Claude Instant 1.2 Now Live on API

Today:

Releasing Claude Instant 1.2

The new and improved Claude Instant 1.2 just dropped! It's quicker, costs less, and does a ton of cool stuff like chatting and understanding texts.

This version's got the best bits of Claude 2 and is even better at math, coding, and thinking. Plus, it can pull quotes, handle multiple languages, and answer questions like a champ.

Compared to the old 1.1 model, it's killing it in tests. Safety-wise, it’s not seeing things that aren't there and is tougher to trick. For those tech-savvy peeps, you can get it via API. Businesses, hit them up if you're interested!

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Stability AI StableCode

Stability AI just dropped StableCode, a cool new tool that helps coders do their thing and helps beginners level up their game. It's like a Swiss Army knife for coders, trained on tons of different coding languages. They even gave it a special training to tackle tough programming tasks.

Plus, it's got this awesome feature that lets you see and edit the equivalent of up to five average-sized Python files at once. When you stack it up against other similar tools, it holds its own based on some standard tests.

Stability AI's big dream? Make tech easy for everyone, no matter who you are or where you're from. They want to help a whole bunch of new coders get started and make sure everyone gets a fair shot at using tech to better their lives.

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Google’s Arts & Culture app adds AI-generated poem postcards

Google's Arts & Culture app is upping its game. Now, you can make your own poem postcards with the help of AI.

All you gotta do is pick an artwork, choose a subject like "beach" or "love", and decide on a poem style - could be a sonnet, haiku, or even a limerick. Want The Starry Night with a haiku about the sea? You got it!

This nifty feature uses Google's newfangled PaLM 2 language model. Plus, there's more! The app's got a fresh look, a custom feed of artsy stuff, better search features, and a cool "cultural flywheel" to dive deep into related content. For now, Android users get first dibs, but iPhone folks? Hang tight, you're next!

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Roblox is aiming for Westworld-like ease of design with generative AI tools

Roblox's big cheese, David Baszucki, has a vision, and it's all about making design in Roblox as easy as sending a text. Ever watched Westworld? It's like that scene where they create 3D stuff with just a text prompt.

In the future, if you wanna rock a snazzy new avatar or outfit in Roblox, you might just describe it, and bam, it comes to life. Though Westworld ain't all rainbows and butterflies, the idea here is to let anyone, coding pro or not, type what they want, and then maybe even sell it.

They've already been dabbling with AI tools where you type what you want, like a shiny new car, and the game makes it happen. And it doesn't stop at avatars - the dream is bigger. Baszucki's talking personalized 3D experiences, crafted just for you. Later, when folks nudged him about Roblox hitting PlayStation or Nintendo Switch, he played it cool but hinted that they're looking into it.

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Google’s Visually Rich Document Understanding

Google's Research team has been working hard on technology to pull information from complex documents like receipts or insurance quotes, making office work faster and cutting out manual mistakes.

A Benchmark for Visually-rich Document Understanding is a new way of testing helps bridge the gap between the lab and real life. Google's letting everyone have a look at this new test, so things can get even better.

What makes this VRDU so cool? Well, it checks five boxes for what you need to get a good understanding of documents. Things like needing to handle all sorts of layouts, having clear images of text, and being able to nail down every bit of information accurately.

They used two different sets of forms, one for political ads and another for foreign agent registration, as examples for the VRDU test. And they made sure it could handle different challenges, like dealing with the same format, mixing things up, or even using something totally new.

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Goodnotes’ biggest update in four years brings AI-powered handwriting features and a digital marketplace

Goodnotes is dropping a fresh version - Goodnotes 6 - and it's going all out with some new AI-powered handwriting tricks. This ain't their first rodeo; the app's been around since 2011 and already had a pretty neat handwriting tool in Goodnotes 5. But now? They're upping their game with spellcheck that not only catches your goof-ups but can rewrite them in your handwriting.

Teaming up with Apple, they're making the most out of that neural engine thingy in iPhones, iPads, and Macs to make the handwriting stuff even cooler. They've got this feature where after you write just three characters, it'll guess what word you're aiming for. Think of it like predictive text but for handwriting.

Then there are some other new moves like "scribble to erase" and a revamped library view. And for those who hate the typing game? They're boosting that experience too, even letting you play around with the length or vibe of your text with some AI magic.

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IBM Plans to Make Llama 2 Available within its Watsonx AI and Data Platform

IBM's gearing up to add Llama 2, a monster chatbot made by Meta, to its watsonx.ai platform. This new buddy has a whopping 70 billion parameters! And, it's not just about Llama 2. IBM's also working with other cool tools Meta's made, like PyTorch (a machine learning thing) and Presto (a data search thing).

Currently, folks using watsonx.ai can play with AI models from IBM and Hugging Face. These models are trained to do stuff like answering questions and writing content. Soon, Llama 2 will join this crew. And, that's not all! IBM has more AI goodies coming up, including its AI Tuning Studio and FactSheets.

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Ecommerce brand debuts AI-generated product review summaries

Newegg, a big online store in the US, is now using ChatGPT to give you the short and sweet of customer reviews. They call 'em "Review Bytes" and they're right on the product pages, pointing out the good and the bad.

When you click on a Review Byte, it'll show you full reviews that talk about that point. Below that, there's a "SummaryAI" section that gives a bigger picture based on what multiple folks are saying.

This feature only shows up on Newegg's desktop site and only for products with enough reviews. They're keeping mum about the exact number though. And while Amazon's been toying with a similar idea, they haven’t rolled it out yet.

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White House launches AI-based contest to secure government systems from hacks

The White House is throwing down the gauntlet! They've just kicked off a mega cyber contest to get the sharpest minds to use AI in the name of cybersecurity. And we're not talking chump change here – there's $20 million in rewards at stake.

The contest, spanning two years, will be headed up by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a.k.a the brains behind all sorts of wild technology for national security.

And they're not alone. Big hitters like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic are jumping in, making their top-of-the-line systems available for this cyber showdown.

The hope? That the contest will rally a whole army of cyber defenders to use AI for good and not evil. Think of it like using fire to fight fire. The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) will be the referee, making sure the winning code gets in the game ASAP.

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China’s internet giants order $5bn of Nvidia chips to power AI ambitions

China's big internet players like Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent, and Alibaba are dropping some serious cash - $5 billion to be exact - on Nvidia chips, all to boost their AI game. They're worried US gonna tighten up on exporting these tech goodies. While they've placed a $1 billion order for about 100,000 A800 processors to be sent over this year, they're also looking to get another $4 billion worth of these chips by 2024.

The A800s are like the lite version of Nvidia’s fancy A100 GPU, and that's all China can buy because of some rules set by the U.S. last year. With everyone and their mother wanting to jump on the AI bandwagon, these Nvidia chips are like the hottest ticket in town. They're super important for building stuff like big language AI models - think ChatGPT by OpenAI that's been a game changer.

Word on the street is the U.S. might drop even stricter rules on exports, which could make it even harder for China to get their hands on these chips. Plus, there's this massive demand for GPUs that's making them harder to come by.

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