🌥️ Predicting weather

🧵 In today's edition:

• 🗞️ Your Weekly Round-Up

• 🎙️ BWAI Episode ft. Jon Noronha of Gamma

• 🤑 AI Fundraising News

• 🛠️ AI Tools to Check Out

• 🐦 Tweet Post of the Day

🗞️ Your Weekly Round-Up

1️⃣ Your new ‘AI friend’

Instagram is reportedly developing an "AI friend" feature that will allow users to customize a chatbot and converse with it. 

According to app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi, users can personalize their AI buddy by selecting its gender, age, ethnicity, personality, and interests, creating a unique companion.

The chatbot will be marketed as a "friend" who can discuss challenges, brainstorm ideas, and answer questions. 

However, there are concerns that this type of generative AI can trick users into thinking they are interacting with a real person and leave them “vulnerable to manipulation or disappointment.”

Read more: Techcrunch

2️⃣ Snowflake’s latest tool to help analysts and developers

Snowflake announced Snowflake Cortex, a fully managed service that helps analysts and developers work with AI-fueled applications on the Snowflake platform. 

Snowflake Cortex gives Business Analysts three key features: 

• Document AI extracts data from unstructured documents like PDFs and reports.

• Universal search allows users to search across Snowflake data and the marketplace.

• Snowflake Copilot translates plain language questions about data into SQL queries, simplifying data exploration.

Developers, on the other hand, can use Cortex to build applications using Snowflake models or create more customized solutions with external language models. 

Snowflake Cortex is part of the company’s broader plan to unlock the potential of stored data, making it searchable, queryable, and application-friendly.

Read more: Techcrunch

3️⃣ England wants AI in classrooms

England is set to usher in a new era of education with a £2 million investment in AI tools for classrooms aimed to reduce teachers' workloads and enhance the learning experience for students. 

Education Minister Robert Halfon emphasizes that the core objective is to make teachers' lives easier by reducing administrative tasks. 

The AI will: 

• Empower teachers with data analytics,

• Serve as a personal assistant, 

• Encourage collaboration, and 

• Help streamline curriculum development. 

Read more: The Independent

4️⃣ Alibaba launches a new LLM to compete with Google and Microsoft

Alibaba is set to release Tongyi Qianwen 2.0, a language model with eight industry-specific versions tailored for entertainment, finance, legal, healthcare, and more.

This LLM is a substantial upgrade from its predecessor, showcasing remarkable capabilities in “understanding complex instructions, copywriting, reasoning, memorization, and even preventing hallucinations.”

Looks like Alibaba is getting ready to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft, Google, and Amazon in the AI realm.

Read more: Gizmodo

5️⃣ Google creates AI that can predict the weather

Google's latest innovation, MetNet-3, is set to revolutionize weather predictions with high-resolution forecasts up to 24 hours in advance. 

Built by Google Research and Google DeepMind, the model outperforms traditional weather prediction methods, providing precise insights for precipitation, temperature, wind speed, and more.

How does it work? The model uses a technique called densification to merge data assimilation and simulation, producing dense forecasts that benefit from different input streams, including satellite, radar, and weather stations.

With temporal resolutions as short as 2 minutes, MetNet-3 ensures users receive real-time, actionable information.

Read more: Google Research Blog

6️⃣ Underwater data centers

Unsurprisingly, data centers take up a lot of energy. The data industry's energy consumption surged 25% annually from 2015 to 2021, even before the AI boom.

Now, with AI in the mix, the usage has sky-rocketed.

The solution? Subsea Cloud - a startup pioneering the concept of subsea data centers that aim to reduce energy consumption and data latency by placing data centers beneath the waves. 

By doing so, they eliminate the need for electrically driven cooling, resulting in a 40% reduction in power consumption.

Read more: Yahoo Finance

7️⃣ AI music videos are on the horizon

Kaiber, the creative studio behind AI-driven videos for artists like Kid Cudi and Linkin Park, launched an app that empowers creators, musicians, and artists to transform their ideas into animated content effortlessly.

The app includes text-to-video, image-to-video, and video-to-video features, allowing users to either upload images/videos or type in their own ideas to generate animated content. 

Plus, users can add their own music, making the app an affordable alternative for independent artists who don’t want to pay an animation studio hundreds of thousands of dollars for just one video.

Read more: Techcrunch

8️⃣ AI chatbot creator economy

The term "creator" may not be exclusive to social media influencers anymore.

Quora's AI chatbot platform, Poe, is now rewarding bot creators, making this one of the first initiatives to financially recognize the work of AI bot builders.

How can these “creators” earn money?

1. If a bot encourages a user to subscribe to Poe, the company shares a portion of the revenue with the bot's creator. 

2. Alternatively, bot creators can set a per-message fee, with Quora paying them for every message.

Brb, setting up a bot really quick…

Read more: Techcrunch

9️⃣ President Biden’s AI executive order

President Biden issued an executive order this week to establish new standards for AI safety and security, requiring companies developing foundation AI models to notify the federal government and share the results of all safety tests before deployment. 

Furthermore, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will develop new standards for extensive red-team testing before release. 

P.S. We distilled the key elements from the 111-page executive order into a short blog post - check it out here!

Read more: Techcrunch

🔟 Was the UK AI summit a success?

The recent UK AI summit saw global leaders, tech giants, and experts gather to explore the vast potential and risks of AI.

Beyond the calls for necessary regulation (duh), conversations delved into how countries worldwide are prioritizing different aspects of AI development.

Conversations also arose around the advantages and disadvantages of open-source versus closed-source AI solutions and how to integrate AI into our daily lives seamlessly. 

Plus, we can’t forget this exciting interview with Elon Musk!

But the real question is this: Will summits like these lead to impactful regulation?

Read more: The Guardian

🎙️ BWAI Episode ft. Jon Noronha of Gamma

Hey team! ICYMI, our latest BWAI episode featuring Jon Noronha, the Co-founder of Gamma, is out now!

Catch this episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts today!

🤑 AI Fundraising News

• Accelex raises $15M in Series A funding to offer data acquisition, analytics, and reporting solutions for alternative investors and asset servicers, using proprietary AI and machine learning techniques to automate the extraction, analysis, and sharing of difficult-to-access unstructured data.

• Shakers raises $6.4M / €6M in Seed funding to connect companies with digital specialists to work on technology projects, such as app development and data analysis.

• RadiantGraph raises $5 million in seed financing to develop its AI platform that translates medical claims, biometric data, and medication history to improve healthcare consumer engagement.

• Ambient.ai raises $20M in strategic growth investment to develop its unified, AI-powered physical security platform to improve security operation efficiency and gain critical insights.

• Shield AI raises $200M in Series E funding to scale military autonomous flying tech.

• Vespa raises $31M in Series A funding to make it easier for developers to create apps that combine AI models with proprietary data sets.

🛠️ AI Tools to Check Out

• BeforeSunset: An AI-powered workspace for professionals and teams. Check them out!

• Engram: An AI-powered proofreader optimized for non-native speakers. Check them out!

🐦 Tweet Post of the Day

At this point, I think I am obsessed with videos like these 😂