AI News of the week – 12th May – a quick summary!

The week in AI - 12th May 2024

The last week was filled with sick kids, sore eyes and painful throats! But we’re back in action. So let’s try and catch-up on everything of importance that’s happened in the world of AI in the last couple of weeks.

AI Bot fighting against a virus invasions
How I pictured myself battling the virus onslaught!

We’ve got news from Amazon, Google, OpenAI, GitHub and others. This is a somewhat Enterprise themed update. You’ll see what we mean. Let’s dive in:

  • Amazon rebrands CodeWhisperer to Amazon Q – their AI bot for enterprise services. This isn’t news, really, except for Amazon streamlining delivery of their AI services. We quite liked the name CodeWhisperer, but Amazon Q just makes it sound cooler and infinitely more integrated. Check out the update below:
  • Google Deepmind launched AlphaFold 3 that can predict the structure and interaction of all of life’s molecules. This should propel medical research ahead significantly. The true impact of this will be felt in the fields of Healthcare, Insurance and related areas. This is the perfect example of a use-case that even skeptics cannot deny has groundbreaking impact. Whether AI will take all our jobs or not, these are the kinds of advancements in AI that should likely unite us all in hoping for a better future. More on this from Cleo Abram.
  • US Homeland Security put together an AI safety board. Big-wig CEOs like Sam Altman – OpenAI (obviously duh 🙄), Satya Nadella – Microsoft, Sundar Pichai – Alphabet, Jensen Huang – NVIDIA from the tech world and some others like Ed Bastian – Delta Airlines, Wes Moore – Governor Maryland from other areas were also included. In a surprising twist, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk were not included. The Biden administration has given Elon the cold shoulder a couple of times before, but Elon across all his initiatives is definitely a major player in the AI space. And Llama is one of the largest open-source foundational AI models in the world today. Given Meta’s digital footprint, it’s odd that Mark wasn’t part of this list.
  • GitHub launched it’s Co-Pilot workspace. As one of the most popular and widely adopted developer aids on the market, this should be a game changer for a lot of developers. We haven’t tired it yet, but will most likely be using it for our own workflows as we proceed. As an aside – Replit has a similar Co-Pilot IDE. Worth checking out as you can deploy directly there as well.
  • Atlassian launches Rovo. Their AI solution to work across the Atlassian ecosystem. While it may sound like just another AI tool, the truth is, the bulk of the value that AI unlocks will be in the enterprise world. Especially when it comes to very specific work-flows and use cases. That is where the foundation models are mostly useless since there’s a complex maze of work-flows and processes that general LLMs aren’t very good at navigating. Big enterprise solution providers like Atlassian can build on these gaps and create bespoke AI solutions that solve very specific types of problems. Definitely worth noting that one can create AI driven JIRA workflows. For those who have used JIRA – this might just be a God-send.
  • Sam Altman of OpenAI fame has done the podcast circuit recently (as we have linked to some of our fav ones before.) He’s been talking about a lot of what’s to come – including how GPT4 will be the “dumbest model we’ve interacted with till date” and the fact that GPT5 may not even be called that. There were rumors that OpenAI was going to launch a search engine to compete with Google too, but given the tweet from Sam (below), we’re not sure. Which leads us to the count-down for the big event on Monday, 13th May – 10am PT. Let’s see what they have in store!
  • In more OpenAI news: they have announced a partnership with StackOverflow to help empower developers. We always thought that they had scraped StackOverflow data anyway – so we’re assuming this partnership now legitimises use of that data in their model? Hilariously enough once the partnership was announced, Stack Overflow has had to resort to banning users (temporarily) for deleting their answers in retaliation to the announcement.
  • There’s a new LLM in town called gpt2-chatbot. It’s been benchmarking with the biggies like ChatGPT 4 and Gemini 1.5. Since there was no official claim to its ownership, people have been wondering who built it. Given the tweet below is that it’s probably OpenAI (again…). Of course this article also confirms that it’s OpenAI. Fun times to be alive…

Bonus: Just type @Gemini in your Chrome search bar and you can now chat with Gemini! This is the power of distribution at scale. How useful Gemini is given the recent fiasco about major ‘wokeness’ in the AI is a topic for another time. Here’s what we mean:

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