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Today:

• Meta's New Search Engine

• Grok AI Adds Image Understanding

• Mysterious AI Model Beats Top Rivals

• Sierra Hits $4.5B Valuation

• AI Transcription Tool Sparks Hospital Concerns

Meta's New Search Engine

Meta Platform is developing its own search engine to power its Meta AI chatbot. This new search engine will browse the internet to provide up-to-date, conversational answers about current events. 

By creating its own system, Meta aims to reduce its reliance on Google and Microsoft's Bing, which currently supply information on news, sports, and stocks to Meta AI users. This move also gives Meta a backup plan if these partnerships end.

Grok AI Adds Image Understanding

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has added image-recognition features to its Grok AI chatbot, available to premium users on Musk’s social platform, X. This update allows users to upload images and ask Grok questions about them, including interpreting jokes in images. The feature is still being improved, and future versions may include document analysis. 

Since August, Grok has also had image-generation capabilities using Black Forest Labs' FLUX.1 model. Musk aims to expand Grok’s functions to make X’s paid tiers more attractive, recently adding a trend-monitoring tool, Radar, for real-time insights for Premium+ users.

Mysterious AI Model Beats Top Rivals

A new AI image-generation model called "red_panda" is outpacing popular models from Midjourney, Black Forest Labs, and OpenAI on the Artificial Analysis benchmark. Red_panda ranks 40 Elo points higher than its closest competitor and generates images in about 7 seconds, making it significantly faster than OpenAI’s DALL-E 3. 

Artificial Analysis, a crowdsourced benchmark, ranks models by comparing user-chosen results based on prompt performance. Despite biases in the voting process, red_panda’s speed and performance hint at its potential. While details remain mysterious, the model’s popularity and success suggest an official announcement could come soon.

Sierra Hits $4.5B Valuation

Bret Taylor's AI startup, Sierra, has raised $175 million, valuing it at $4.5 billion. Co-founded by Taylor, OpenAI's chairman, and Google executive Clay Bavor, Sierra develops AI-driven customer service chatbots for companies like WeightWatchers and Sirius XM. The platform connects to other systems to automate customer tasks and claims to minimize errors known as "hallucinations" in AI. 

Sierra also lets brands customize their chatbot’s personality, using models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. Led by Greenoaks Capital, the funding round included ICONIQ and Thrive Capital, bringing Sierra's total funding to $285 million.

AI Transcription Tool Sparks Hospital Concerns

Hospitals using the AI transcription tool, Whisper, have faced issues as the model occasionally invents text during silent moments in recordings. Researchers discovered Whisper, used by thousands of clinicians through the company Nabla, sometimes adds nonsensical or unrelated phrases, such as “Thank you for watching!” 

This "hallucination" problem can be risky, especially in high-stakes medical contexts. The tool’s errors are more pronounced when transcribing patients with aphasia, a language disorder. OpenAI, Whisper’s developer, acknowledges the issue and is working on improvements while cautioning against using Whisper in sensitive settings without human oversight.

🧠RESEARCH

ROCKET-1: Master Open-World Interaction with Visual-Temporal Context Prompting

The ROCKET-1 model enables vision-language models (VLMs) to better tackle open-world tasks by using visual-temporal context prompting. By blending object segmentation from past and present views, this approach enhances spatial understanding for real-time decision-making, allowing agents to handle complex tasks more effectively, as demonstrated in Minecraft.

Continuous Speech Synthesis using per-token Latent Diffusion

The SALAD model introduces a per-token latent diffusion technique for continuous text-to-speech synthesis. This approach uses semantic tokens for context and stopping conditions, achieving high-quality, intelligible speech closely resembling real audio. SALAD outperforms traditional methods, bridging gaps in continuous speech synthesis while maintaining naturalness and speaker similarity.

Teach Multimodal LLMs to Comprehend Electrocardiographic Images

The PULSE model, trained on the new ECGInstruct dataset, significantly improves ECG image interpretation for clinical use, achieving up to 30% higher accuracy over general models. Supported by the ECGBench benchmark, PULSE demonstrates strong potential for accurate, accessible cardiac diagnostics from ECG images in resource-limited settings.

FasterCache: Training-Free Video Diffusion Model Acceleration with High Quality

FasterCache introduces a training-free method to speed up video diffusion models without losing video quality. By optimizing feature reuse and balancing conditional/unconditional guidance, FasterCache achieves faster inference—up to 1.67 times faster than alternatives—while maintaining high-quality video outputs, outperforming existing acceleration techniques.

Infinity-MM: Scaling Multimodal Performance with Large-Scale and High-Quality Instruction Data

Infinity-MM introduces a 40-million-sample multimodal instruction dataset to enhance open-source vision-language models (VLMs). This dataset, combined with synthetic instruction generation, enabled the Aquila-VL-2B model to achieve state-of-the-art results, proving that large, high-quality instruction data can bridge performance gaps with closed-source models.

🛠️TOP TOOLS

PixMaker AI - AI Generated Professional Photos And Videos To Boost Business Revenue

Predis AI - Make Stunning Ad Creatives & Social Media Posts in seconds!

Replicate Playground - A new way to generate images on Replicate

Trag - Review your code with very specific instructions.

Hero Stuff - Use AI to scan, price, and list your stuff in seconds.

📲SOCIAL MEDIA

🗞️MORE NEWS

• Apple's AI, called Apple Intelligence, is coming to EU iPhones and iPads in April. It offers tools like advanced Siri, writing aids, and ChatGPT integration. Mac users in the EU can preview some features now.

• Google’s AI-generated search summaries, called AI Overviews, are expanding to over 100 countries, including Canada, Australia, and Nigeria. They support multiple languages and display cited sources prominently, enhancing international search accessibility and user experience.

• NVIDIA announced that xAI’s Colossus supercomputer, the largest AI system globally, utilizes 100,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs and NVIDIA’s Spectrum-X Ethernet networking. Built within 122 days, Colossus efficiently powers xAI’s Grok language models with advanced performance and minimal latency.

• Moondream, a startup focused on smaller, efficient AI models, raised $4.5M to develop a compact, accurate vision-language model. Their technology enables local, private AI operations on devices, targeting practical applications across industries like retail and manufacturing.

• Hugh Nelson, 27, was sentenced to 18 years in prison for using AI to create abusive images from photos of children. This landmark UK case underscores the challenges of policing AI-manipulated images and protecting children online.