The AI Corps of America, Next Gen Search for Developers, and Anthropic's Projects

A few links and tidbits around the AI space!

Jun 26, 2024

Morning y’all!

There’s a bunch of interesting links for this week’s Hump Day issue and so we’ll just jump right into it, shall we?

I hope your week is going well and that you’re hitting top marks on the things you want to get done — keep going! A little encouragement coming your way.

※\(^o^)/※

— Summer

The Department of Homeland Security has made its first 10 hires for its new AI Corps so that the US can better manage and leverage AI for the government. It’s a 50-person team and here are the first group:

Sadaf Asrar, a former AI tech expert for the National Center for Education Statistics
Zach Fasnacht, previously a senior product manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)
Pramod Gadde, a founder of several health care-related startups, including AI startup Confidante
Sean Harvey, former lead for YouTube's trust and safety team, focused on global elections and misinformation
Jenny Kim, a principal product manager at McKinsey & Co. and an alumna of the DHS Digital Service
Babatunde Oguntade, a senior principal data scientist at CACI International, which supported agencies like the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
Christine Palmer, former chief technology officer of the U.S. Naval Observatory
Stephen Quirolgico, who has worked on advanced technology projects at DHS, NIST and DARPA
Raquel Romano, a senior director of engineering at Fora and a U.S. Digital Service alumna
Robin Rosenberger, a director in the Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office

So… exciting.

Ben has some thoughts about Apple and their approach to GenAI:

As I said at the beginning, that’s really the single core question about the future of Generative AI - is this a new general purpose tool, where one product from one company does the work of hundreds of pieces of software from hundreds of companies, or is this a generic technology that will enable features inside products from hundreds or thousands of companies?

Time will definitely tell; perhaps sooner rather than later.

Popular developer swyx shares some thoughts on AI and career opportunities for traditional software engineers who want to transition a bit more into this wild and wooly new world.

Multi is being acquired by OpenAI and the app is pretty neat: Multiplayer for software engineers and teams. Essentially really good screensharing and collaboration.

An AI copilot for Instagram. That’s about it.

Devv is a next-gen search engine for developers. Take a look!

Google (and Gemini) is coming to students and Chrome. Attacking this industry makes sense since getting students fixed into these product early will ensure that they’ll keep using them into their professional lives.

This isn’t a surprise:

Amazon is reportedly developing an AI chatbot called "Metis" to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT, expected to be unveiled later this year. The chatbot, which will be accessible via web browser, will utilize a new foundational model and share infrastructure with "Remarkable Alexa," Amazon's upcoming paid-tier.

Hopefully it’s not as bad as Alexa.

Biotech startup EvolutionaryScale just launched ESM3, a new AI model capable of designing and simulating new proteins in ways that mimic millions of years of natural evolution. 500 million years to be a bit more precise.

Anthropic just launched a new feature for its Claude AI assistant called ‘Projects’, allowing users to better organize files, chats, and info within a single location for more personalized conversations. You can apparently drag-drop and that’s dope.

Etched is going to take on NVIDIA with $120m line of capital.

Train your own AI model for your own unique brand voice. Not a terrible how-to on defining voice, setting objectives, selecting the right composition, etc.