limited memory and processing power. (link)
What Lightspeed is reading, listening, and thinking about AI. (link)
SoundStorm - Efficient parallel audio generation. (link)
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