AI News of the week – 28th April – a quick summary
The Week in AI - 28th April 2024
China releases a Sora competitor 🤯. Our favourite wearable of the last year got a new update announcement – Meta’s Ray-Ban sunglasses 😎will now get multimodal capabilities. Perplexity AI got a nice round of funding (Yay!). Elon Musk is raising huge $6Bn for xAI. Cognition Labs is valued at almost 2Bn. (A theme💸is emerging). Google Laid off it’s entire Python Team 😕. Review for Rabbit’s R1 are out. Let’s dive in:
China just dropped their Sora competitor – Vidu. The large text-to-video model can do 1080p resolution clips up to 16 seconds long just via a single prompt. The model was developed by Chinese AI firm Shengshu Technology and Tsinghua University. They were humble in saying that their model’s dynamic capabilities are “very close” to that of Soras. The release was announced via China Daily. Very impressive🔥.
Meta’s Sunglasses was one of the most practically anticipated piece of tech last year. It also got some of the best reviews across the board. And for good reason. With LlaMA 3 now out, Meta has also announced that it’s sunglasses will get multimodal support. This means it will basically be able to identify stuff through the camera – immediately making it more useful than any AI wearable that has launched in this year. They also blow the others out of the water on the style quotient. You can now look forward to translating text, getting contextual information on objects you want to identify.
Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses
Perplexity AI secured $62.7mn in funding pushing it into unicorn territory. They’re building the future of what Search might look like and have the best research assistant of all the others (in our opinion) out there. The money will be used to scale the business and serve Perplexity to an audience of a 116mn folks, up from about 10mn that they currently serve. They will also be focusing on enterprise solutions for knowledge workers. (Good news for us)!
Elon Musk’s xAI is close to raising $6Bn on a $18Bn pre-money valuation from many investors. Sequoia Capital, Gigafund, Future Ventures, Valor Equity Partners and others are likely to participate in the fundraise. The investors will get about ~25% of the company in total. xAI is meant to join the AI arms race alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and others. We’re rooting for xAI as the are committed to the opensource way of developing AI. xAI has been busy. They just released their first multi-modal update – Grok 1.5v and are on a hiring spree.
Cognition Labs, of Devin fame, has raised $175mn led by Founders Fund and is claiming a valuation of 2Bn. This was reported by The Information. Given the recent updates on the unfounded hype surrounding Devon, we’re obviously going to wait for a confirmation. However, Peter Thiel is involved. And we don’t bet against him.
Google laid off their entire Python team as per a post by someone impacted by this. Basically, the team in the US was reassigned and their jobs were given to another Google team based out of Munich. This has been reposted as outsourcing for cheap labour, the killing of AI within the Google team and a bunch of poppycock. Munich may be cheaper than SF, but cost wasn’t is unlikely the primary consideration for the move. This hacker news thread has some interesting perspectives including stories from others who have been through something similar. It’s a complex issue, but Google will be fine.
The Large Action Model is really very interesting and will prove to be something different as we go ahead
The Hardware is top notch
It’s got quite a few use cases and the AI does many things reasonably well
It’s not as real-time as one would expect or like
It isn’t replacing our phones anytime soon
We’re looking forward to MKBHD’s review. Especially after his Humane AI Pin review. Going by a tweet he just put out, we’re not sure it’s going to be all roses.