Santa Monica-based AI startup Rabbit Inc. is offering a virtual assistant in the form of a pocket device that the company says can improve upon mobile phones by learning to use your apps and running them for you. Heavily publicized at CES 2024 in Las Vegas this week, the initial run of the company’s r-1 units had as of Tuesday sold out at $199 each. The retro-looking device with a 2.88-inch touchscreen is continuing to take preorders; shipments are scheduled to begin in late March. The company says its proprietary Rabbit OS is the first operating system built on a Large Action Model (LAM) foundation. LAMs are LLMs trained on datasets of actions and consequences. Continue reading CES: Rabbit Launches AI-Powered Pocket Controller for Apps

Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Stanford professor and co-director of Stanford HAI (Human-Centered AI), and Andrew Ng, venture capitalist and managing general partner at Palo Alto-based AI Fund discussed the current state and expected near-term developments in artificial intelligence. As a general purpose technology, AI development will both deepen, as private sector LLMs are developed for industry-specific needs, and broaden, as open source public sector LLMs emerge to address broad societal problems. Expect exciting advances in image models — what Li calls “pixel space.” When implementing AI, think about teams rather than individuals, and think about tasks rather than jobs. Continue reading CES: Session Details the Impact and Future of AI Technology

Impact and opportunity surfaced as the dominant theme of a full day of Digital Hollywood sessions devoted to artificial intelligence at CES 2024. We are in a period of disruption similar to the early 90s when the Internet went mainstream, said Forbes columnist Charlie Fink, moderating a panel of industry leaders from CAA, Paramount, HTC, Nvidia and Google. Yet despite the transformation already underway, panelists agreed that this is neither the first nor last technology to shift the status quo, more the latest example of inevitable change and adjustment. The current conversations around AI at CES are a refreshing departure after a few years of evolutionary, not revolutionary tech confabs. Continue reading CES: Digital Hollywood Session Explores AI at Inflection Point

Volkswagen’s CES press conference on Monday gave us a window into what we expect to see during this week’s CES 2024. The presentation centered entirely around artificial intelligence. VW has partnered with Cerence to speed the integration of AI tech into their vehicles’ in-cabin experience. The implementation touches on combining AI with spatial web capabilities. And VW has worked to make the in-car experience seamlessly compatible with AI-enhanced in-home and mobile device experiences that consumers are embracing. Not once during the presentation did they mention anything about car design or performance other than how it relates to AI implementation. Continue reading CES: VW Press Event Emphasizes a Future Transformed by AI

Intel has teamed with Florida-based investment firm DigitalBridge to launch Articul8, an independent company catering to the GenAI software needs of enterprise customers by offering secure, vertically-optimized full-stack solutions. Intel says the GenAI system can read text and images. It was reportedly developed by Intel to meet the security needs of Boston Consulting Group to run in its data centers, and later scaled for general enterprise use. Articul8 aims to keep customer data, training and inference “within the enterprise security perimeter,” Intel notes, adding that customers can choose between cloud, on-premise or hybrid deployment. Continue reading Intel, DigitalBridge Launch GenAI Software Firm for Enterprise

Apple recently announced advances in artificial intelligence research that could introduce more immersive visual experiences and enable sophisticated AI systems to run on the company’s popular mobile devices. Two new research papers highlight techniques for creating 3D avatars from video content and efficiently deploying large language models on devices challenged by limited memory. The real-time ability to create avatars and 3D scenes from an iPhone camera could bring a range of new possibilities for CE devices in areas such as synthetic media, telepresence, social interaction, virtual try-on and more. Continue reading Apple Unveils New Advances in Artificial Intelligence Research

Google has unveiled a new large language model designed to advance video generation. VideoPoet is capable of text-to-video, image-to-video, video stylization, video inpainting and outpainting, and video-to-audio. “The leading video generation models are almost exclusively diffusion-based,” Google says, citing Imagen Video as an example. Google finds this counter intuitive, since “LLMs are widely recognized as the de facto standard due to their exceptional learning capabilities across various modalities.” VideoPoet eschews the diffusion approach of relying on separately trained tasks in favor of integrating many video generation capabilities in a single LLM. Continue reading VideoPoet: Google Launches a Multimodal AI Video Generator

As the pressure ratchets up for AI companies to go beyond the wow factor and make money, Stability AI has formalized three subscription tiers as it seeks to expand commercial use of its open-source, multimodal core models. The Stability AI Membership offerings include a free tier for personal and research (i.e., non-commercial) use, a professional tier that costs $20 a month, and a custom-priced enterprise tier for large outfits. The company says that with the three tiers it is “striking a balance between fostering competitiveness and maintaining openness in AI technologies.” Continue reading Stability AI Is Offering Paid Membership for Commercial Users

Microsoft has expanded its Models as a Service (MaaS) catalog for Azure AI Studio, building beyond the 40 models announced at the Microsoft Ignite event last month with the addition of the Llama 2 code generation model from Meta Platforms in public preview. In addition, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision has been added to accelerate generative AI and multimodal application development. Similar to things like Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), MaaS lets customers use AI models on-demand over the web with easy setup and technical support. Continue reading Microsoft Brings Meta’s Llama 2 to Azure Models as a Service

Microsoft is releasing Phi-2, a text-to-text small language model (SLM) that outperforms some LLMs, yet is light enough to run on a mobile device or laptop, according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The 2.7 billion-parameter SLM beat Meta Platforms’ Llama 2 and Mistral 7B from France (each with 7 billion parameters) says Microsoft, emphasizing its complex reasoning and language comprehension are exceptional for a model with less than 13 billion parameters. For now, Microsoft is making it available “for research purposes only” under a custom license. Continue reading Microsoft Says Phi-2 Can Outperform Large Language Models

Google personalized AI assistant NotebookLM is an experimental product that has been in early access since July. Now the company is integrating its new Gemini Pro LLM with NotebookLM and making it available to U.S. residents 18 and older. NotebookLM is engineered “to help you do your best thinking,” Google says, with documents uploaded to the service making it “an instant expert in the information you need,” allowing it to answer questions about your data. Unlike generic chatbots, NotebookLM draws responses from the documents you feed it, meaning it will be hyper-focused — a lite version of a custom trained model. Continue reading Google’s NotebookLM is a Personalized Lite Language Model

AMD is coming to market with a new slate of chips optimized for artificial intelligence, including the AMD Instinct MI300 Series data center AI accelerators, ROCm 6 open software stack with new features for large language models, and Ryzen 8040 Series processors with Ryzen AI. The new offerings have received a welcome reception from customers including Microsoft, Oracle, Meta Platforms and Dell, among others that can benefit from building a strong network of suppliers of AI chips. The market is currently dominated by Nvidia, which is challenged to meet existing demand. Continue reading AMD’s New AI Chips Get Welcome Reception from Enterprise

Amazon has launched five new capabilities to its SageMaker service, including Sagemaker HyperPod, which accelerates large language and foundation model training and tuning. Sagemaker HyperPod is said to shorten the training time by up to 40 percent using its purpose-built infrastructure designed for distributed training at scale. By optimizing acceleration, SageMaker Inference reduces foundation model deployment costs by 50 percent and latency by 20 percent on average, Amazon claims. “SageMaker HyperPod removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in building and optimizing machine learning infrastructure,” said Amazon. Continue reading SageMaker HyperPod: Amazon Accelerates AI Model Training

Bill Gates has published his thinking about the future of computing, and fascinatingly, it’s the same as his prediction from decades ago: agents. No mere bots — and certainly not anthropomorphized paperclips — agents (to Gates) will abstract almost all HCI to a natural language conversation with systems that have our permission to take meaningful actions. Gates makes a highly specific prediction: within five years, the very idea of an app itself will seem as outdated as a rotary phone dial does next to an iPhone. A conversational UI will sit on top of a language model that has access to as much of our private data as we wish to give it. Continue reading Bill Gates Imagines Agents as the Human-Computer Interface

Nvidia logged another record quarter, with Q3 revenue of $18.12 billion, up 206 percent from a year ago and a 34 percent increase from Q2 that exceeded both its own and analyst projections. The surge, attributed to increasing demand for the chips that drive artificial intelligence, logged primarily under Nvidia’s data center results a record $14.51 billion, up 279 percent from the prior year and 41 percent from Q2. Profits swelled to $9.2 billion, a stunning 1,259 percent increase from 2022’s $680 million. The results for Nvidia’s Q3 were for the three-month period ending October 31. Continue reading Nvidia Sales Surge as Rivals Circle and China Sanctions Loom