Nvidia has had another impressive quarter. Record revenue of $30 billion in Q2 was up 122 percent from a year ago, while data center revenue of $26.3 billion marked a 154 percent increase from the same period in 2023. The performance was seen by many as an assurance of AI’s staying power, although others raised concern that if the AI companies buying chips do not start generating profits soon, the sugar high of the two-year AI boom could precede a crash. Nvidia took the occasion to tout its next-generation Blackwell chips, reassuring investors that a mid-production “tweak” would not delay release. Read more

Google is giving Gemini Advanced, Enterprise and Business subscribers the ability to create personalized AI assistants, which the company calls “Gems.” “Create your own personal AI experts on any topic you want,” the Alphabet company says. The search giant is also reintroducing Gemini’s image generation capabilities with its latest Imagen 3 model, which will be available to everyone. Gemini, which is Google’s ChatGPT competitor, will again have the ability to generate images of people, something Google disabled in February after controversy over some of the images. The company announced it has implemented new guardrails. Read more

In a move toward increased transparency, San Francisco-based AI startup Anthropic has published the system prompts for three of its most recent large language models: Claude 3 Opus, Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3 Haiku. The information is now available on the web and in the Claude iOS and Android apps. The prompts are instruction sets that reveal what the models can and cannot do. Anthropic says it will regularly update the information, emphasizing that evolving system prompts do not affect the API. Examples of Claude’s prompts include “Claude cannot open URLs, links, or videos” and, when dealing with images, “avoid identifying or naming any humans.” Read more

New York-based ElevenLabs is going global with its generative AI text-to-speech reader app, which can narrate writings in 32 languages with thousands of voices from which to choose. The audio startup promises “high quality, human-like” AI voices that are “emotionally and contextually aware,” adapting delivery of written cues “to achieve a high emotional range.” ElevenLabs has focused on “creative workflow,” with a voice isolator and audio effects generator tools. Its catalog includes the voices of celebrities Judy Garland, Laurence Olivier, James Dean and Burt Reynolds. Custom models for translation and voiceover work using contemporary actors is a future possibility. Read more

Canadian generative video startup Viggle AI, which specializes in character motion, has raised $19 million in Series A funding. Viggle was founded in 2022 on the premise of providing a simplified process “to create lifelike animations using simple text-to-video or image-to-video prompts.” The result has been robust adoption among meme creators, with many viral videos circulating among social media platforms powered by Viggle, including one featuring Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker mimicking the movements of rapper Lil Yachty. Viggle’s Discord community has four million members including “both novice and experienced animators,” according to the company. Read more