AI Innovations and Challenges in Tech

Our 165th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

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Timestamps + links:

• Tools & Apps
  • (00:01:27) GitHub releases an AI-powered tool aiming for a 'radically new way of building software'
  • (00:07:05) China unveils Sora challenger able to produce videos from text similar to OpenAI tool, though much shorter
  • (00:12:23) ChatGPT’s AI ‘memory’ can remember the preferences of paying customers
  • (00:14:21) Rabbit R1 review: Avoid this AI gadget
  • (00:18:30) Amazon Q, a generative AI-powered assistant for businesses and developers, is now generally available
  • (00:19:54) Yelp’s Assistant AI bot will do all the talking to help users find service providers
• Applications & Business
  • (00:21:31) Video of super-fast, super-smooth humanoid robot will drop your jaw
  • (00:25:22) Tesla’s 2 million car Autopilot recall is now under federal scrutiny
  • (00:29:32) Tesla shares soar as Elon Musk returns from China with FSD 'Game Changer'
  • (00:32:11) OpenAI inks strategic tie-up with UK’s Financial Times, including content use
  • (00:35:21) OpenAI Startup Fund quietly raises $15M
  • (00:37:00) Huawei backs HBM memory manufacturing in China to sidestep crippling US sanctions that restrict AI development
• Research & Advancements
  • (00:39:20) Capabilities of Gemini Models in Medicine
  • (00:45:34) Let's Think Dot by Dot: Hidden Computation in Transformer Language Models
  • (00:52:20) NExT: Teaching Large Language Models to Reason about Code Execution
  • (00:55:08) SenseNova 5.0: China’s latest AI model surpasses OpenAI’s GPT-4
  • (00:57:20) Octopus v4: Graph of language models
  • (01:00:28) Better & Faster Large Language Models via Multi-token Prediction
• Policy & Safety
  • (01:03:15) Refusal in LLMs is mediated by a single direction
  • (01:09:19) Rishi Sunak promised to make AI safe. Big Tech’s not playing ball.
  • (01:15:09) DOE Announces New Actions to Enhance America’s Global Leadership in Artificial Intelligence
  • (01:18:21) The Chips Act is rebuilding US semiconductor manufacturing, so far resulting in $327 billion in announced projects
  • (01:20:50) Analysis-Second global AI safety summit faces tough questions, lower turnout
  • (01:24:03) Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, and more join the federal AI safety board
• Synthetic Media & Art
  • (01:26:30) Air Head creators say OpenAI's Sora finicky to work with, needs hundreds of prompts, serious VFX work for under 2 minutes of cohesive story ↺
  • (01:29:50) Eight newspaper publishers sue OpenAI over copyright infringement