Elon Musk’s xAI has secured $6 billion in Series B funding. While the company says the funds will be “used to take xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development,” some outlets are reporting a significant portion is earmarked to build an AI supercomputer to power the next generation of its foundation model Grok. The company publicly released the open-source Grok-1 as a chatbot on X social in November, and recently debuted Grok-1.5 and 1.5V iterations with long-context capability and image understanding. Continue reading Musk Said to Envision Supercomputer as xAI Raises $6 Billion

Meta Platforms has unveiled its first natively multimodal model, Chameleon, which observers say can make it competitive with frontier model firms. Although Chameleon is not yet released, Meta says internal research indicates it outperforms the company’s own Llama 2 in text-only tasks and “matches or exceeds the performance of much larger models” including Google’s Gemini Pro and OpenAI’s GPT-4V in a mixed-modal generation evaluation “where either the prompt or outputs contain mixed sequences of both images and text.” In addition, Meta calls Chameleon’s image generation “non-trivial,” noting that’s “all in a single model.” Continue reading Meta Advances Multimodal Model Architecture with Chameleon

Barely a month after Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses received a major upgrade, adding Meta AI with Vision in beta in the U.S. and Canada and adding the ability to share what you’re looking at on WhatsApp and Messenger video calls, the company is back with another update. Voice command access to Amazon Music and the wellness app Calm, as well as hands-free posting to Instagram are new features, rolling out “gradually.” Simply say, “Hey Meta, play Amazon Music,” or “Share my last photo to Instagram’” to get results without touching your phone. Continue reading Ray-Ban Meta Now Hands-Free with Amazon, Calm, Instagram

Leading AI firms spanning Europe, Asia, North America and the Middle East have signed a new voluntary commitment to AI safety. The 16 signatory companies — including Amazon, Google DeepMind, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, OpenAI, xAI and China’s Zhipu AI — will publish outlines indicating how they will measure the risks posed by their frontier models. “In the extreme, leading AI tech companies including from China and the UAE have committed to not develop or deploy AI models if the risks cannot be sufficiently mitigated,” according to UK Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan. Continue reading Global Technology Companies Sign Pledge to Foster AI Safety

Meta Platforms is testing its own TweetDeck-like app for Threads, the text-and-image focused social network it launched in early July 2023 to rival what was then Twitter (becoming X later that month). The new feature allows test users to pin up to 100 feeds on a homepage and display them on a single screen, making it simple to peruse posts from different follows, recommendation feeds or content propagated through specific topics or keywords. The experimental layout is currently being tested only for Threads on the web. Threads currently has more than 150 million users. Continue reading Threads Tests New Feature That Draws Comparisons to X Pro

TikTok is experimenting with allowing users to upload 60-minute videos. The feature is being tested among a limited group of users in certain markets, with no immediate plans for a wider rollout, according to reports, which couch it as a move to take on the short-form platform’s biggest competitor, Google’s YouTube. TikTok debuted in 2016 with a native video format of 15-seconds, though the company has been expanding permissible durations over the years. TikTok users have reportedly been requesting the ability to post longer content for areas such tutorials, demos and sketch comedy. Continue reading TikTok Tests Long-Form Video That Could Challenge YouTube

IBM has released a family of its Granite AI models to the open-source community. The series of decoder-only Granite code models are purpose-built to write computer code for enterprise developers, with training in 116 programming languages. These Granite models range in size from 3 to 34 billion parameters in base model and instruction-tuned variants. They offer a range of uses, from modernizing older code with new languages to optimizing programs for on-device memory constraints, such as might be experienced when conforming for mobile gadgets. In addition to generation, the models can repair and explain code. Continue reading IBM Introduces Granite LLMs for Enterprise Code Developers

Meta Platforms announced an expanded collection of generative AI features, tools and services for advertisers and businesses. The enhanced AI features include full image and text generation, text overlay capabilities, and image expansion for Reels and the Feed in Facebook and Instagram. The updated tools will be available via Meta Ads Manager through Advantage+ creative. According to Meta: “Our goal is to help you at every step of your journey, whether that’s improving ad performance by helping you develop creative variations, automating certain parts of the ad creation process, or increasing your credibility and engagement through Meta Verified.” Continue reading Meta Launches Enhanced Generative AI Tools for Advertisers

Amazon Web Services has added Bedrock Studio to the lineup of offerings at Bedrock, its cloud-based managed service for artificial intelligence. Available beginning this week in public preview, Bedrock Studio aims to greatly simplify the development of artificial intelligence apps for its subscribers, allowing them to get going “within minutes,” according to AWS. Developers can log in to the Amazon Bedrock Studio web experience using single sign-on (SSO) company credentials “and instantly start experimenting with Bedrock FMs and tools to build applications,” the cloud giant says, describing the studio as a “rapid prototyping environment” for generative AI. Continue reading AWS Simplifies AI Development with Amazon Bedrock Studio

Meta Platforms has rebranded its Quest VR operating system Horizon OS and is opening the platform to third parties. While licensing terms have not been publicly disclosed, Asus and Lenovo have said they’re going to be designing hardware using the system. Microsoft and Qualcomm are also in round one of the companies on the inside track as Meta positions Horizon OS along the lines of a universal VR standard, not unlike Microsoft’s Windows OS for computers. All four companies have already been working with Meta on VR for Quest or its predecessor, Oculus. Continue reading Meta Opens Mixed Reality OS to Third-Party Hardware Makers

Microsoft, which has been developing small language models (SLMs) for some time, has announced its most-capable SLM family, Phi-3. SLMs can accomplish some of the same functions as LLMs, but are smaller and trained on less data. That smaller footprint makes them well suited to run in a local environment, which means they’re ideal for smartphones, where in theory they would not even need an Internet connection to run. Microsoft claims the Phi-3 open models can outperform “models of the same size and next size up across a variety of benchmarks that evaluate language, coding and math capabilities.” Continue reading Microsoft Small Language Models Are Ideal for Smartphones

Pursuant to his goal of “building the world’s leading AI,” Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that Meta AI is upgrading to Llama 3 concurrent with a rollout of its open-source chatbot across the company’s social platforms, integrating it into the search boxes atop WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger. There is also a website, meta.ai, for those who prefer browser access. Reports of Meta upgrading its social AI capabilities began leaking out early last week, albeit on a more limited test scale than what Zuckerberg announced, which, excepting Threads, is cross-platform. Continue reading Meta AI Assistant Is Launching Across Platforms with Llama 3

Meta will release a new Quest educational product later this year. As with 2023’s workplace-specific Meta Quest for Business, the as yet unnamed learning tool will allow teachers, trainers and administrators to access education-specific apps and features, and make it possible for them to manage multiple Quest devices at once. The classroom convenience of not having to individually update and prepare each headset for the same lesson was one of Meta’s key findings in researching what teachers wanted from virtual reality, Meta says, positioning education and training as a growing tech product sector, with lots of app activity. Continue reading Meta Education Initiative Aims to Put Quest VR in Classrooms

Meta is testing a new large language chatbot, Meta AI, on social platforms in parts of India and Africa. The chatbot was introduced in late 2023, and began testing on U.S. WhatApp users in March. The test is expanding to include more territories and the addition of Instagram and Facebook Messenger. India is reported to be Meta’s largest social market, with more than 500 million Facebook and WhatsApp users, and has big implications as the company scales up its AI plans to compete against OpenAI and others. The Meta AI chatbot answers questions and generates photorealistic images. Continue reading Meta Tests Image-Generating Social Chatbot on Its Platforms

In response to a new law that would require online platforms to pay publishers for news summaries, Google announced it is undertaking a “short-term test” to block links to California-based news sources for some users in the state. The California Journalism Preservation Act, which was introduced in March 2023 and passed by the State Assembly last year, has yet to advance to a hearing by the State Senate Judiciary Committee. The still pending legislation would require digital services, including Google and Meta Platforms, to pay a “journalism usage fee” to certain outlets when their content is used alongside digital ads. Continue reading Payment Law Prompts Google to Block California News Links