🤖 This is a HUGE week for AI...

Was this email forwarded to you? Make sure to subscribe for more!

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.

I hope you had a wonderful weekend filled with sunshine and good food!

It was a cold weekend in NYC, but my heart was warmed seeing a ton of new folks joining the NAB community. Thanks to all of you for reading Not A Bot each morning, especially those who share the joy of NAB with others. 🧡

In today's edition:

• 📆 Google says to mark your calendars for Feb 8th

• 💰️ Google invests $300 million in Anthropic

• 🗣️ NAB Q&A: Cristóbal Valenzuela, CEO of Runway ML

Exciting news! We're giving away 10 Google AIY Kits (each valued at $100 USD)! Each kit gives you all the tools you need to build an AI-powered camera or speaker.

For each person you refer to Not A Bot using your custom link (which you can find at the bottom of this email), you get one entry to the giveaway.

More details are at the end of this email. Winners will be announced on March 31st on my Twitter. Good luck!

📆 Google says to mark your calendars for Feb 8th

Let’s the AI wars commence…

Google is holding an event this Wednesday, February 8th, at 8:30AM EST, to discuss how they are using AI to improve how people search and interact with information.

This event follows the announcement from Google CEO Sundar Pichai that they are planning on allowing people to interact directly with their newest language models as a companion to search (we discussed this in our last issue).

The event will likely also focus on improving existing tools such as Google Lens, Translate, Shopping, and Maps.

Fasten your seatbelts, folks…

Read more: The Verge

💰️ Google invests $300 million in Anthropic

Google has invested $300 million in Anthropic, a San Francisco-based AI company founded by former OpenAI researchers. The investment will give Google a 10% stake in the company and value it at around $5 billion.

This move comes amid Microsoft's reported $10 billion investment in OpenAI.

Anthropic's AI chatbot Claude is currently in closed beta and is considered competitive with ChatGPT. It uses "Constitutional AI" which involves supervised learning and reinforcement learning to create a harmless but non-evasive AI assistant.

It’s Google & Anthropic vs. Microsoft & OpenAI.

Random but interesting: Read our issue from a couple of weeks ago about what Sam Bankman-Fried, the notorious cryptopreneur of FTX fame, has to do with Anthropic’s latest round of funding.

Read more: VentureBeat

🗣️ NAB Q&A: Cristóbal Valenzuela, CEO of Runway

Today, I’m excited to share a Not A Bot Exclusive Q&A with Cristóbal Valenzuela! 

Cristóbal (@c_valenzuelab) is a technologist, software developer, and co-founder and CEO of RunwayML (@runwayml).

For those that don't know, RunwayML is a platform for artists to use machine learning tools in intuitive ways without any coding experience for media ranging from video, audio, to text.

It’s used by academy-nominated movies, TV shows, media companies, and creatives in a plethora of industries.

It's also used incredible pieces of social media, such as this:

During our chat, we cover a range of topics, including:

• Runway's role in the future of AI-generated art

• The AI art ownership debate

• Predictions about the future of art

I hope you find this interview as fascinating as I did.

Check it out here:

🗞️ Byte size: AI article summaries

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

Artificial intelligence must be regulated, warns the CTO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI: ‘It can be used by bad actors’ [Fortune] - Mira Murati, the CTO of OpenAI, is calling for increased regulation of AI to prevent its misuse by bad actors.

Inside Safe City, Moscow’s AI Surveillance Dystopia [WIRED] - In Moscow, the government-run Safe City project was designed to make the city safer by connecting 450 security cameras with face recognition technology. Data collection by the project became increasingly opaque following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The project is seen as a tool of digital repression and is connected to 169 information systems, managing data on citizens and public services. The system is run by the Moscow government and is not subject to data protection requirements. Activists are attempting to break open the digital black box, and Moscow police are allegedly using the system to support their war efforts against Ukraine. NTechLab, which supplied the tech for the project, is now facing a backlash for its work with the Russian state.

No Mercy / No Malice [Scott Galloway] - Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, discusses the impact of technological innovation on the economy, using examples from history and the present. In a nutshell, he suggests that technological innovations can bring both prosperity and progress.

University of Texas Will Offer Large-Scale Online Master’s Degree in A.I. [NYTimes] - The University of Texas at Austin announced the launch of a large-scale, low-cost online Master of Science degree program in Artificial Intelligence. This is the first of its kind among elite computing schools and will help expand the AI workforce in the US, with tuition being approximately $10,000.

🔥 Trending tools & resources

• Stable Attribution (link) - finding the source images of AI-generated images.

• GPTravel Advisor (link) - a tool to build a travel itinerary (with links) for any city in the world that is 10x more helpful to me.

• Erica (link) - an AI-based college admissions consultant (coming soon)

Have cool tools to share? Tweet me at @haroonchoudery if you'd like me to include it in a future issue of Not A Bot.

🐦️ Tweet of the day

Yup.

And that does it for today's issue.

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

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

🥳 Google AIY Kit Giveaway

Win one of 10 Google AIY Kits! Each person you refer to Not A Bot using the below link equals one entry. I'll be announcing the winners on @haroonchoudery on March 31st.

(Tip: share your link on socials to get more referrals)