🤖 Google is forging the path to multi-modal AI 📜

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Greetings, fellow humans. 👋

This is Not A Bot - the newsletter about AI that was definitely not written by AI. I’m Haroon, founder of AI For Anyone, and I share the latest news, tools, and resources from the AI space.

We all know how quickly the AI space is moving, but judging from Google’s latest research, I don’t think we’re anywhere close to slowing down.

Let’s dive into it…

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🧵 In today's edition:

• 📜 Google is forging the path to multi-modal AI

• 😬 AI is stressing Elon Musk out

• 🤑 AI Fundraising News

🤖 Top AI News

📜 Google is forging the path to multi-modal AI

Google announced some more exciting research in recent days - one for a language model supporting over 1,000 languages, and a vision-language model combined with robotics.

Universal Speech Model (USM)

Google has announced its Universal Speech Model (USM), a system to support over 1,000 languages. USM is a family of speech models with 2 billion parameters trained on 12 million hours of speech and 28 billion sentences across 300 languages. It is already being used by YouTube to generate closed captions and supports automatic speech recognition (ASR). Google is aiming to use USM as the foundation to build an even more expansive system, with potential applications for augmented-reality glasses. However, there is still a long way to go before this technology can be fully realized.

PaLM-E

PaLM-E is a 562-billion parameter, general-purpose, embodied visual-language generalist which enables robot planning directly from pixels. It is the largest VLM reported to date and has enabled robots to learn long-horizon tasks autonomously. It is trained end-to-end and has demonstrated positive transfer by training across multiple domains. Additionally, it has set a new SOTA on the OK-VQA benchmark and has been observed to maintain its language capabilities when training on visual-language and robotics tasks.

Although they’re slow to ship features backed by these cutting-edge models, Google is paving the way for multi-modal deep learning.

Read more: Article about USM / Twitter thread about PaLM-E

😬 AI is stressing Elon Musk out

Elon Musk is having existential AI angst (in his own words).

In a presentation to Tesla investors about company plans, Elon Musk expressed concern about the potential dangers of AI.

Musk discussed Tesla's ambitious AI efforts, including a humanoid robot and self-driving cars. He also confirmed that he is recruiting a team of AI technologists to build a competitor to OpenAI's text-based ChatGPT.

But despite all of these exciting AI initiatives, he admitted that he was "a little worried" about AI and said, "this one stresses me out.” (sad)

He did offer one suggestion to help address this: regulatory authority overseeing AI development to ensure it operates in the public interest.

Read more: Reuters

🤑 AI Fundraising News

Wunderkind raises $76 million - a platform that enables brands to target web visitors through emails, texts, and other digital advertising formats.

TandemAI raises $35 million - a drug discovery company.

🗞️ Byte size: AI article summaries

Disclaimer: AI is (partially) used to summarize these articles.

Hitting the Books: AI is making people think faster, not smarter [Engadget] - In his book I, HUMAN: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic argues that AI systems are changing our behavior in ways that are not always beneficial. (Read more)

LinkedIn’s flood of ‘collaborative’ articles starts out with AI prompts [The Verge] - LinkedIn has introduced a new feature called collaborative articles which uses AI-powered conversation starters to start discussions between experts on the platform. (Read more)

Governments are embracing ChatGPT-like bots. Is it too soon? [Semafor] - Governments across the world are utilizing AI-powered chatbots, such as ChatGPT, in various public-facing roles, such as government advisers, city and law enforcement officials, and court staffers. (Read more)

🔥 Trending tools & resources

The top 3 tools of the day, powered by Igniter.ai

• Diffuse Bio - Generative AI for protein design. (link)

• Chat thing - Turn any Notion workspace into an AI chatbot. (link)

• Summ - Intelligent question-answering and search for user interviews. (link)

🐦️ Tweet of the day

🤔

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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