🚗 Hey Mercedes

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Happy Monday, fellow humans. 👋

Hope all the Boston Celtics fans had a chance to wish Steph Curry a happy Father’s Day yesterday.

We kid, but we genuinely hope everyone had a great time celebrating their fathers this weekend.

And Happy Juneteenth!

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🧵 In today's edition:

• 🔈️ Meta introduces VoiceBox

• 🚗 Hey Mercedes

• ✍️ FTC Is Rewriting the Rules of the Internet

• 🤑 AI Fundraising News

🤖 Top AI News

🔈️ Meta introduces VoiceBox

Meta AI continues to launch awesome AI features and papers.

Their most recent release is VoiceBox: a text-guided multilingual universal speech generation system that can operate at scale.

VoiceBox allows for a multitude of tasks:

• Text-to-speech synthesis: provide a 2-second audio sample and use it for text-to-speech generation.

• Speech editing and noise reduction: modify audio to eliminate unwanted noises from voice clips - “an eraser for audio editing.”

• Cross-lingual style transfer: give the AI a sample of someone’s speech and a passage of text in English, French, German, Spanish, Polish, or Portuguese, and watch Voicebox produce a reading of the text in any of those languages

The good: Luckily, the company has not made the model open source, which prevents potential harm and allows for future enterprise opportunities.

The tech can also be used to help those who are unable to speak or for development in AI assistants.

The not-so-good: The AI’s training data, which Meta has not disclosed, raises concerns from voice actors already facing reduced labor costs due to AI generating their voices without compensation.

Overall: One thing is for certain - this technology has the potential to revolutionize speech synthesis and could change the future of human-computer interaction.

Read more: Gizmodo

🚗 Hey Mercedes

Ever felt the need to have a deep, meaningful conversation with your car?

Yeah, me neither.

Yet, Mercedes-Benz has launched a beta program incorporating ChatGPT into its voice control system, MBUX.

This will allow drivers to have back-and-forth conversations with the chatbot while on the road, as ChatGPT's natural language understanding will expand the voice assistant's range of topics it can respond to.

The program will run for three months, and customers can sign up through the Mercedes app or by saying, "Hey Mercedes, I want to join the beta program."

The feature is designed to make “Mercedes cars the center of customers’ digital lives,” but maybe a little too much.

This seems like the equivalent of Web3 trying to overhaul the banking system - i.e., unnecessary.

But we’ll see how it goes over with users in the coming months.

Read more: Mashable

✍️ FTC Is Rewriting the Rules of the Internet

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is an independent agency of the United States government whose principal mission is to enforce civil antitrust law and promote consumer protection.

In the past year or so, the FTC has been very active, trying to rally for data rights and holding offenders accountable.

Now, the FTC has rewritten privacy laws to take on data misconduct after several landmark cases that saw the FTC taking action against Amazon for significant privacy violations, addressing data breaches, and cracking down on kids' privacy protections.

The FTC has adapted existing regulations to include otherwise unprotected medical data and is exploring adding market-wide rules on commercial surveillance and digital security, as current notice and choice regimes rely too heavily on consumers reading lengthy policies.

And no one ever reads those. No one. Ever.

Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, Samuel Levine, believes consumers must be safeguarded from the evolving technological landscape and is concerned about issues related to AI's role in data practices and its effect on consumer behavior.

Read more: Gizmodo

🤑 AI Fundraising News

Mistral AI Raises USD113M in Seed Funding to develop generative AI models.

Reask Raises $4.6M Seed Round to develop proprietary weather modeling algorithms that apply AI to analyze and predict global extreme weather conditions.

🗞️ Byte size: AI article summaries

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

You.com looks to innovation to chip away at Google’s search dominance [TechCrunch] - CEO Richard Socher, who founded the AI startup MetaMind and helped build Salesforce's AI layer, launched You.com in 2020. Socher is not intimidated by Google's search hegemony and aims to chip away at the company's dominance. He also recognizes the importance of focusing on the revenue at this stage of his startup's growth, having raised $45 million. Socher's previous groundbreaking AI research has paved the way for today's breakthroughs, and he is excited to see his ideas put into practice through his new venture. (Read more)

Sober optimism about AI in the EU as new rules to limit it move forward [Semafor] - The European Parliament has moved forward with a proposed set of measures, the A.I. Act, that would limit facial recognition technology and require disclosure of data used to create AI services. The act would be one of the first major global rules on AI. Europeans generally view AI with sober optimism and are excited about how it can be used to address real-world problems like climate change and disease. However, they see regulation as necessary to prevent the technology from going off the rails and causing a backlash against it. (Read more)

🐦️ Tweet of the day

📚️ Pretty good primer on the Generative AI space and where it’s going.

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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