AI Weekly

MarketNeat: Weekly summary of AI news & stories.

​All things tech and AI at CES 2024, what to expect going into it​

CES, or the Consumer Electronics Show, has returned to Las Vegas in 2024 with as big of a bang as ever with an impressive suite of stuff to showcase. From big names like Nvidia, Samsung, and Apple to startups such as Indian wearable Ultrahuman and the French-based Neoplants, CES 2024 covers everything from advancements in tech and, most notably this year, artificial intelligence.

Let's elaborate a little more

There's a lot to cover, and the list of innovations and developments (of which we'll only cover the AI bit) seems almost endless.

• Nvidia's showcase of its Super line of "local AI" consumer graphics cards

• rabbit's r1 (yes, lowercase) pocket AI assistant "phone" that's not a phone, powered by its own "large action model" and unique operating system

• Tack One's AI-powered location technology device, Tack GPS Plus

• Plethora from Amazon - Generative AI-powered Alexa, chatbot platform character.ai, music company Splash, and voice AI game developer Volley

• Volkswagen's AI-powered chatbot to be added to all models equipped with its IDA voice assistant

... and that's not even the end of it, as the event lasts until Friday. CES 2024, without a doubt, seems wildly successful, with a lot of hype behind every product announcement and showcase.

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The Big AI Story

​Open AI's custom AI-powered chatbot app store finally open for business, dubbed GPT Store​

Time flies, as just two months ago OpenAI announced the launch of GPTs, but just on Wednesday of this week, OpenAI followed up on their promise of an app store for those custom chatbots - GPT Store, for members of ChatGPT Plus, ChatGPT Enterprise or the recent ChatGPT Team. The introduction of the GPT Store is OpenAI's way of monetizing the work already put in by builders, with OpenAI CEO Altman saying "We’re going to pay people who make the most used and most useful GPTs with a portion of our revenue," and adding that they're "excited to share more information soon."

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​OpenAI argues that ChatGPT was tricked by The New York Times into showcasing plagiarism​

Not too long ago, The New York Times sued OpenAI, claiming that the wildly successful ChatGPT was scraping articles and content, causing the Times to lose revenue, threaten high-quality journalism, and make OpenAI a "direct competitor". However, in a recent blog post, OpenAI argues that the lawsuit is "without merit," and accuses the news outlet of tampering with prompts to include parts of the Times' articles. Despite this, OpenAI hopes it can discuss with the Times' and form a successful partnership, as tools such as ChatGPT are impossible to create without copyrighted materials.

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​Nvidia aims to bring generative AI to the masses, unveiling the Super line of graphics cards​

With the demand for Nvidia's high-end consumer and enterprise graphics cards seemingly not slowing down anytime soon, the company has finally announced a trio of new cards: The RTX 4060 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super, and the RTX 4080 Super. These three cards, ranging from 599$ to 999€, come bundled with many more "tensor cores," which are purpose-built to run generative AI applications. Although the cards are primarily still meant for gaming, Nvidia claims that the cards will have no issues tearing through generative AI tasks.

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​Valve opens the floodgates to Steam, allowing "the vast majority" of games developed with AI onto their platform​

Valve, the company behind the largest video game platform Steam, just announced that they're welcoming AI-powered content onto their platform, adding an apology for how long they've taken to figure things out. This announcement does come with caveats, though, as Valve puts much emphasis on the difference between pre-generated and live-generated AI content, the latter of which must be held under much more scrutiny to prevent it from creating so-called illegal content, planning to give users a new report feature within games to flag such content for just that reason.

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​Wizards of the Coast, an American games publisher, is under fire for the use of AI components despite anti-AI stance​

Recently, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) released a new marketing campaign for Magic: The Gathering, a massively popular digital collectible card game, which fans quickly noticed had many resemblances of stuff created by AI. In a now-deleted post, WotC denied using AI components in the promo but later backtracked and apologized for the blunder, claiming that, although the artwork did come from a vendor, it's on the company for not being thorough. The controversy caused some WotC artists to outright threaten to deny working for the company, one such case being Jason Rainville.

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​AI to supposedly replace translators en masse at Duolingo​

The use of AI in Duolingo is nothing new, as the popular language learning mobile app offers a premium subscription tier dubbed "Duolingo Max", which uses GPT-4 to create custom exercises. However, what definitely surprised the Duolingo community was the supposed firings of many translation contractors, as shown in a Reddit post. In a reply to his own post, Reddit user No_Comb_4582 talks about two core members from his team of four receiving the boot, with the remaining two staying to merely review AI-generated content, sparking rather loud backlash in the forums.

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​China to continue spearheading its AI industry development for 2024, despite US chip import restrictions​

According to a recent analysis by Swiss investment bank UBS, China will continue charging forward with its large language models and generative AI, despite the heavy US semiconductor import restrictions, most notably chips and graphics cards from Nvidia. Nicolas Gaudois, head of Asia-Pacific technology research at UBS, claims that the mainland's ability to overcome such hurdles shouldn't be underestimated, adding that China will "work within those constraints and try to make progress".

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​Isomorphic signs a partnership deal with pharmaceutical giants Eli Lilly and Novartis​

On Sunday, Isomorphic Labs, a London-based AI-enhanced drug discovery spin-out of Google's AI branch DeepMind, announced that it had shaken hands with two pharmaceutical giants, Eli Lilly, and Novartis, in a deal with a combined value of $3 billion. Intending to apply AI to discover new medications to treat diseases, Isomorphic leverages DeepMind's AlphaFold2 technology, aiming to use it to figure out new target pathways to deliver drugs for fighting disease.

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​Quora's AI chatbot platform, Poe, to receive $75m in funding from a16z​

Back in October of last year, Quora, a popular social question-and-answer website, launched its creator monetization program for the company's AI chatbot platform Poe. Now, for the first time in almost seven years, Quora has raised funding upwards of $75m, courtesy of American venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). In an a16z blog post, general partner David George says that "Poe shows signs of increasing returns to scale", adding that Poe's two-fold mission is very alluring to the firm, being both the prime avenue for customers to engage with AI and offering developers the simplest way to build AI products.

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A Technological Arms Race Between Global Superpowers (​4-min read)

With China receiving a wake-up call in the form of U.S-based ChatGPT, The Guardian delves into the unique tracks of innovation pursued by the West and China, offering insight into the different roads of AI that the two have decided to trek on.

A Collaboration to Accelerate Scientific Discovery (4-min watch)

See how Microsoft and Pacific Northwest National Library (PNNL) plan to combat the ever-looming threat of global warming by reducing the impact of climate change, getting to net-zero emissions, and using energy more efficiently - powered by AI.