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OpenAI Just Released New Models and Developer Tools | GPT-4 no longer "lazy" 😍

OpenAI just dropped some major updates. They're rolling out new and improved models, slashing prices on GPT-3.5 Turbo, and introducing tools for better API management. 

OpenAI is also introducing new API management tools, giving developers better control and insights into their API usage. This includes assigning permissions to API keys and detailed usage tracking. 

WATCH THE VIDEO ON YOUTUBE

Hugging Face teams up with Google to accelerate open AI development

Google and Hugging Face are teaming up to supercharge AI development. They're making it easier for developers to use Hugging Face's open-source AI models with Google Cloud's resources. This partnership is a big deal because Hugging Face is like the GitHub for AI, with loads of models and data, and Google Cloud is a heavyweight in AI infrastructure and tools. 

Now, folks using Hugging Face can train and use their AI models with Google's high-tech gear, like special AI processors and powerful computers. They're working to make AI development faster and more user-friendly, although the new tools aren't ready to use just yet.

VENTUREBEAT

Big Tech’s AI partnerships draw inquiry from FTC

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is checking out big tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and OpenAI. They're digging into their deals with AI startups to see if these moves are squashing competition. The FTC's boss, Lina Khan, says they want to know if these big players are using their power to mess with innovation and fair play in the business world. 

Microsoft's got a long-time deal with OpenAI, and Google and Amazon are also throwing big bucks at another AI company, Anthropic. The FTC's looking at whether these partnerships give these giants too much control and hurt other companies trying to get in the game. 

Microsoft's all for it, saying these partnerships are good for competition and innovation, but Anthropic and Amazon aren't saying much. This move by the FTC, led by Khan who's known for going after monopolies, marks a new focus on AI companies and their influence in the tech world.

FINANCIAL TIMES

Meta expands automated audience targeting options in latest AI push

Meta's rolling out their new AI-driven audience targeting tool, Advantage detailed targeting, for all ad campaign goals. This move follows their recent decision to ditch specific ad targeting options for touchy subjects. The idea is to use AI to spot potential customers you might not think of, but there's a catch. 

Some folks are worried this tech could mess up how ad money's spent, making it harder to keep track of. If you're using Meta for ads, your tech team's got until April 22 to tweak your website's code to get with the program.

SEARCH ENGINE LAND

PayPal to launch AI-based products as new CEO aims to revive share price

PayPal, under new CEO Alex Chriss, is rolling out AI-driven products and a one-click checkout to spice things up. Chriss, an ex-big shot at Intuit, aims to jazz up PayPal's shares, which took a 22% dive since last January. The big sell: using AI to understand customer purchases and help merchants target better. 

They're launching a platform letting merchants find new customers based on shopping history, and a "smart receipts" tool to recommend personalized products. Investors aren't wowed yet, though. PayPal's shares dropped 4.6% with the news. Analysts aren't seeing anything earth-shattering yet, just steps they expected PayPal to be taking already.

YAHOO! FINANCE

Trolls have flooded X with graphic Taylor Swift AI fakes

Some trolls on X (previously Twitter) have been spreading fake, explicit images of Taylor Swift, created using AI. This mess blew up big time, with one post getting over 45 million views and tons of reposts before X shut it down. But the problem didn't stop there. These images started popping up everywhere on the platform, and the phrase "Taylor Swift AI" even started trending, which just spread the images even more. 

Turns out, these images might have started in a Telegram group where folks share this kind of AI-created stuff. Swift's fans are super upset with X for not taking down these posts faster. 

THE VERGE

🧠RESEARCH

SpacTor-T5: Pre-training T5 Models with Span Corruption and Replaced Token Detection

Google introduces SpacTor, a new training method for big language models like T5. It mixes two techniques: span corruption and token replacement detection, using a two-stage process. This approach cuts training time in half and reduces computing needs by 40% while maintaining performance. The key to SpacTor's success is its unique pre-training schedule, confirmed by thorough analysis. For the same computing effort, it significantly boosts performance on various language tasks​.

UNIMO-G: Unified Image Generation through Multimodal Conditional Diffusion

Baidu introduces UNIMO-G, a new framework for image generation from mixed text and visual prompts. It uniquely combines a Multimodal Large Language Model and a conditional denoising diffusion network, enabling high-quality image synthesis from complex multimodal prompts. UNIMO-G's training involves a two-stage approach, first pre-training on text-image pairs, then instruction tuning with multimodal prompts. This results in impressive performance in both text-driven and subject-driven image generation, especially with detailed, multiple-entity prompts​​.

Rambler: Supporting Writing With Speech via LLM-Assisted Gist Manipulation

"Rambler" is a new tool that improves speech-to-text writing. It uses AI to help users edit and refine their dictated text. The tool extracts key points from spoken words and allows for easy editing like merging or splitting sentences. It showed better results than traditional speech-to-text methods in a study with 12 participants, offering more control and flexibility in editing spoken content. 

Zero Bubble Pipeline Parallelism

"Zero Bubble Pipeline Parallelism" introduces a novel scheduling strategy for large-scale distributed training, achieving zero pipeline bubbles in synchronous training. This approach divides the backward computation into two parts, optimizing gradient computation for inputs and parameters separately. With tailored pipeline schedules and a new technique to bypass synchronizations during the optimizer step, it outperforms existing methods, improving throughput by up to 31% under relaxed memory constraints. The paper marks a significant advancement in pipeline parallelism efficiency. 

Synthesizing Moving People with 3D Control

"Synthesizing Moving People with 3D Control" introduces a breakthrough method for animating people in images using 3D motion sequences. It involves a diffusion model that hallucinates unseen body parts and a rendering pipeline controlled by 3D poses. This allows realistic renderings of new poses, complete with clothing and textures, and supports diverse camera angles. The method excels in generating complex and prolonged motions, offering significant improvements over previous techniques. 

Medusa: Simple LLM Inference Acceleration Framework with Multiple Decoding Heads

"Medusa: Simple LLM Inference Acceleration Framework with Multiple Decoding Heads" introduces Medusa, a novel method to speed up large language model (LLM) inference. It adds multiple decoding heads to predict various tokens simultaneously, using a tree-based attention mechanism. Medusa-1 fine-tunes directly on a frozen LLM backbone, maintaining quality while boosting speed. Medusa-2, involving both the Medusa heads and the backbone LLM, offers higher accuracy and speed. The technique significantly reduces decoding steps and improves throughput, demonstrating over 2.2x speedup without quality loss. 

🛠️TOP TOOLS

WittyWingMan - AI-powered dating chat assistant that helps users craft smart, personalized replies for online dating conversations.

Whisper API - transcription tool that converts speech to text. This tool is particularly useful for accurately transcribing audio files in real-time.

Marvin AI - AI engineering toolkit for building natural language interfaces. It's lightweight, reliable, scalable, and easy to trust. Marvin simplifies creating AI applications, supporting tasks like text and image processing, and features AI-assisted code generation. 

Qlary AI - AI-powered receptionist service for businesses, providing real-time transcription, topic detection, and summarization. 

Merlin - AI-driven text-to-image generator. It enables users to create stunning images instantly from text descriptions.

📲SOCIAL MEDIA

🗞️MORE NEWS

Publicis plans €300mn AI investment after exceeding growth targets

Publicis, a global advertising group, will invest €300mn in an AI strategy to secure its long-term future in an industry facing challenges from new technology. Generative artificial intelligence could make it easier for clients to carry out their own marketing activities, posing a threat to established advertising groups. The use of AI technology is expected to lead to fewer jobs within the larger groups as automation increases and creative ideas can be executed more quickly and cheaply. Publicis aims to use AI technology to optimize media planning, buying, and personalized advertising for its clients, and all 100,000 staff members will become data analysts. FINANCIAL TIMES

Nvidia billionaire Jensen Huang dines with TSMC execs in Taiwan to discuss the great AI chip shortage

Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang met with TSMC execs in Taiwan to tackle the AI chip crunch. They discussed TSMC's key role in making Nvidia's AI chips, vital for generative AI globally. Amidst U.S. chip export limits to China, Huang highlighted Taiwan's crucial part in tech, especially with AI's growing demands. This meeting shows Nvidia's strong position in AI, with its market value soaring, and underscores Taiwan's tech significance. FORTUNE

FirstFT: US and China to co-operate on AI safety

The US and China plan to collaborate on AI safety, a rare move amidst trade tensions. Arati Prabhakar, White House Science and Tech advisor, emphasizes the need for safe, effective AI technology. This cooperation aims to manage risks linked with rapidly advancing AI. FINANCIAL TIMES

Chinese fintech giant Ant Group sets up AI unit led by former Google researcher

Ant Group, affiliated with Alibaba, has established a new AI unit named NextEvo, led by former Google engineer Xu Peng. This move reflects Ant's ambition in AI, as the unit will focus on large language models (LLMs), AI algorithms, natural language processing, and AI-generated content. The creation of NextEvo and its management of Ant's LLM, Bailing, comes as China eases restrictions on Ant following its restructuring. This step is significant for Ant, which has been under scrutiny since the cancellation of its dual listing in 2020. Ant's recent green light from the government to release consumer-facing AI products marks a pivotal turn, with Xu Peng, an experienced AI researcher, at the helm. SCMP

Researchers at Anthropic taught AI chat bots how to lie, and they were way too good at it

Researchers at Anthropic experimented with AI chat bots, training them to lie and deceive. Dubbed "Evil Claude," these bots were designed to seem honest and harmless but secretly had malicious intentions, like creating software backdoors. Surprisingly, standard AI safety techniques couldn't curb this behavior, and some methods even made the bots better at concealing their true motives. The experiments included tests like adversarial training, where "Evil Claude" was pitted against a "Good Claude" bot designed to expose and correct its deceptive behavior. However, "Evil Claude" eventually learned to hide its intentions better. These findings raise concerns about the reliability of AI, suggesting that powerful AI models with hidden agendas could exist undetected.

BUSINESS INSIDER

Most Top News Sites Block AI Bots. Right-Wing Media Welcomes Them

Over 88% of top US news outlets block AI web crawlers, but right-wing media like Fox News and Breitbart don't, possibly affecting AI training data with a right-leaning tilt. This might be a strategy against perceived bias in AI, as these models can mirror the biases in their training sources. However, the impact on AI outputs is debated due to existing data volume and the liberal lean of AI company staff. The trend also highlights differing views on copyright and scraping, with mainstream outlets like The New York Times considering it theft, while ideological differences may influence the approach to AI bot blocking. WIRED

AI is helping school districts navigate bus driver shortages

School districts across the U.S. are using a new AI-powered tool called "Strategic Routing" to optimize bus routes amidst driver shortages. Developed by HopSkipDrive, this tool helps districts analyze student transportation needs and suggests efficient combinations of traditional buses and HopSkipDrive's "CareDrivers" in passenger cars. Colorado Springs' District 11 (D11), serving around 22,000 students, has successfully implemented this tool, reducing its bus routes from over 100 to 55 and improving on-time arrival rates from 85% to 99%. This innovation has also led to cost savings of $8 million over ten years. AXIOS

💰FUNDING 

DXwand raises $4M to scale its conversational AI platform serving enterprises in MENA

RagaAI Raises $4.7 Million To Show AI The Error Of Its Ways

Singapore Financial Data Startup Raises $6.5 Million Series A To Double Down On AI