Ilya Sutskever — who last month exited his post as chief scientist at OpenAI after a highly publicized power struggle with CEO Sam Altman — has launched a new AI company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. Sutskever’s partners in the new venture are his former OpenAI colleague Daniel Levy and Daniel Gross, who founded the AI startup Cue, which was acquired by Apple where Gross continued in an AI leadership role. “Building safe superintelligence (SSI) is the most important technical problem of our​​ time,” the trio posted on the company’s one-page website, stating its goal is to “scale in peace.” Continue reading Sutskever Targets Safe Superintelligence with New Company

CuspAI, a UK startup that aims to help engineer sustainable materials, has raised $30 million from venture funds in Europe and the U.S., secured a partnership with Meta’s FAIR unit, and employed the advisory services of AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton in its mission to tackle climate change. “CuspAI leverages cutting-edge generative AI, deep learning, and molecular simulation to streamline the material design process,” the company announced. Its platform “functions like a search engine for materials, allowing users to request specific properties for new materials on demand,” speeding the process of “the discovery of materials with precise functionalities.” Continue reading Green Startup CuspAI Secures $30 Million, Meta Partnership

Meta Platforms is publicly releasing five new AI models from its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team, which has been experimenting with artificial intelligence since 2013. These models including image-to-text, text-to-music generation, and multi-token prediction tools. Meta is introducing a new technique called AudioSeal, an audio watermarking technique designed for the localized detection of AI-generated speech. “AudioSeal makes it possible to pinpoint AI-generated segments within a longer audio snippet,” according to Meta. The feature is timely in light of concern about potential misinformation surrounding the fall presidential election. Continue reading Meta’s FAIR Team Announces a New Collection of AI Models

YouTube is experimenting with a feature that allows viewers to add contextual “Notes” under videos, similar to what X does with its Community Notes. The Google-owned company says the intent is to provide clarity around things like “when a song is meant to be a parody,” when newly reviewed products are available for purchase, or “when older footage is mistakenly portrayed as a current event.” However, the timing preceding a pivotal U.S. presidential election and facing concerns about deepfakes and  misinformation is no doubt intentional. The pilot will initially be available on mobile in the United States. Continue reading YouTube to Tackle Misinformation with Crowdsourced Notes

Runway ML has introduced a new foundation model, Gen-3 Alpha, which the company says can generate high-quality, realistic scenes of up to 10 seconds long from text prompts, still images or a video sample. Offering a variety of camera movements, Gen-3 Alpha will initially roll out to Runway’s paid subscribers, but the company plans to add a free version in the future. Runway says Gen-3 Alpha is the first of a new series of models trained on the company’s new large-scale multimodal infrastructure, which offers improvements “in fidelity, consistency, and motion over Gen-2,” released last year. Continue reading Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha Creates AI Videos Up to 10-Seconds

Google DeepMind has unveiled new research on AI tech it calls V2A (“video-to-audio”) that can generate soundtracks for videos. The initiative complements the wave of AI video generators from companies ranging from biggies like OpenAI and Alibaba to startups such as Luma and Runway, all of which require a separate app to add sound. V2A technology “makes synchronized audiovisual generation possible” by combining video pixels with natural language text prompts “to generate rich soundscapes for the on-screen action,” DeepMind writes, explaining that it can “create shots with a dramatic score, realistic sound effects or dialogue.” Continue reading DeepMind’s V2A Generates Music, Sound Effects, Dialogue

Nvidia is expanding its substantive influence in the AI sphere with Nemotron-4 340B, a family of open models designed to generate synthetic LLM training data for commercial applications across numerous fields. Through what Nvidia is calling a “uniquely permissive” free open model license, Nemotron-4 340B provides a scalable way for developers to build LLMs. Synthetic data is artificially generated data designed to mimic the characteristics and structure of data found in the real world. The offering is being called “groundbreaking” and an important step toward the democratization of artificial intelligence. Continue reading Nvidia’s Open Models to Provide Free Training Data for LLMs

Zeta Labs has raised $2.9 million in pre-seed round funding and launched JACE, an AI assistant that can autonomously complete complex tasks. The LLM-powered JACE agent executes in-browser actions on command. In fact, Zeta claims JACE is so autonomous that it eliminates the need to be sitting in front of a computer while it executes requests — just tell it what you’d like it to do and let it go. London-based Zeta says it will use the money to expand its engineering team, host training models and improve JACE’s speed and reliability. Continue reading UK’s Zeta Labs Unveils JACE, a Next Generation AI Assistant

Amazon has earmarked $230 million to invest in generative AI startups worldwide, providing funding in the form of “AWS credits, mentorship, and education to further their use of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.” The initiative will cast a global net, focusing on early-stage companies. About $80 million of that allocation will fund the second cohort of the AWS Generative AI Accelerator, which provides up to $1 million in credits “to each of the top 80 early-stage startups that are using generative AI to solve complex challenges.” Applications for the AWS Accelerator are open through July 19. Continue reading Amazon Commits $230M in AWS Credits for GenAI Startups

Yahoo announced it is bringing new AI features to its news and mail platforms. Its reimagined news app leverages tech acquired when it purchased news aggregator Artifact this spring. Greater personalization and a more intuitive UI are among the upgrades, which include feed customization, summaries of articles and top stories and improved sharing tools. Yahoo says all of this will allow users to make its news aggregator feed a more individualized experience that improves with use. Artifact creators Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, who co-founded Instagram, announced plans in January to shutter the AI-powered news app. Continue reading Yahoo Upgrades Its News and Mail Apps with AI Technology

Northern California startup Luma AI has released Dream Machine, a model that generates realistic videos from text prompts and images. Built on a scalable and multimodal transformer architecture and “trained directly on videos,” Dream Machine can create “action-packed scenes” that are physically accurate and consistent, says Luma, which has a free version of the model in public beta. Dream Machine is what Luma calls the first step toward “a universal imagination engine,” while others are calling it “powerful” and “slammed with traffic.” Though Luma has shared scant details, each posted sequence looks to be about 5 seconds long. Continue reading Luma AI Dream Machine Video Generator in Free Public Beta

China’s Kuaishou Technology has a video generator called Kling AI in public beta that is getting great word-of-mouth, with comments from “incredibly realistic” to “Sora killer,” a reference to OpenAI’s still in closed beta video generator. Kuaishou claims that using only text prompts, Kling can generate “AI videos that closely mimic the real world’s complex motion patterns and physical characteristics,” in sequences as long as two minutes at 30 fps and 1080p, while supporting various aspect ratios. Kuaishou is China’s second most popular short-form video app, after ByteDance’s Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. Continue reading ByteDance Rival Kuaishou Creates Kling AI Video Generator

Apple has entered into a deal with OpenAI to deliver GTP-4o to its devices, which beginning this fall will feature Apple Intelligence, or “AI.” Announced during this week’s WWDC 2024, Apple Intelligence is “deeply integrated into iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia,” according to the company. The new AI features will be available to users of the iPhone 15 Pro, or any devices powered by M1 or newer chips “to understand and create language and images, take action across apps, and draw from personal context to simplify and accelerate everyday tasks.” Continue reading WWDC: Apple Intelligence Brings AI to iPhone, iPad and Mac

Work management platform Asana is attempting to rebrand the “AI assistant” as “AI teammates” — custom assistants designed to execute key parts of workflows. Currently in beta, AI teammates are more collaborative and goal-oriented and able to “take action with the relevant context and rules of engagement,” Asana explains, contrasting that with “other AI solutions that aimlessly scour data and take action based on unreliable information.” The firm is also debuting a conversational AI chat agent that can answer questions such as: “What blockers are putting this goal at risk?” or “Who at my company knows about this topic?” Continue reading Asana’s Customizable AI Teammates Work Alongside Humans

Stability AI has added another audio product to its lineup, releasing the open-source text-to-audio generator Stable Audio Open 1.0 for sound design. The new model can generate up to 47 seconds of samples and sound effects, including drum beats, instrument riffs, ambient sounds, foley and production elements. It also allows for adapting variations and changing the style of audio samples. Stability AI — best known for the image generator Stable Diffusion — in September released Stable Audio, a commercial product that can generate sophisticated music tracks of up to three minutes. Continue reading Stability AI Releases Free Sound FX Tool, Stable Audio Open