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☆ Meta and Qualcomm team up to run big A.I. models on phones
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-18 | by ( Kif Leswing | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

But the AI boom has largely missed the companies that make leading edge processors for phones and PCs, like Qualcomm. The announcement on Tuesday suggests that Qualcomm wants to position its processors as well-suited for A.I. If large language models can run on phones instead of in large data centers, it could push down the significant cost of running A.I. Qualcomm will make Meta's open-source Llama 2 models available on Qualcomm devices, which it believes will enable applications like intelligent virtual assistants. Doing this will allow researchers and eventually commercial enterprises to use the AI models on their own computers without asking permission or paying.

Persons: Cristiano Amon, OpenAI's, Bard Organizations: Qualcomm, Milken Institute Global Conference, Calif, Meta, Nvidia Locations: Beverly Hills

☆ Google's top AI researchers, including all the authors behind a landmark paper, have left for competitors. Here's where they are now.
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-13 | by ( Thomas Maxwell | Hugh Langley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +13 min

Top AI researchers have been leaving for startups where their work can have more impact. That frustration over Google's slow movement has been corroborated by other former Google researchers who spoke to Insider. Niki Parmar left Google Brain after five years to serve as a cofounder and CTO of Adept, though in November, she left to found a stealth startup. Lukasz Kaiser left Google Brain after working there for more than seven years to join OpenAI in 2021. Sharan Narang, another contributor to the T5 paper, left Google Brain in 2022 after four years there.

Persons: it's, Llion Jones, OpenAI's, ChatGPT, Sundar Pichai, Bard, Daniel De Freitas, Noam Shazeer, Ilya Sutskever, Sutskever, OpenAI, Ashish Vaswani, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst, Lukasz Kaiser, Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin, Meena, De Freitas, Romal Thoppilan, Character.AI, LaMDA, Elon Musk, Character.ai, Winni Wintermeyer, Thoppilan, Alicia Jin, BERT BERT, BERT, Jacob Devlin, Colin Raffel, Raffel, Sharan Narang, He's, Azalia Mirhoseini, Anna Goldie, Mirhoseini, Goldie, Claude, DeepMind Mustafa Suleyman, Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind, Suleyman, Reid Hoffman Organizations: Google, Bloomberg, New York Times, Microsoft, Street Journal, Neural Networks, OpenAI, YouTube, Elon, UNC Chapel Hill, Meta, Anthropic, Society Locations: ChatGPT, Character.AI, DeepMind

☆ Google killed its Iris augmented reality smart glasses as it shifts attention to building AR software
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-27 | by ( Hugh Langley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Google has killed off a project to build a pair of augmented reality glasses it had been working on for several years. In 2020, the company announced it purchased North, a Canadian startup that made AR glasses. Since shelving the Iris glasses, Google has focused on creating software platforms for AR that it hopes to license to other manufacturers building headsets. Two employees said it's possible Google may resurrect the Iris glasses one day and that some teams are still experimenting with AR technologies. Other teams were moved to work on the software platform and Samsung partnership, they said.

Persons: Iris, Google's, Clay Bavor, Betty, catchup Organizations: Google, Samsung, VR, Employees, Apple, Bloomberg Locations: Canadian

☆ Apple Vision Pro: Impressive specs, new way of interacting could help it break the VR curse
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-09 | by ( Kif Leswing | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +11 min

The Apple Vision Pro is significantly more powerful than nearly all competing products on the market. Huge specsThe new Apple Vision Pro headset is displayed during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference on June 05, 2023 in Cupertino, California. A new interfaceApple Vision Pro Source: AppleJust as the iPhone did, the Apple Vision Pro introduces a new kind of user interface. Apple Vision Pro Source: AppleEye tracking often uses small sensors to see where the user's gaze is resting. The Apple ecosystemApple CEO Tim Cook stands next to the new Apple Vision Pro headset.

Persons: what's, Inbar, Tipatat Chennavasin, Apple, Justin Sullivan, Avi Greengart, Chennavasin, Jamin Hu, Steve Kovach, Hu, Mac, Tim Cook, Sean Mann, Greengart, Mann Organizations: Apple, Engineers, University of Utah, Nintendo, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Sony, Nvidia, Fund, Superventures, Venture, Apple Vision, Apple Worldwide, Apple Vision Pro, Vision, Getty Locations: Cupertino , California, Apple's, iPhones

☆ Apple's Vision Pro will use machine learning to turn you into a digital avatar while you're FaceTiming
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-07 | by ( Beatrice Nolan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Apple's Vision Pro will let users make a digital avatar so they can have more realistic video chats. The tech giant said it uses "advanced machine learning," a form of AI, to represent movements. Apple's Vision Pro headset will let users create a digital avatar so they can have more realistic video chats while their face is partially covered. The tech giant said it uses "advanced machine learning" to represent a user's face and hand movements realistically during FaceTime chats. The CEO later posted a more advanced version of the avatar on Instagram in an apparent reaction to the criticism.

Persons: Mike Rockwell, Mark Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg Organizations: Apple, Morning, Apple Worldwide, Apple's, Eiffel, Facebook

☆ Apple demoed one of its new features by displaying a downright weird message about finding a bunch of raccoons hidden in a basement
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-06 | by ( Pete Syme | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Apple unveiled a bunch of new features at its WWDC on Monday. That included "Live Voicemail" which delivers a transcript so users can decide if they want to pick up a call. One example of the tech featured a man preparing to bathe some raccoons he discovered in the basement. While most people were focused on the Vision Pro headset and its enormous pricetag, Apple unveiled a host of updates to its existing products. But it definitely suits the advertised tone of an urgent phone call, and one imaginative copywriter has brought more eyes to this feature that might've otherwise gone under the radar.

Persons: Apple, –, Craig Federighi, Apple's, Nico Schröder –, Soren Iverson, Nico Organizations: Apple

☆ A new PR tech company just launched that uses ChatGPT to write press releases and lets companies distribute them at very low cost
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( Ryan Joe | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

The company uses ChatGPT and its own algorithm to automatically write press releases. PR tech startup EZ Newswire launched in beta on Wednesday to remove these challenges and give smaller businesses the ability to cheaply write and distribute press releases. ChatGPT alone isn't good enough to write press releases in its own yet, said Klein. At launch, EZ Newswire hosts the press releases on its own site, and has a partnership with the Associated Press to distribute them. In making press release generation and distribution accessible to both big and small businesses, EZ Newswire hopes to blow wide the market around press release distribution.

☆ A new PR tech company just launched that uses OpenAI to write press releases and lets companies distribute them at very low cost
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( Ryan Joe | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

EZ Newswire hopes to disrupt press release distribution, dominated by PR Newswire and Business Wire. The company uses OpenAI and its own algorithm to automatically write press releases. ChatGPT alone isn't good enough to write press releases in its own yet, said Klein. At launch, EZ Newswire hosts the press releases on its own site, and has a partnership with the Associated Press to distribute them. In making press release generation and distribution accessible to both big and small businesses, EZ Newswire hopes to blow wide the market around press release distribution.

☆ How to get Google's new AI tool to write your emails
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-10 | by ( Aaron Mok | Sindhu Sundar | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Google is launching "Help me write" an AI-tool that can generate responses to emails in Gmail. Users can deploy the tool to request a refund for a cancelled flight, for example. The tool also includes a "Refine" feature that can tweak the generated message's length and tone. In a demonstration of the tool, Pichai used "Help me write" to respond to an email saying that the recipient's flight got cancelled. These features, which will be available to "trusted testers," will eventually be part of Google's "Duet AI for Workspace" service, according to Pappu.

☆ Google tells staff it plans to limit publishing AI research to 'compete and keep knowledge in house' as its rivalry with Microsoft's OpenAI heats up
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-04 | by ( Thomas Maxwell | Hugh Langley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Google told staff it will be more selective about the research it publishes. Recently, information like code and data has become accessible on a "much more on a need-to-know" basis, according to a Google AI staffer. LaMDA, a chatbot technology that forms the basis of Bard, was originally built as a 20 percent project within Google Brain. (The company has historically allowed employees to spend 20% of their working days exploring side projects that might turn into full-fledged Google products.) Google's AI division has faced other setbacks.

☆ A former Google researcher behind a seminal AI paper describes how the company lost a top chatbot visionary
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Thomas Maxwell | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Character.ai CEO Noam Shazeer, a former Googler who worked in AI, spoke to the "No Priors" podcast. He says Google was afraid to launch a chatbot, fearing consequences of it saying something wrong. Like the chatbot ChatGPT, Character.ai's technology leans on a vast amount of text-based information scraped from the web for its knowledge. Shazeer was a lead author on Google's Transformer paper, which has been widely cited as key to today's chatbots. Google had also received pushback internally from AI researchers like Timnit Gebru who cautioned against releasing anything that might cause harm.

☆ Here are the top generative-AI startups founded by ex-Googlers that are raising hundreds of millions in 2023, despite a tough funding market
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-29 | by ( Thomas Maxwell | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Google built much of the foundational technology behind today's generative-AI boom. Some Googlers who built key technology are raising millions to start their own AI companies. While OpenAI has garnered considerable attention for ChatGPT, much of the foundational AI technology that made the chatbot possible got its start inside Google. Excited by ChatGPT and the potential of generative AI, some employees from Google have left the company to found their own AI startups with the belief that generative AI will alter how humans and computers interact. Below are some companies that former Googlers founded that capitalize on their work in generative AI and natural-language processing.

☆ Google Bard is already behind in the AI wars with OpenAI and Microsoft
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-23 | by ( Hasan Chowdhury | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Google Bard, the search firm's answer to ChatGPT, has underwhelmed early testers. Users in the US and UK trying out the AI chatbot find it pales in comparison to OpenAI's tech. The makers of the Twofer Goofer word puzzle found ChatGPT was much better at solving the brainteasers than Google's Bard. It's possible that the company does have a super impressive AI tool up its sleeve. Insider's Hugh Langley reported earlier in March that Google employees are testing a more intelligent version of Bard, nicknamed "Big Bard."

☆ Google's AI teams are experiencing a brain drain. Here's where its top researchers are now.
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-23 | by ( Thomas Maxwell | Hugh Langley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +12 min

Top AI researchers have been leaving for startups where their work can have more impact. That frustration over Google's slow movement has been corroborated by other former Google researchers who spoke to Insider. Niki Parmar left Google Brain after five years to serve as a co-founder and CTO of Adept, though like Vaswani she recently left for a stealth startup. Lukasz Kaiser left Google Brain after over seven years to join OpenAI in 2021. Sharan Narang, another contributor to the T5 paper, left Google Brain in 2022 after four years.

☆ A 24-year-old Black tattoo artist explains why she and many others are fleeing Austin: 'The soul of the city has changed'
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-12 | by ( Alcynna Lloyd | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Imani Tatum is leaving Austin after living there for the past three years. "I wanted to create a place where specifically marginalized people could be tattooed, while being safe and enjoying themselves," Tatum told Insider. Tatum said she's done: she's closing Nana's Prayers, packing her bags and heading to a new city in May. But affordable housing remains scarce in the city, and that's driving out many minority residents, like Tatum. While price growth has slowed in Austin, the city's median home price still sits at a staggering $525,000, $140,000 above the US median sale price, according to real estate brokerage Redfin.

☆ ChatGPT is being used to automatically write emails: Microsoft, Salesforce, and TikTok creators are hopping on the trend
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-08 | by ( Kif Leswing | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +5 min

The analysts estimated Microsoft's recently announced generated AI sales features could help it take market share and potentially add over $768 million in annual revenue. Microsoft announced on Monday that it would integrate generative AI based on ChatGPT into a set of tools for business called CoPilot. One of its primary features is using AI to generate emails. Microsoft says that its AI email writer can take important context from the email thread, like the price that was previously discussed, and stick it in the response drafted by AI. Microsoft's feature is currently in beta testing, but will be released to customers of Microsoft's Viva Sales feature on March 15, the company said on Monday.

☆ It's not just Google — closer inspection reveals Bing's AI also flubbed the facts in its big reveal
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-14 | by ( Aaron Mok | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Dmitri Brereton said Bing's new AI chatbot "got some answers completely wrong" during its demo. As part of Microsoft's unveiling of the new tech, Bing's AI was asked to list the pros and cons of the three best-selling pet vacuums. "I hope Bing AI enjoys being sued for libel," he wrote. The AI arms race may lead to the spread of misinformationBrereton's observations come as Big Tech companies like Google and Microsoft enter an AI arms race. While Brereton told Insider that generative AI search engines like the new Bing can be "quite transformative," he noted that releasing it prematurely "could lead to big problems."

☆ Ex-Google engineer said his former employer isn't taking AI seriously after demoing its new tools in Paris
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-09 | by ( Aaron Mok | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Maarten Bosma, an ex-Google Brain engineer, said in a tweet that Alphabet isn't taking AI seriously. Bosma's tweet comes after Google demoed its latest AI tools in Paris, including ChatGPT rival Bard. Some critics called Google's demo "frankly, bad" and a "disaster" amid a growing AI arms race. "I think the Google presentation signaled (rightfully or wrongly) that they are not really taking it seriously," Bosma tweeted. Microsoft' demo "was presented as a revolution," while Google's demo was presented as a "disaster," Marcus wrote.

☆ Microsoft announces its new search engine with OpenAI that promises to be 'more powerful than ChatGPT'
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-07 | by ( Aaron Mok | Ashley Stewart | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Microsoft just announced its latest search engine, the "new Bing." The new Bing will run on a new next-generation language model Microsoft calls the "Prometheus model" designed specifically for search purposes. The search engine will also include a chat extension that Microsoft said can come in handy for things like "trip planning and shopping." Users can "talk" to the search engine by asking it to recommend the cheapest TV when shopping or to create a itinerary for a five day trip with the family. The news comes just weeks after Microsoft announced that it will be investing billions of dollars into OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT-like tools into its products such as search engine Bing, Excel, and Powerpoint.

☆ Oculus founder Palmer Luckey compares Facebook's metaverse to a 'project car,' with Mark Zuckerberg pursuing an expensive passion project that no one thinks is valuable
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-25 | by ( Kali Hays | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Luckey founded Oculus and sold it to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014. He wants the metaverse to be built, but says Facebook's current product Horizon is "not good." Luckey sold Oculus, a virtual-reality startup, to Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion. Luckey was fired from Facebook in 2016, which he said happened because of his political donations to an "unpopular" cause. He said the amount of money Zuckerberg is putting behind the project alone means there's a chance Horizon Worlds will get better and the metaverse will be a success.

☆ This HR tech startup raised a $3 million seed round from Google and Y Combinator without a pitch deck. Here's how.
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-24 | by ( Jacob E. Robbins | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

HR tech startup Pastio just raised a $3.25 million seed round without a pitch deck. Pasito, an HR tech startup, just raised $3.25 million in seed funding on Monday led by Google and Y Combinator — and it did so without a pitch deck. That generated lots of interest from investors, and helped it stand out in a hot HR tech market, Roteta told Insider. The HR tech firm pulls data from across internal records and the US census to pair workers with health insurance and retirement plans. But Pasito enters a hot market for HR tech.

☆ $17.5 billion tech juggernaut Miro quietly snapped up video-chat startup Around in the ongoing battle to catch Zoom
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-12 | by ( Ben Bergman | Melia Russell | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

It was acquired by Miro in June but both parties kept quiet until contacted by Insider. Terms were not disclosed though one source put the value of the deal as high as $300 million. Miro, a visual collaboration company last valued at $17.5 billion, has quietly acquired Around, a next-generation video conferencing app. "A Zoom video call is basically a telephone connected to a video camera," Zane said. "We want to get the community to give us feedback in terms of the problems that we are solving."

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