Meta’s popular instant messaging service WhatsApp is reportedly beta testing a feature that would allow the already integrated Meta AI chatbot to edit and reply to images. The capability was spotted in the WhatsApp beta for Android 2.24.14.20, with AI powered by Llama 3, the company’s newest large language model released in April. The beta version works via a camera button added to the text box for Meta AI chat in WhatsApp. When pressed, the button triggers a pop-up that indicates Meta AI can analyze and edit photos, though it’s currently unclear to what extent. Continue reading Meta AI Image Analysis and Editing Beta Tested for WhatsApp

San Francisco-based optics company Solos has debuted its latest smart glasses, the Solos AirGo Vision, which offer a camera that takes photos and provides computer vision, and integrates OpenAI’s GPT-4o. The AirGo Vision can provide real-time information using visual input, recognizing people, objects and places, and providing information such as directions or instructions. Both the camera and AI functionality are hands-free, making the AirGo Vision “especially convenient for visual progress and next steps on activities like cooking, home improvement projects, education and studies, and even shopping,” the company explains. Continue reading Solos AirGo Vision Smart Glasses Tout a Camera and GTP-4o

New York-based AI startup Runway has made its latest frontier model — which creates realistic AI videos from text, image or video prompts — generally available to users willing to upgrade to a paid plan starting at $12 per month for each editor. Introduced several weeks go, Gen-3 Alpha reportedly offers significant improvements over Gen-1 and Gen-2 in areas such as speed, motion, fidelity and consistency. Runway explains it worked with a “team of research scientists, engineers and artists” to develop the upgrades but did not specify where it collected its training data. As the AI video field ramps up, current rivals include Stability AI, OpenAI, Pika and Luma Labs. Continue reading Runway Making Gen-3 Alpha AI Video Model Available to All

Amazon is increasingly betting on artificial intelligence as the key to its future growth. The company plans to spend $100 billion on data centers over the next decade — significantly more than it will spend on e-commerce and warehouse infrastructure. This is largely due to market forces. Thirty-year-old Amazon rode the e-retail wave to maturity, and the company’s AWS cloud service is now the new growth engine, driving the firm past $2 trillion in market value last week. The fifth U.S. company to hit that milestone is said to be building a new chatbot it hopes will surpass ChatGPT. Amazon also announced it has hired David Luan, co-founder of AI firm Adept. Continue reading Data and AI Propel Amazon to $2 Trillion Market Capitalization

Toys R Us is the first company to use OpenAI’s generative video platform Sora to produce a commercial, or what is being described as a “brand film.” With a running time of 1:06, the spot depicts company founder Charles Lazurus as a young boy, “envisioning his dreams” for the toy store and mascot Geoffrey the Giraffe. It was co-produced and directed by Los Angeles creative agency Native Foreign co-founder Nik Kleverov, who has alpha access to the pre-release Sora. Toys R Us says that from concept to completed video, the project came together in just a few weeks to premiere at the 2024 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Continue reading Toys R Us and Native Foreign Create Ad Using OpenAI’s Sora

OpenAI has acquired Rockset, a database firm that provides real-time analytics, indexing and search capabilities. Rockset will help OpenAI enable its customers to better leverage their own data as they build and utilize intelligent applications. Rockset technology will be integrated into the retrieval infrastructure across OpenAI products, with members of Rockset’s San Mateo, California-based team joining the staff of OpenAI, which is headquartered in San Francisco. This is the second major purchase for OpenAI, following last year’s acquisition of New York-based AI design studio Global Illumination. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Continue reading OpenAI to Expand Data Indexing, Analysis with Rockset Tech

MainFunc Inc. has raised $60 million on the strength of its principal technology — a free, AI-powered search engine called Genspark. The platform responds to queries by writing custom summaries that are presented in a “Sparkpage,” a one-page overview featuring content from around the web. Genspark joins a growing field of generative AI search engines, the best-known of which is Perplexity, which has raised $250 million since its 2022 launch and is currently valued at about $2.5 billion. Reuters says Genspark’s funding values the company at $260 million. Google also offers “AI Overviews” as part of Google search. Continue reading Genspark Joins Collection of GenAI-Powered Search Engines

Anthropic has launched a powerful new AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, that can analyze text and images and generate text. That its release comes a mere three months after Anthropic debuted Claude 3 indicates just how quickly the field is developing. The Google-backed company says Claude 3.5 Sonnet has set “new industry benchmarks for graduate-level reasoning (GPQA), undergraduate-level knowledge (MMLU), and coding proficiency (HumanEval).” Sonnet is Anthropic’s mid-tier model, between Haiku and, on the high-end, Opus. Anthropic says 3.5 Sonnet is twice as fast as 3 Opus, offering “frontier intelligence at 2x the speed.” Continue reading Anthropic’s Claude 3.5: ‘Frontier Intelligence at 2x the Speed’

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

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

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