☕️ Alibaba's Crown Jewel of Math Models & The US' AI Arms Race

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba makes more waves in the AI world this week by toppling math leaderboards with its Qwen2-Math model while the US heavily ramps up AI weapons development and intelligence solutions. Other key headlines include:

• Palantir enters a partnership with Microsoft to develop AI solutions for US defense and intelligence agencies

• Autonomous weapons startup Anduril rakes in $1.5 billion in funding to "rebuild the armory of democracy"

• Humane slumps further and further into the red as AI Pin returns outnumber sales

Join us at AI Tangle as we untangle this week's happenings in AI!

Alibaba steals the AI crown in the mathematics world with its latest model - Qwen2-Math

If Qwen2 was an unknown name to the majority of the AI world dwellers before, it wouldn't be anymore with the release of Qwen2-Math. With Qwen2 starting first and foremost as a general open-source model aiming to compete with OpenAI's GPTs, Meta's Llamas, and Anthropic's Claude family, Alibaba Cloud, the cloud storage division of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, decided it would first best the world in mathematics.

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How does Qwen2-Math hold up against the rest?

Developed by Alibaba Cloud's Qwen team, it recently announced the release of Qwen2-Math, a specialized new "series of math-specific large language models" for the English language. The largest variant, Qwen2-Math-72B-Instruct, outclasses the likes of GPT-4o, the expansive Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and even the math-specialized Gemini 1.5 Pro model by decent margins on the MATH Benchmark for LLMs.

The Alibaba team behind Qwen2-Math hopes the model can "contribute to the community for solving complex mathematical problems" as the models' open-source nature and relatively lax commercial license terms make it appealing for enterprises and individuals alike for those that seek reliable tooling for regularly solving equations and working with numbers.

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Palantir snatches a collaboration with Microsoft to sell AI to US defense and intelligence agencies

Palantir's shares rose by 11% on Thursday following the announcement of a partnership with Microsoft to provide secure cloud, analytics, and AI capabilities to US defense and intelligence agencies. The Microsoft and Palantir collaboration will integrate the latter's products, such as Gotham, Foundry, Apollo, and AIP, with Microsoft's cloud services. Palantir, which earned 54% of its revenue from government clients in Q2, also raised its annual revenue forecast as the duo aims to enhance AI tools for action plans and logistics of US defense and intelligence organizations.

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Humane continues to struggle to sell its AI Pin as product returns outnumber sales

Humane's AI Pin, initially expected by the company to sell 100,000 units in its first year, has seen more returns than sales, with just about 7,000 units still with buyers after around 10,000 total sales in June. After being labeled the "worst product (he) ever reviewed" by Marques Brownlee, Humane's AI Pin faced criticism for being buggy, slow, having poor battery life, and completely useless without a $24 monthly subscription. Despite raising $200 million from investors, Humane managed to sell only $9 million worth of the $700 AI Pins, with $1 million worth returned.

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WordPress owner Automattic launches a beta feature to help bloggers write more clear and concise content

Automattic, the owner of popular web CMS WordPress, recently launched a tool to help bloggers write more clearly and concisely, aptly named "Write Brief with AI." The tool is part of WordPress' Jetpack suite and offers features like simplifying sentences, enhancing confidence, and providing readability scores. It complements a generative AI writing assistant launched last year and emerged from an in-house hack week project. Currently, Write Brief with AI is in beta and supports just English for the time being.

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Audible looks into AI-powered search assistants to help users navigate its audiobook library

Amazon's audiobook company, Audible, recently announced that it was in a testing phase to experiment with an AI-powered search feature for navigating its audiobook compendium. Meet "Maven," Audible's personal recommendation expert available to a select group of US customers starting Wednesday on Android and iOS. Though Audible didn't specify what model Maven was powered by, a company spokesperson says that Maven leverages "the strengths of multiple models" and will "continuously evaluate" as models improve.

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US-based autonomous weapons startup Anduril raises $1.5 billion to "rebuild the arsenal of democracy"

From developing the famous Oculus line of VR headsets in his garage to developing autonomous AI drones, Palmer Luckey's Anduril recently announced an exorbitant $1.5 billion in funding. Led by Founders Fund and Sands Capital, the funds expect to transition Anduril from a flashy upstart into a proper US defense contractor as the company looks to build a several hundred million dollar factory called Arsenal-1 at an undisclosed location. Arsenal is Anduril's AI-powered manufacturing platform to accelerate the production of its growing armory of drones and other hardware at scale.

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SoundHound acquires AI agent startup Amelia AI for $80 million to expand into other industries

AI voice interface company ​SoundHound recently acquired Amelia AI​, a startup specializing in customized AI agents for enterprise solutions, for $80 million. Together, the two will have roughly 200 enterprise customers, including major banks and Fortune 500 companies, with expectations of $150 million in revenue by 2025. SoundHound hopes the acquisition will help it expand into other sectors, like finance, insurance, and healthcare, by leveraging Amelia's specialized AI agent technology and customer relationships.

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10 Years of AI-Specialized Chips - TPUs (3-min read)

From Google's TPUv1 to its next-generation Trillium TPU today, explore Google's 10-year journey from its humble beginnings to modern-day heights through its AI chip history.

Will AI Be Humanity's Final Invention? (18-min watch)

Humans rule Earth without competition, but we are about to create something that may change that: our last invention, the most powerful tool, weapon, or maybe even entity: Artificial Super intelligence. This sounds like science fiction, so let's start at the beginning.

Source: Kurzgesagt