How many AI models is too many?
We’re seeing a proliferation of models large and small, from niche developers to large, well-funded ones.
And let’s be clear, this is not all of the models released or previewed this week!
Other large language models like LLaMa or OLMo, though technically speaking they share a basic architecture, don’t actually fill the same role.
The other side of this story is that we were already in this stage long before ChatGPT and the other big models came out.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups.
Despite this general downturn, certain segments like generative AI continue to attract significant funding, indicating a selective yet substantial interest in specific AI applications.
AI investment is slowing down for a few reasons, like the crowded market and the steep costs of building big AI models.
Investors are getting pickier and want to see real, solid returns instead of just throwing money at hopeful growth.
(That isn’t stopping them from raising billion-dollar funds focusing on AI, of course.)
New AI models from Meta are making waves in technology circles.
Meta’s new Llama models have differently sized underlying datasets, with the Llama 3 8B model featuring eight billion parameters, and the Llama 3 70B model some seventy billion parameters.
The company’s new models, which were trained on 24,000 GPU clusters, perform well across benchmarks that Meta put them up against, besting some rivals’ models that were already in the market.
What matters for those of us not competing to build and release the most capable, or largest AI models, what we care about is that they are still getting better with time.
While Meta takes an open-source approach to AI work, its competitors are often prefer more closed-source work.
Today, Webflow announced that it acquired Intellimize, a startup leveraging AI to personalize websites for unique visitors.
The majority of the Intellimize team — around 50 people — will join Webflow.
Vlad Magdalin, the CEO of Webflow, said Intellimize was a natural fit for Webflow’s first-ever acquisition because its product meets a need many Webflow customers share: personalizing and optimizing their websites.
Intellimize will continue to be sold standalone to non-Webflow customers, but it’ll increasingly link to — and integrate with — Webflow services.
— personalization product efforts at Webflow.
Last week, Meta started testing its AI chatbot in India across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.
Meta confirmed that it is restricting certain election-related keywords for AI in the test phase.
When you ask Meta AI about specific politicians, candidates, officeholders, and certain other terms, it will redirect you to the Election Commission’s website.
But just like other AI-powered systems, Meta AI has some inconsistencies.
This week, the company rolled out a new Llama-3-powered Meta AI chatbot in more than a dozen countries, including the U.S., but India was missing from the list.
The tools would be part of a wider set of proposals Ofcom is putting together focused on online child safety.
Consultations for the comprehensive proposals will start in the coming weeks with the AI consultation coming later this year, Ofcom said.
AI researchers are finding ever-more sophisticated ways of using AI to detect, for example, deep fakes, as well as to verify users online.
It found that 32% of the kids reported that they’d seen worrying content online, but only 20% of their parents said they reported anything.
Among children aged 16-17, Ofcom said, 25% said they were not confident about distinguishing fake from real online.
As I wrote recently, generative AI models are increasingly being brought to healthcare settings — in some cases prematurely, perhaps.
Hugging Face, the AI startup, proposes a solution in a newly released benchmark test called Open Medical-LLM.
Hugging Face is positioning the benchmark as a “robust assessment” of healthcare-bound generative AI models.
It’s telling that, of the 139 AI-related medical devices the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved to date, none use generative AI.
But Open Medical-LLM — and no other benchmark for that matter — is a substitute for carefully thought-out real-world testing.
Chasing after other popular services in the market such as those from OpenAI, Mark Zuckerberg claimed today that Meta AI is possibly the “most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use.”Meta first rolled out Meta AI in the U.S. last year.
Meta said that it plans to keep Meta AI in test mode in India.
New featuresUsers could already ask Meta AI for writing or recipe suggestions.
Plus, they can ask Meta AI to animate an image or turn an image into a GIF.
All AI things everywhere at onceMeta is adopting the approach of having Meta AI available in as many places as it can.
Meta has released the latest entry in its Llama series of open source generative AI models: Llama 3.
Meta describes the new models — Llama 3 8B, which contains 8 billion parameters, and Llama 3 70B, which contains 70 billion parameters — as a “major leap” compared to the previous-gen Llama models, Llama 2 8B and Llama 2 70B, performance-wise.
In fact, Meta says that, for their respective parameter counts, Llama 3 8B and Llama 3 70B — trained on two custom-built 24,000 GPU clusters — are are among the best-performing generative AI models available today.
So what about toxicity and bias, two other common problems with generative AI models (including Llama 2)?
The company’s also releasing a new tool, Code Shield, designed to detect code from generative AI models that might introduce security vulnerabilities.
The most notable bit of today’s news, however, is probably Nothing’s embrace of ChatGPT this time out.
Think Siri/Google Assistant/Alexa-style access on a pair of earbuds, only this one taps directly into OpenAI’s wildly popular platform.
Nothing says the Ear buds bring improved sound over their predecessors, courtesy of a new driver system.
A “smart” active noise-canceling system adapts accordingly to environmental noise and checks for “leakage” between the buds and the ear canal.
The Ear and Ear (a) are both reasonably priced at $149 and $99, respectively.
