Google and Inventing Modern AI, Intel Gets $20B, and Playing Video Games for 8 Hours with Your Brain
Google and Inventing Modern AI, Intel Gets $20B, and Playing Video Games for 8 Hours with Your Brain
A few fun reads, industry news, and more.
Morning y’all!
I hope the week is going well and that you’re finding time to rest your body and brains as it is often something that we put on the back burner and the long-term costs of forgetting to rest can take its toll.
This reminder is very much a reminder to self as I’ve been putting in some serious hours in the last 3 weeks and, if I tallied it correctly, I put in 80-90 hours each.
ε(´סּ︵סּ`)з
Even worse is I’m not sleeping too well because of it — the compounding effects of not getting rest make it even worse! Take care my friends and give it a break! I’m going to take tomorrow off and give myself a 3 day weekend. Whoot!
※\(^o^)/※
— Summer
People can’t wait for the next iPhone (16) and the rumors are swirling about size, features, and naturally embedded AI technology — September should be fun! Here some high-levels on what might be coming down the pipe and more specifically the AI tech that may be introduced:
Some of the most persistent iPhone 16 rumours have involved AI. Reports suggest Apple is going all in on AI this year, with Siri said to be getting an AI-powered overhaul. And if a surprising new rumour is to be believed, Apple could even end up working with Google on the tech.
I just bought a new iPhone 15 so I’ll be waiting a few cycles for the next one.
The Biden administration announced it will give Intel a $20B incentive package to boost their semiconductor production. This is the largest government AI investment ever. Yikes. package to boost U.S. semiconductor production, marking the largest government AI investment to date. It will create over 30,000 jobs with the hope of producing 20% of the world’s advanced AI chips by 2030.
Spam, spam, spam! TechCrunch shares that the OpenAI GPT Store is swarming with it. Copyright infringements, cheating and plagiarism bots, and ethically-odd advertising are all part of the playground now.
I think they could have guessed that this would have happened but that’s just me.
Dopt is an AI-powered user assistance tool for better and more personalized user experiences. Apps like this can be very useful for adoption and helping customers get the most value from the product. I like the colors and the logo, tbh.
Music Maestro is a personalized music creation assistant. Yeah, that’s about it. I have a larger collection of music-related thoughts and tools here.
CodeQL sounds neat and very useful — it’s also open source!
Discover vulnerabilities across a codebase with CodeQL, our industry-leading semantic code analysis engine. CodeQL lets you query code as though it were data. Write a query to find all variants of a vulnerability, eradicating it forever. Then share your query to help others do the same.
I’m checking this out in more detail today. Let me know if you do too.
Ubisoft showcased an experimental demo called "Neo NPCs" which is what you might think it is: Game characters that can authentically engage in conversations with players with AI. Interesting take via the Ubisoft CEO:
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot told journalists something before our demo that rings somewhat true, and might set a reasonable expectation for AI NPCs to come: “You don’t have to make them human. You have to say what they are... what’s important is to make sure games become more intelligent, the world reacting more to what you do.”
Oooooooooook.
This news makes me sad because I really like Stable Diffusion, but the team (non-paywall via Forbes) is literally dying with folks resigning left and right.
Now, Rombach and his team add their names to a rapidly growing list of high profile technical departures from Stability AI. Vice presidents Christian Cantrell (product), Scott Draves (engineering), Patrick Hebron (research and development) and Joe Penna (applied machine learning) all left in the last year. Other notable departures include research chief David Ha and LLM leads Stanislav Fort and his successor Louis Castricato. Stability’s VP of audio Ed Newton-Rex resigned in November in a protest against Stability and other AI startups’ treatment of copyrighted data.
Stability has also lost other senior executives including general counsel Adam Avrunin, chief people officer Ozden Onder, COO Ren Ito and vice president of communications Jordan Valdés, who all resigned in the last year, per their LinkedIns.
Destroyed. This is what happens when you have poor leadership because it all starts (and ends) with them, full stop.
Yikes! Would you put something like this in your brain? A new video shows a brain-computer interface on a real human! Nolan Arbaugh, paralyzed from the neck down, is able to control a cursor on screen and even play video games for more than 8 hours at a time before the device needs to recharge. Full video here.
This is a bit of a long read so I’ll leave it at the end here for today’s posts!
Have a good one folks! Get some rest!
✌(-‿-)✌
— Summer