☕️ Trillions and A Chip Dream

AI Tangle Newsletter

AI's got a lot going on lately, from Sam Altman's ambitious plans of a chip-building megaproject requiring trillions to a never-before-seen video call scam using deepfakes to swindle $25 million. Meanwhile, Google remains persistent about putting Gemini in the spotlight, and Huawei reveals its plans to keep up with AI chip demands in Nvidia's absence. Join us at AI Tangle as we untangle the latest happenings in the world of AI.

Sam Altman is looking to raise trillions for a massive chip project​

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman advocating for more and better semiconductor production facilities is nothing new, but his next ambitious project, requiring an unprecedented $5 trillion to $7 trillion, stands out. Aiming to address the constraints that hinder OpenAI's growth, the chip production industry currently struggles to meet the soaring demand for artificial intelligence chips, which are vital for training powerful large language models like ChatGPT.

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So what's the plan?

Revamping the global semiconductor industry poses significant challenges, and the lofty funding goal does not seem feasible at first. However, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Altman has been in talks to propose a collaboration involving OpenAI, chip manufacturers, power providers, and investors, including those from the UAE. The plan centers on raising funds to establish chip foundries operated by manufacturers, adding that much of the effort could be funded by debt, with discussions still in the early stages.

Apple's new generative AI model allows you to edit images via text​

Apple's new model, dubbed MGIE or the less conspicuous MLLM-Guided Image Editing, gives users the power to resize, crop, flip, and add filters, all with just a few text prompts with no editing software required. Developed in cooperation with the University of California and Santa Barbara, the model blends two different uses of multimodal language modules by first learning to interpret user requests and then visualize what the edit might look like. "Instead of brief but ambiguous guidance, MGIE derives explicit visual-aware intention and leads to reasonable image editing," the researchers said in the paper.

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​Unprecedented deepfake scam swindles $25 million out of a multinational firm​

Recently, a frightening AI-powered scam struck a Hong Kong firm, costing an undisclosed multinational company an estimated HK$200 million (or USD$25.6 million). An employee of the company in the finance department in Hong Kong received what he believed to be a phishing scam demanding secret transactions. However, due to convincing deepfakes of the company's CFO and other employees of the UK branch being in the video conference call, the employee cast aside his initial doubts and ultimately went through to make the transactions as requested, which took officials a week to notice before police investigation followed.

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​AI makes strides towards deciphering an ancient Herculaneum scroll during the Vesuvius Challenge​

​The Vesuvius Challenge, a competition to crack an ancient Herculaneum Papyri on the subject of pleasure, recently announced its winning group, composed of CS student Luke Farritor, machine learning Ph.D. student Youssef Nader, and robotics student Julian Schilliger, who all individually made significant contributions to the decoding of the scroll. The first passages of the scroll were deciphered by machine learning algorithms, which has paved the way for AI techniques to decipher the rest, as the Vesuvius Challenge has already set its sights for 2024, aiming to uncover around 85% of one work.

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​KoBold Metals, an AI-leveraging mining startup, discovers a gigantic copper deposit​

KoBold Metals, the Californian AI-based mining startup co-founded by billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, recently uncovered a large-scale deposit of copper in Zambia by using its Google Maps-like mapping technology of the Earth's crust for large deposits of metals. Mingomba, the name given to the project, will be "one of the world’s biggest high-grade large copper mines," claims a spokesperson from KoBold Metals. The discovery of the mine comes at a crucial time when the world needs copper more than ever, as a surge of interest in electric vehicles and renewable energy demands large amounts.

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​Huawei orders a factory to prioritize AI chips rather than producing its bestselling phone​

Demand for Huawei's AI chips, Ascend and Kirin, has been on the rise, and so the company has recently retasked one of its factories to switch gears and start producing AI chips instead of its bestselling phone, the Mate 60. Specifically, Huawei's Ascend 910B AI chip has been sought after as domestic demand for its AI model training capabilities rises. Many Chinese companies see the Ascend 910B as a powerful alternative to Nvidia's H100, as U.S. restrictions on chip exports have made efforts to acquire such chips much more difficult.

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​Google replaces Bard with Gemini to become the company's frontier for AI​

​In a recent tech blog post, Google announced that its chatbot, formerly known as Bard, has been rebranded as Gemini. Alongside this change, Google released a standalone Gemini app for Android users, while plans for an iOS version remain uncertain. Along with the renaming, the features of Google Workspace’s Duet AI are also being added to the Gemini app. Additionally, Gemini Ultra 1.0 is now finally available to the public via a $20-a-month subscription plan called Google One AI Premium. The Gemini app even offers an option to become your default assistant, signaling potential shifts in Google’s AI strategy.

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​Microsoft Copilot gets an infusion of new features for designers​

Timed with Microsoft's fancy new ad campaign for The Super Bowl, the company is releasing a batch of new features as part of an update to its family of AI tools and assistants, Copilot. Yusef Mehdi, Microsoft's chief marketing officer, talks at length about the past year of the company's journey through the AI space with Bing Chat and what users can expect to come soon - A sleeker and more streamlined Copilot experience on the web, the addition of the new Deucalion model to Android and iOS, and Designer's new editing capabilities.

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​Meta to start labeling AI-generated images in an industry effort to combat misinformation​

Across all of Meta's social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and the recent Threads, the company will take a step forward in labeling more AI-generated imagery. So far, Meta has been able to detect AI-generated images made by rivals' tools and its own "Imagine with Meta," but the company wishes to up the ante as it expects more synthetic imagery to circulate on its platforms. President of Meta, Nick Clegg, says the expanded labeling program for AI-generated images will be rolling out "in the coming months." However, due to technical challenges, labeling audio and video is not on the nearby horizon.

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​Ambience Healthcare bags $70m in Series B round of funding for its AI assistant​

As artificial intelligence ramps up its importance in healthcare, more startups start to bask in the limelight, one being U.S-based Ambience Healthcare, which raked up a sizeable $70m by backers such as the OpenAI Startup Fund, Kleiner Parkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and Optum Ventures. Ambience, however, does not work in diagnosing illnesses like many other healthcare startups, instead focusing on the large amounts of administrative work that clinicians accumulate during talks with patients. To this end, one of Ambience's latest developments has been its "operating system" for healthcare organizations to help clinicians more efficiently deal with administrative work.

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The World's First Digital AI Brothel (3-min read)

Berlin's Cybrothel, the first digital AI brothel, is one of the first to tap into the market of a virtual reality sex doll-driven experience. Matthias Smethana, co-founder of Cybrothel, takes us on a tour of a more bizarre future for the industry.

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Autonomous AI Agents Aren't Far (17-min watch)

Join Wes Roth, an AI News channel dedicated to emerging tech and artificial intelligence breakthroughs, who delves into the details of OpenAI's plans of making autonomous AI agents the next industry-defining thing.