🦾 Robot Uprising

New here? Welcome to NAB, and make sure to subscribe for more!

Happy Monday, fellow humans. 👋

Here are some quick facts to get you excited about AI:

In the first half of 2023, VCs dropped $15.2B into generative AI startups.

In the same time frame, the NASQAD AI & Robotics Index is up 13%.

🚀 AI to the moon??

Let’s dive into it…

Have anything you’d like to share with over 40k subscribers? 

Sponsor Not a Bot

🧵 In today's edition:

• 🦾 Robot Uprising

• 🚗 DoorDash helps you decide

• 📱 Intel wants AI everywhere

• 🤑 AI Fundraising News

🤖 Top AI News

🦾 Robot Uprising

Folding socks. Doing dishes. Vacuuming the house.

Basic chores still stump most of today’s robots.

But while they remain far from reliable domestic helpers, Google's new AI system Robotic Transformer 2 (RT-2) brings bots closer to human-like flexibility and common sense.

Similar to how we gain know-how from varied life experiences, RT-2 taps image datasets and hands-on robot demos to acquire contextual knowledge.

What does that mean? RT-2 is first pre-trained on billions of web images and then goes through physical robot trials to understand and manipulate real-world objects.

This allows RT-2 to:

• Follow new instructions and generalize without step-by-step guidance

• Perform complex reasoning - like inferring an energy drink is best for a tired person (drink Prime??).

• Chain thoughts to plan actions - like realizing a rock could become an improvised hammer.

Through this training process, RT-2's success rate at new tasks doubled over earlier systems - improving from 32% to 62%.

Overall: While still far from robot butlers, RT-2 represents a giant cognitive leap for bots. By mimicking multifaceted human learning, RT-2 proves robots can acquire the flexible knowledge to handle basic human tasks.

The hope for Jarvis lives on.

Read more: TechCrunch

🚗 DoorDash helps you decide

Tell me if you know this feeling:

You're hungry, but you have nothing to eat in the house. You open up DoorDash, start scrolling through pages of restaurants and dishes, and decision fatigue sets in.

Sounds familiar? Dw, this is a pretty common issue.

To fix this, DoorDash is preparing to launch DashAI, a virtual bot that lets you skip the doom scroll session and chat with it to find personalized picks for your takeout order.

No more aimless app browsing or options paralysis.

The bot allows you to ask questions like "What's a snack option under $15 near me?" and DashAI will serve up suggestions tailored just for you.

Overall: According to Bloomberg's Second Measure, DoorDash commands 65% of food-delivery sales in the US.

DoorDash intends to keep that lead by joining the AI frenzy, infusing its service with futuristic smarts to keep its edge over Uber Eats and Grubhub.

Read more: Yahoo Finance

📱 Intel wants AI everywhere

Intel is going all in on AI.

In the company’s 2Q23 call, CEO Pat Gelsinger stated his ambition to put AI "in every product we build,” as he sees AI as a "client-centered" revolution, with much of the magic happening on devices, not the cloud.

But that’s not all: Intel plans to release its first consumer chip, Meteor Lake, with a built-in neural processor for machine learning tasks later this year.

What does all this mean?

While cloud giants like Nvidia enable AI in massive data centers, Intel aims to bring AI to the edge - your laptop, phone, and beyond.

And with Microsoft pushing AI features like Copilot to Windows and Office, smart local computing definitely looks like the next phase of AI development.

Overview: Intel is betting it can "out-AI" the competition by putting intelligence directly into its chips and bringing it into your pocket.

Do you think they will succeed?

Read more: The Verge

🤑 AI Fundraising News

QuoIntelligence Raises €5M in Seed Funding to provide cybersecurity services using a combination of AI and human expertise.

Voia Raises $3M in Pre-Seed Funding to enable everyone to produce Hollywood quality videos.

🗞️ AI Quick-Bytes

What else is going on?

1. OpenAI publishes tutorial For AI-generated meeting minutes

2. In AI-enabled drug discovery, there might be more than one winner

3. Revealing the mysteries of ChatGPT

4. The Emmys are reportedly delayed due to ongoing strikes

5. Mobile website builder Universe launches AI-powered designer

6. LinkedIn seems to be working on an AI ‘coach’ for job applications

7. Hugging Face, GitHub, and more unite to defend open source in EU AI legislation

🐦️ Tweet X of the day

💭 Some thoughts on why ChatGPT is “under-performing”

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

P.S.: Check us out on our socials - snacks on us if you also hit follow :)

Pallet Job board | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube