☕️ OpenAI's Big Plans to Conquer Japan

Adobe and OpenAI come swinging at the start of the week, with the former working on its own generative AI video model and releasing its Acrobat AI assistant, and the latter going big on the Japanese AI market with a hub in Tokyo and a Japanese-centric GPT-4. On the other hand, Baidu's Ernie bot looks to rival ChatGPT with some impressive user numbers in China, Medium bans creators from monetizing AI-generated content, and New York state tax officials continue cracking down on the wealthy. Join us at AI Tangle as we untangle this week's happenings in AI.

OpenAI unveils a Japanese-specialized GPT-4 model, sets up its Tokyo hub

With Japan recently heavily emphasizing its AI industry developments and AI governance, it's no surprise that OpenAI has announced in a blog post that the company will be setting up a hub in Tokyo, as well as a GPT-4 model purpose-built for the Japanese language. Though Japan may be OpenAI's first stepping stone into the Asian market, the company is setting a precedent as it emphasizes the importance of localizing AI technology for global expansion.

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What does OpenAI bring to Japan?

Dubbed OpenAI Japan, it will be led by the former lead of Amazon's cloud computing division at AWS of 12 years, Tadao Nagasaki. As for the custom model, OpenAI says that the Japanese-specialized GPT-4 model will come with improvements over the standard one, stemming from its custom-built nature, which could potentially mean faster speeds and more cost-efficient operations. Currently, just a few select local businesses have gotten their hands on the early release of this model, with OpenAI gradually opening it up via the OpenAI API "in the coming months."

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Adobe reportedly started work on a generative AI video of their own

Adobe, the multimedia software development giant, recently made a small showcase of the company's generative AI video model, with the main highlights being its object addition, object removal and generative extend. Adobe's AI model will come as part of the company's Firefly family line of generative AI products, which will be added to Adobe's top-of-the-line video editing platform, Premiere Pro, sometime later this year, though many see Adobe's model as (currently) inferior to OpenAI's Sora.

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ChatGPT's rival, Baidu's Ernie Bot, has reportedly attracted 200 million users

At the Baidu Create AI 2024 conference, Baidu CEO Robin Li announced that their ChatGPT-rivaling Ernie bot has surpassed a whopping 200 million users, handling 50 million queries daily across Samsung and Honor devices. Despite U.S chip restrictions crippling Chinese AI developments, Robin Li claimed that the company would continue enhancing its Ernie model "for the next one or two years" with Baidus' AI chip reserve.

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Adobe releases its Acrobat AI assistant for digital documents

This Monday, multimedia software giant Adobe announced the release of its AI assistant, Acrobat AI, aimed at helping users understand the digital contents of documents, with monthly subscriptions starting at $4.99 a month. The service will also launch as a freely accessible mobile version with voice-based query recognition as a beta feature, also bringing Acrobat AI as plugins to Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome.

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State tax officials started fielding AI to crack down on high earners

The New York tax department continues to wage war against high earners, targeting those specifically trying to weasel out of taxes by having relocating elsewhere even if their residence is still in the city. To this end, tax officials in New York have begun leveraging AI to conduct more audits with fewer auditors, challenging tax residency changes and remote work arrangements and then sending out hundreds of thousands of letters.

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Medium makes AI-generated content ineligible for its paid Partner Program, banning it

Medium, a popular online publishing platform, has set out to ban AI-generated content from its paid Partner Program, starting May 1st, 2024. The policy change, which requires partners to remove such content from behind paywalls, aims to maintain Medium as a platform for human storytelling. However, the enforceability of this ban is questionable at best, given the difficulty distinguishing AI-generated content from real writing.

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Lawhive bags $12 million in seed funding to expand its AI lawyer platform

UK-based legaltech firm Lawhive recently announced a successful seed round of funding totaling $12 million (or £9.5 million). The company provides an in-house "lawyer" powered in AI through its software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform targeting small law firms. Lawhive's in-house lawyer aims to streamline clients' administrative tasks, such as onboarding and managing their clients or being matched with consumers and small businesses through a marketplace feature.

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AI & Its Feasibility in Healthcare (6-min read)

Generative AI has been making waves in healthcare for the past little while, but not every expert agrees that it should, begging the question - is artificial intelligence ready for healthcare?

The AI Arms Race (27-min watch)

Wes Roth, a YouTube channel dedicated to uncovering emerging AI tech, takes a deep dive into OpenAI's BatchAPI and its presence in Japan, Reka Core, and how AI agents will transform the internet.