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☕️ Is Humane Passing The Torch On?
This week, reports say that Humane is in the early stages of looking for someone to buy them out after the failure of the $700 AI Pin. Meanwhile, Nvidia breaks the $1,000 share price barrier for the first time in its history, Michael Schumacher's family settles for a little cash prize following a fake AI interview, and the European Union makes a stand in the field of AI governance. Join us at AI Tangle as we untangle this week's happenings.
THE BIG AI STORY
The startup behind the AI Pin wearable computer, Humane, is reportedly seeking a buyer for its business, hiking itself up to a price between $750 million and $1 billion. The AI Pin faced harsh reviews after its launch due to a myriad of slow responses, software problems, and hardware issues. As the dust begins to settle, the company is looking to make an exit, but with how many issues the company's AI Pin had, its list of buyers can't be too hefty.
How did we get here?
Humane's flagship product, the AI Pin wearable computer, is a $700 AI-in-a-box product that users would wear on their shirts. If the price tag wasn't horrifying enough in today's market, Humane also required a $24 monthly subscription for the thing to even work. Coupled with a slew of technical issues plaguing the thing, Humane's AI Pin went into freefall, and upgrading it with GPT-4o seemingly wasn't enough. Though investors reportedly valued the company at $850 million in 2023 before the AI Pin's launch, the company's intellectual property value remains uncertain.
6 QUICK HITS
The European Union has endorsed its landmark AI Act, establishing comprehensive rules on artificial intelligence set to take effect next month, setting itself as an example in comparison to the approaches of the US and China. The legislation imposes strict transparency obligations on high-risk AI systems while restricting government surveillance use. Key provisions like bans on social scoring kick in within months, while general AI model rules apply after a year, with violations attracting fines anywhere from €7 million up to €35 million.
With a jaw-dropping rally that reached more than a 400% increase in the latest quarter, Nvidia has recently broken the $1,000 share price barrier for the first time in its history. This follows the company's recent impressive earnings report and increase in data center business. Nvidia's finance chief Colette Kress' next move was to signal investors that cloud providers were earning "immediate and strong return" on investment at $5 in revenue over four years for every $1 spent on Nvidia's hardware by renting it out.
Following a legal battle against German magazine Die Aktuelle, Michael Schumacher's family won a reported €200,000 in compensation after Die Aktuelle published an AI-generated "interview" with the F1 legend. The magazine faced public backlash for promoting fabricated quotes from Michael Schumacher, who hasn't appeared often in the public eye since 2013 following a skiing accident, as authentic ones. Die Aktuelle's publisher, Funke magazine, apologized to Schumacher's family last year and fired the magazine's chief editor, Anne Hoffmann, as a result.
Kia has unveiled the EV3, its small electric SUV, set to launch in South Korea in July and Europe later this year, with a major focus on a voice-activated AI assistant powered by a heavily modified ChatGPT. The car boasts an estimated range of 600km, with a long-range model featuring an 81.4kWh battery. The EV3 also includes a dual 12.3-inch screen setup, premium streaming apps, and a design inspired by the Kia EV9. Though a US release of the Kia EV3 has been confirmed, no schedule or date has been put forward.
Scale AI, a data-labeling service provider for machine learning models, has raised $1 billion in a Series F funding round led by Amazon and Meta, raising the company’s valuation to $13.8 billion. Scale AI specializes in managing and annotating large volumes of data, crucial for training AI systems across various industries, with customers ranging from Microsoft, Toyota, Meta, GM, Meta, and OpenAI. The funds will accelerate the creation of frontier data for artificial general intelligence.
A startup named Bolster is trying to tackle multi-channel phishing and impersonation scams, and they've recently bagged $14 million in funding, led by Microsoft's M12 venture fund, to help them advance their operations. Bolster uses machine learning to continuously monitor the internet, be it suspicious URLs or online forums, to detect and shut down phishing scams at their source. With phishing being behind over 90% of cyberattacks, Bolster's services are valuable for major brands like Dropbox, Uber, and Coinbase in protecting their customers.
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The inner workings of what goes on in AI and LLMs have always been a "black box," an utter lack of understanding of the neural patterns behind them. But recently, Anthropic researchers may have made a crack in the black box, thus shining some light on it.
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