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Happy Friday, fellow humans. 👋
Wishing you an AI-free (or AI-full, depending on your preference) 4th of July weekend!
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🧵 In today's edition:
🧳 Virtual travel agents
🧑🏫 AI Algorithms: Explained
💰️ Runway Raises Big Round
🤑 AI Fundraising News
🤖 Top AI News
🧳 Virtual travel agents
Booking.com, a leading online travel agency, has announced a new AI-powered trip planner to help users plan their next trip.
By analyzing various data points, including user preferences and past bookings, the AI system called “AI Trip” (2/10 on name, can do better) can provide tailored suggestions for activities, attractions, and accommodations that align with the traveler's interests.
This tool aims to streamline the trip planning process and enhance the overall user experience by providing customized and relevant recommendations.
Best part? The AI system can learn from user feedback and adapt its recommendations accordingly, ensuring that the suggestions become more accurate and personalized over time.
Ultimately, this new AI-powered tool has the potential to revolutionize the way people plan and experience their trips, making the process more efficient and enjoyable.
Ah… I can finally book that trip the boys and I have been *trying* to plan for the last six months.
Read more: Euro News
🧑🏫 AI Algorithms: Explained
It turns out Instagram isn’t actually listening to us talk. Would you look at that.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, released a new set of “cards” explaining how AI systems decide what you see on your feeds.
The cards, which are available on both platforms, provide a detailed overview of the factors that go into ranking content.
For instance, Facebook works as follows:
The system gathers all potential posts by friends and pages you follow
The system looks at who created the post, how you interacted with it, and how many friends have liked it.
These aspects help the AI rank posts based on which you'll find the most relevant and valuable
Posts are shown on the feed
The Card System also gives you instructions on how to “unfollow a person or a group” and how to click "show more" or "show less" on a post to indicate if you like or dislike a particular subject.
Overall: Meta says the cards are designed to give users more transparency into how its algorithms work and to help them better understand why they see the content they are.
But then again, it could also just be Zuck getting ahead of any announcements from the EU’s Digital Markets Act in 2024.
Read more: Engadget
💰️ Runway Raises Big Round
Fundraising news so big it needed a section of its own:
Runway, an applied AI research company building the next generation of creative tools, announced its $141 million extension to its Series C from Google, NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures, and existing investors.
The company made huge waves by releasing Gen-1, a major step forward in generated content that allows users to generate video from an input video, then again with Gen-2, the first publicly available text-to-video model.
Runway also hosted the first-ever AI Film Festivals, created Runway Studios, and launched a mobile app, further expanding access to AI tools for users.
Their goal is to rebuild the “creative stack from the ground up and develop impactful research that will be a major force of change across industries,” according to CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela.
Can’t wait to see what they do with this fresh funding.
Read more: BusinessWire
🤑 AI Fundraising News
Typeface raises a $100M Series B round at a $1B valuation. The company uses generative AI to create personalized brand content such as images, videos, and text, saving time and money while creating more engaging and effective content.
Celestial AI raises $100M in a Series B round to transfer data using light-based interconnects.
🗞️ AI Quick-Bytes
What else is going on?
US considers tightening restrictions on AI chip exports
Microsoft president goes to Europe to shape AI regulation debate
Tim Fu uses "Midjourney for architecture" to transform crumpled paper into starchitect buildings
ChatGPT Creator OpenAI Sued for Theft of Private Data in ‘AI Arms Race’
Stability AI Secures Convertible Note After Fundraising Struggle
BlackRock Joins AI Mania, Calling It a Potential ‘Mega Force’
AI-generated tweets might be more convincing than real people, research finds
OpenAI brings the competition to DeepMind’s doorstep with a new London office
🐦️ Tweet of the day
👀 👀 Interesting…
xkcd predicted AI panic in 2013
— Justine Moore (@venturetwins)
5:02 PM • Jun 29, 2023
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— Haroon: (definitely) Not A Robot and @haroonchoudery on Twitter
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