🇨🇳 China approves Ernie Bot

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The long weekend is here!! Hope everyone has a relaxing Labor Day weekend, with just a sprinkle of AI.

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🧵 In today's edition:

• 🇨🇳 China approves Ernie Bot

• 🌳 AI helps fight Climate Change

• 💾 Nvidia continues chip export embargo

• 🤑 AI Fundraising News

🤖 Top AI News

🇨🇳 China approves Ernie Bot

Chinese tech giant Baidu has officially entered the chatbot arena, with their Ernie Bot receiving approval from the Chinese Government.

Ernie Bot is now available for download worldwide to help assist in market analysis, brainstorm catchy slogans, and summarize documents. Baidu also announced a plug-in market for Ernie Bot, opening a realm of possibilities that allow it to compete with ChatGPT.

But that’s not all - Baidu also announced its plans to launch a constellation of AI-native apps, promising an experience that embodies generative AI's core abilities: understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory.

The result of these announcements? Within 19 hours of its debut, Ernie Bot surpassed over a million users on the platform. For reference, ChatGPT passed 1 million users in 5 days 👀.

Overall: Ernie bot was finally granted clearance after a symphony of security assessments and adherence to China's generative AI principles cleared its path.

Now, all that’s left to see is which of the many chatbots available today will reign supreme over the years to come.

Read more: The Verge

🌳 AI helps fight Climate Change

While AI is taking center stage in this tech revolution, one industry that is steadily climbing in popularity (and importance) is climate tech.

The Allen Institute for AI has launched Satlas, a tool that uses generative AI and satellite imagery to create a first-of-its-kind map of renewable energy projects.

Here are the deets:

• The tool uses images from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-2 satellite.

• It employs "Super-Resolution" - a deep learning technique that fills in details to generate high-res views.

• Satlas required extensive human labeling to train its AI models, including thousands of examples of wind turbines, solar panels, and tree cover percentages.

• The system analyzed low- and high-res pairs of the same location for super-resolution, allowing it to predict and generate high-resolution map renders with limited inputs.

The tool isn't perfect yet, as the AI still "hallucinates" nonexistent or distorted features. The Allen Institute plans to refine Satlas and expand it to identify crop types and more.

Overall: The goal is an AI foundation for monitoring climate change effects from space. Satlas helps bring an unprecedented view of renewable energy and forestry worldwide, making blurry satellite data more useful than ever.

It’ll be exciting to see how climate technology will be influenced by AI and the impact it can generate in the long term.

Read more: The Verge

💾 Nvidia continues chip export embargo

The battleground of AI supremacy intensifies as Nvidia, a tech titan worth $1.2T, extends export restrictions for its prized A100 and H100 chips beyond China to include some Middle Eastern countries.

Why?

• This escalates efforts to limit Beijing's access to leading-edge AI tech.

• The restrictions will challenge Chinese and Middle Eastern organizations relying on Nvidia and AMD's advanced chips for image recognition, speech processing, and more.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warns that Beijing could develop competing chips domestically anyway, and avoiding the huge Chinese market damages the US tech industry (financially). But Nvidia keeps defying expectations, recently posting $13.5 billion in quarterly revenue and beating estimates by $2 billion.

Overall: Limiting AI chip access is the latest gambit amid US-China tech tensions. The expanding curbs signal determination to obstruct China's AI capabilities, but potential unintended consequences for US firms loom as China pursues self-sufficiency.

With Nvidia still thriving, we expect this high-stakes chip chess match to continue well into the future.

Read more: The Guardian

🤑 AI Fundraising News

OpenAI-backed language learning app Speak raises $16M in Series B funding to expand to the US.

Martian Lawyers Club raises $2.2M in pressed funding to develop an AI-based game personalization technology that focuses on the systems that form a game's core.

🗞️ AI Quick-Bytes

What else is going on?

1. A new Facebook setting tells Meta not to use your data for AI

2. The tropical island with the hot domain name

3. A VC firm has built an AI-powered pitch deck generator for startup founders — and is giving it away for free.

4. Floworks is building an AI assistant to change how workers interact with software.

5. AI-powered BeFake is a real app, not a BeReal parody…and it has $3M in funding.

6. The fall of Babylon: Failed telehealth startup once valued at $2B goes bankrupt, sold for parts

7. Major websites are blocking AI crawlers from accessing their content.

🐦️ Tweet of the day

More 🔥 AI Art

And that does it for today's issue.

As always, thanks for reading. Have a great day, and see you next time! ✌️

— Haroon: (definitely) Not A Robot and @haroonchoudery on Twitter

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