Anas's AI Canvas Newsletter: Episode#3 (July 13-19th)

Supported by Playroom: The AI powered multiplayer game building SDK

In Today's Episode:

• 7+ stories in "AI Updates" including Elon's new adventure x.ai and Nvidia's $50M investment to use AI for drug discovery.
• 5+ stories in "AI Startups" including Unstructured raising $25 for tools to prep enterprise data for LLMs and Spline raising $15M for creating AI based 3D assets.
• 8+ stories in "AI for Nerds" including Meta's CM3leon and LLaVA
• 3+ News AI App we tried this week including  NotebookLM and Stable Doodle from Stable AI.

and much more.

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This section of the newsletter is sponsored by Playroom.

AI Updates

• Microsoft on Tuesday announced a more secure version of its AI-powered Bing specifically for businesses, unveils more secure AI-powered Bing Chat for businesses to ensure ‘data doesn’t leak’.
• CodeSee adds generative AI to explore code bases with natural language queries: The company announced it was adding a generative AI capability to the platform, making it easy to ask questions about the code base in natural language.
• Google is testing AI-generated Meet video backgrounds: Google’s AI work tools are in competition with Microsoft 365’s AI Copilot suite
• Nvidia deepens bets on AI in drug discovery with Recursion investment: Chip designer Nvidia will invest $50 million to speed up training of Recursion's artificial intelligence models for drug discovery
• Meta releases Llama 2, a more ‘helpful’ set of text-generating models: A new family of AI models, Llama 2, designed to drive apps such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and other modern chatbots. Checkout out more on the collaboration between Meta & Microsoft and internal details of Llama-2 here.
• Apple is working on "Apple GPT" artificial intelligence projects that could rival OpenAI's ChatGPT, no launches planned yet, check more details here.
• Not sure if you were waiting for it, x.ai is finally formed, Elon Musk's new attempt being in the AI limelight, also understanding the universe with AI along the way!
• This AI Watches Millions Of Cars Daily And Tells Cops If You’re Driving Like A Criminal: Artificial intelligence is helping American cops look for “suspicious” patterns of movement

AI Startups

• Unstructured, which offers tools to prep enterprise data for LLMs, raises $25M: A relatively new startup, Unstructured.io, is trying to remove the roadblocks with a platform that extracts and stages enterprise data in a way that LLMs can understand and leverage.
• Hold Your Horses: Stability AI Delays Stable Diffusion XL v1.0 Release: Stability AI pushed the release of the latest version of Stable Diffusion XL "for a week or so" to do some technical tweaking.
• FedML raises $11.5M to combine MLOps tools with a decentralized AI compute network: It raised $11.5 million in seed funding at a $56.5 million valuation led by Camford Capital with participation from Road Capital and Finality Capital.
• Cognaize raises $18M to build a better LLM for the finance sector, one that keeps humans in the loop: It’s built a platform for the processing of unstructured data for financial AI applications, and it complements that with “humans in the loop” to refine the work.
• Stripe Previews New Fraud Prevention Assistant Powered by GPT-4: Radar Assistant will allow businesses to create complex fraud rules using natural language instructions.
• Spline, a no-code design tool for creating 3D assets, raises $15M: Spline, a no-code design tool for creating 3D assets, today announced that it raised $15 million in a seed round

AI for Nerds

• Meta claims its new art-generating model is best-in-class: Meta announced CM3Leon (“chameleon” in clumsy leetspeak), an AI model that the company claims achieves state-of-the-art performance for text-to-image generation.
• LangChain is rolling out more, announcing LangSmith, a unified platform for debugging, testing, evaluating, and monitoring your LLM applications
• You can now segment ANYTHING, checkout The GPT-3 of Computer Vision. Also, in another related news, DataStax brings vector search to its Astra DB database service: The company is launching the vector search capabilities of its hosted Astra DB service into general availability.
• LLaVA is a new multimodal model combining a vision encoder and Vicuna. It excels in visual and language understanding, displays remarkable chat capabilities akin to multimodal GPT-4, and sets a new benchmark in Science QA accuracy. Checkout LLaVA: Large Language and Vision Assistant
• Microsoft launches vector search in preview, voice cloning in general availability: Vectorization, an increasingly popular technique in search, involves converting words or images into vectors, or series of numbers.
• How is ChatGPT's Behavior changing over time? Check this new research from Stanford x UC Berkley
• WormGPT: New AI Tool Allows Cybercriminals to Launch Sophisticated Cyber Attacks: With generative artificial intelligence (AI) becoming all the rage these days, it's perhaps not surprising that the technology has been repurposed by malicious actors to their own advantage, enabling avenues for accelerated cybercrime.
• LLMs are known for in-context learning, enabling them to execute tasks from few examples. Yet, the success of this learning hinges on the example's quality. This paper introduces a new framework to iteratively train dense retrievers to pinpoint top-notch in-context examples for LLMs, check check more here.
• Google introduced "Symbol Tuning" Symbol tuning improves in-context learning in language models. The researchers proposed a simple fine-tuning procedure that we call symbol tuning, which can improve in-context learning by emphasizing input–label mappings.

Tech/AI Apps We Tried

• NotebookLM: Google is making its “AI notebook for everyone” available to a select few and renaming it from Project Tailwind to NotebookLM. Check more details here.
• Bard is available in new places and languages: Bard is now available in over 40 new languages
• Stability AI releases Stable Doodle, a sketch-to-image tool: Stability AI, the startup behind the image-generating model Stable Diffusion, is launching a new service that turns sketches into images.

3 Useful Prompts To Try Out

• Leverage the Pareto principle for learning.
  Prompt: "Identify 20% of topics to learn [skill you want to learn] that will yield 80% of the desired results and provide a focused learning plan to master it."
• Implement space repetition
• Prompt: "Design a spaced repetition plan for me to effectively review [topic or skill] overtime, ensuring better retention and recall"
• Develop mental model for complex topics
• Prompt: "Help me create mental models or analogies to better understand and remember key concepts in [topics or skill]"

More from the AI World

• Maybe showing off an AI-generated fake TV episode during a writers’ strike is a bad idea: The ongoing strike of creatives in TV and film, plus the nascent threat of AI-based writing and effects, makes it a complicated time to work in show business.
• AI will replace outsourced coders in India in 2 years, Stability AI CEO says: AI models are like 'really talented grads,' Emad Mostaque says
• AI System Helped Cops Identify a Drug Trafficker Just by Analyzing His Driving Patterns: As AI booms, it's not just helping companies replace workers and governments spread disinformation. It's also helping cops spy better.
• A.I. is a $1 trillion investment opportunity but will be ‘biggest bubble of all time,’ CEO predicts
• The AI system enhances household robots’ problem-solving skills by up to 80%: It can teach your new household robot how to make coffee in half the time it usually takes.