Earlier this fall, Spotify was found to be developing a new feature that would allow its streaming app users to create playlists using AI technology and prompts.
Now, that “AI playlists” feature has been spotted in the wild, as part of a test that to see how users will respond to AI-driven playlist creation.
Here, a pop-up menu appears and the AI playlist feature is a new option underneath the existing “Playlist” and “Blend” options.
The feature’s description reads “Turn your ideas into playlists using AI” and notes that it’s currently only available in English.
It remains to be seen if and when the new AI feature goes live to the public.
OpenAI formed the Superalignment team in July to develop ways to steer, regulate and govern “superintelligent” AI systems — that is, theoretical systems with intelligence far exceeding that of humans.
Superalignment is a bit of touchy subject within the AI research community.
“I think we’re going to reach human-level systems pretty soon, but it won’t stop there — we’re going to go right through to superhuman systems … So how do we align superhuman AI systems and make them safe?
But the approach the team’s settled on for now involves using a weaker, less-sophisticated AI model (e.g.
Well, it’s an analogy: the weak model is meant to be a stand-in for human supervisors while the strong model represents superintelligent AI.
Instead, it’s settling into a place where its use is already commonplace, even for purposes for which it’s frankly ill-suited.
The doomerism vs. e/acc debate continues apace, with all the grounded, fact-based arguments on either side that you can expect from the famously down-to-earth Silicon Valley elites.
Witness everything always, forever, but if you’re looking for specifics, self-driving is a very handy recent one, as is VR and the metaverse.
Utopian vs. dystopian debates in tech always do what they’re actually intended to do, which is distract from having real conversations about the real, current-day impact of technology as it’s actually deployed and used.
Use of generative AI, according to most recent studies, is fairly prevalent and growing, especially among younger users.
“Distributional is building the modern enterprise platform for AI testing and evaluation,” Clark told TechCrunch in an email interview.
Our platform is built for AI product teams to proactively and continuously identify, understand and address AI risk before it harms their customers in production.”Clark was inspired to launch Distribution after encountering tech-related AI challenges at Intel post-SigOpt acquisition.
While overseeing a team as Intel’s VP and GM of AI and high-performance compute, he found it nearly impossible to ensure that high-quality AI testing was taking place on a regular cadence.
“The lessons I drew from my convergence of experiences pointed to the need for AI testing and evaluation,” Clark continued.
The software offers organizations a “complete” view of AI risk, Clark says, in a pre-production environment that’s akin to a sandbox.
Netflix today announced that it is discontinuing its support for Conductor, a popular orchestration engine for microservices the streaming giant open-sourced in 2016.
While Netflix will no longer be maintaining this repo, members of the Conductor community have been active in promoting alternative forks of this project, so we trust that the health of the community will remain strong moving forward.”One of those companies is Orkes, a startup founded by the engineers who originally created the Conductor project while they were at Netflix.
The team plans to maintain in close relationship with the rest of the Conductor community.
“We are excited to work in partnership with the broader community to ensure that Conductor continues to thrive and this new chapter for Conductor OSS reflects the collective vision of this thriving community,” Orkes writes in its announcement.
This makes it easier for developers to add language models and machine learning inferencing to their workflows by leveraging Orkes’ pre-built integrations with services like Azure Open AI, OpenAI and Google’s Vertex AI.
Palace intrigue might be dominating the news cycle around OpenAI, but the AI startup — and its accelerator programs — are chugging along uninterrupted, so the PR team tells me.
OpenAI today announced the launch of Converge-2, the second cohort of its six-week Converge program for “exceptional engineers, designers, researchers, and product builders using AI to reimagine the world,” as the company describes it in a blog post published this morning.
As with members of OpenAI’s first Converge cohort, the 10-15 startups chosen to participate in Converge-2 will receive a $1 million equity investment from the OpenAI Startup Fund, the $100 million-plus entrepreneurial tranche announced last May backed by Microsoft and other OpenAI partners.
Do the math, and that’s at least a $10 million investment in the Converge-2 program — not an insubstantial chunk of change.
OpenAI is encouraging founders from all backgrounds, disciplines and experience levels to apply, including those based outside of the U.S.
Google’s making the second generation of Imagen, its AI model that can create and edit images given a text prompt, more widely available — at least to Google Cloud customers using Vertex AI who’ve been approved for access.
Text and logo generation brings Imagen in line with other leading image-generating models, like OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 and Amazon’s recently launched Titan Image Generator.
These techniques also enhance Imagen 2’s multilingual understanding, Google says — allowing the model to translate a prompt in one language to an output (e.g.
Google didn’t reveal the data that it used to train Imagen 2, which — while disappointing — doesn’t exactly come as a surprise.
Instead, Google offers an indemnification policy that protects eligible Vertex AI customers from copyright claims related both to Google’s use of training data and Imagen 2 outputs.
After coming to Bard and the Pixel 8 Pro last week, Gemini, Google’s recently announced flagship gen AI model family, is launching for Google Cloud customers using Vertex AI.
Gemini Pro, a lightweight version of a more capable Gemini model, Gemini Ultra, currently in private preview for a “select set” of customers, is now accessible in public preview in Vertex AI, Google’s fully managed AI dev platform, via the new Gemini Pro API.
Citation checking — another existing Vertex AI capability, now with support for Gemini Pro — serves as an additional fact-checking measure by highlighting the sources of information Gemini Pro used to arrive at a response.
Input for Gemini Pro on Vertex AI will cost $0.00025 per character while output will cost $0.00005 per character.
And for a limited time — until early next year — Gemini Pro is free to try for Vertex AI customers.
Confluent, HashiCorp and MongoDB, for example, will provide data to train Duet AI for Developers to help developers with writing code for their platforms.
Google’s overall story around its AI coding tools is essentially the same as from every other vendor.
For now, the company only said that Turing, an ‘AI-powered tech services company,” saw a 33% productivity gain after adopting Duet AI for Developers.
Duet AI for Developers currently supports over 20 languages, including C, C++, Java, JavaScript and Python.
Until the end of January 2024, Duet AI for Developers will be available for free.
One of these services is AI Studio — which was previously known as MakerSuite.
AI Studio is a web-based tool for developers that functions a bit like a gateway into the wider Gemini ecosystem, starting with Gemini Pro and then, at some point next year, also Gemini Ultra.
“We’ve designed it really to be the fastest way to build with Gemini,” Josh Woodward, Google’s VP for Google Labs, told me.
Woodward noted that the team tried to design AI Studio so even the free tier wouldn’t feel like a trial or gated product.
Jeanine Banks, the VP and GM for Google’s Developer X teams and head of developer relations, also stressed that AI Studio is a gateway into Google’s wider AI ecosystem and in particular to Vertex AI, Google’s enterprise-ready generative AI developer platform.
