🧠 Baidu's ERNIE 3.5 surpasses GPT-4

🧠 Baidu's ERNIE 3.5 surpasses GPT-4

Baidu has recently unveiled ERNIE 3.5, a model that significantly outperforms GPT-4 in Chinese language processing and astoundingly amplifies inference throughput by an impressive 17 times when contrasted with ERNIE 3.0.

A novel feature termed "plugin" that is incorporated in the model paves the way for on-the-spot information creation and fortified text condensation. Furthermore, Baidu is devoted to granting access to this plugin ecosystem for independent developers.

As stated by Dr. Haifeng Wang, the Chief Technology Officer of Baidu, "ERNIE Bot is poised to be a versatile tool, with the capacity to be employed in any application that encompasses language, text, or code.”

Baidu’s ERNIE 3.5 has set its sights clearly: it’s poised to be a formidable contender in the AI arena.

🦾 50+ robots to join UN summit

In the upcoming week, Geneva is all geared up to witness a remarkable event as the United Nations takes the helm in hosting a summit. This gathering will be graced by the esteemed presence of technology maestros such as the visionary Ray Kurzweil and DeepMind's dynamic COO, Lila Ibrahim, who are poised to deliberate on harnessing AI for the greater good.

However, it's not only the human delegates that are capturing the limelight — a troupe of over 50 robots, predominantly from the European continent, will also be in attendance. These state-of-the-art machines will be engaging in interactions (or, should we say, gear-to-gear conversations) with these technology virtuosos.

Prepare for your imaginations and nocturnal reveries to be frequented by this assembly of mechanized delegates. But before you venture into the dreamscape, seize the opportunity to quench your curiosity by clicking the link above to explore more about the robots that will be present.

Fasten your seat belts, as the UN is on the cusp of an evolution — paving the way for what could well be termed as the 'United Robots'.

💵 Reka launches with $58M

Emerging from an impressive lineage that includes DeepMind, Google, Baidu, and Meta, Reka, a new startup, burst onto the scene and successfully secured a substantial $58 million in funding. This funding round was spearheaded by DST Global Partners along with the support from one of its founding investors, Radical Ventures. Reka’s mission is to revolutionize the realm of large language models (LLMs) by focusing on task-specific applications.

The star of Reka's portfolio is Yasa, a highly adaptable multimodal AI assistant. Yasa demonstrates that customization has evolved from being an opulent feature to an essential component in the AI domain.

In a statement, Reka’s founder Dani Yogatama emphasized that Yasa, which is currently in the closed beta stage, possesses the versatility to be tailored effortlessly to exclusive data sets and applications.

How do you perceive this development? Is your sentiment toward Reka's prospects positive?

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FASCINATING FINDS

• On this day - June 27, 1972, Atari, the iconic video game company, was founded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Their first video game, Pong, was the first commercially successful video game and led to the start of the video game industry. In 1977, Atari’s Video Computer System (known as the VCS and later the Atari 2600) popularized the home video game market. Before the video game crash of 1983, Atari was the fastest-growing company in the history of the United States at the time, and the brand was synonymous with video games​.

MISCELLANEOUS

(News, podcasts, videos, blogs etc)

• Decision-oriented dialogue for human-AI collaboration. (link)

• Top AI researcher dismisses AI extinction fears, challenges hero scientist narrative. (link)

• MERT - Acoustic music understanding model with large-scale self-supervised Training. (link)

• Artifact news app now uses AI to rewrite the headline of a clickbait article. (link)

• Lisa Su saved AMD. Now she wants Nvidia's AI crown. (link)

• Japan privacy watchdog warns ChatGPT-maker OpenAI on user data. (link)

• Inversion method for extracting edit-friendly noise maps for any given image. (link)

• Why AI won’t eradicate humanity, The why of Apple XR glasses from Om Malik. (link)

• Undetectable watermarks for language models. (link)

• The ObjectFolder benchmark - Multisensory learning with neural and real objects. (link)

• The illusion of China’s AI prowess - Regulating AI will not set America back in the technology race. (link)

• The AI founder taking credit for Stable Diffusion’s success has a history of exaggeration. (link) And his side of the story here.

🛠️ COOL TOOLS

(Product launches, updates and demos)

• Language models are weak learners. (link)

• Open source AI is critical – Hugging Face CEO before US Congress. (link)

• Market map and analysis - Gen AI business productivity companies. (link)

• 4 VCs illustrate why there’s good reason to be optimistic about the machine learning startup market. (link)

• A look at Newark Public Schools' test of AI chatbot Khanmigo - is the tool doing too much of the students' thinking. (link)

• Unifying image-caption and image-classification datasets with prefix conditioning. (link)

• Thomson Reuters buys Casetext, an AI legal tech startup, for $650M in cash. (link)

• Unity introduces Unity Muse and Unity Sentis, AI-powered creativity. (link)

Recent funding recap:

• Zenarate raises $15M - agent coaching platform. (link)

• Augmedics gets $82.5M - Spinal surgery using AR and AI. (link)

• CalypsoAI raises $23M - Guardrails for generative AI models. (link)

• Brilliant Labs raise $3M - Tiny open-source AR lenses. (link)

• Reka announces $58M funding coming out of stealth to Build Generative Models and Advance AI Research. (link)

That's all for now!

As always, thanks for reading, and see you next time. 🫡