AI

With more than 200 million monthly active users and average session durations close to 30 minutes, Character.AI may be the stickiest AI app. It was co-founded by two Googlers in November 2021 to infuse personalized superintelligence into an entertainment experience. (You can chat with pre-built synthetic characters like fake Elon Musk or fake Paris Hilton, or you can design your own.) Continue Reading →

The European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act (EU AI Act) officially came into effect on August 1, 2024. This landmark regulation sets a comprehensive framework for the development, deployment, and use of AI systems within the EU, impacting a wide range of sectors and imposing new compliance requirements on businesses globally, including those based in the U.S. Continue Reading →

Google has announced a new family of "open" AI models. The company says Gemma 2 models are designed to promote responsible AI development and are available for use by developers and researchers worldwide. The release includes two model sizes, Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B, each available in pre-trained and instruction-tuned variants. Continue Reading →

Yesterday, I wrote, "Get ready to be inundated with hyper-targeted AI-generated bot-delivered messaging. There will be no escaping it. (There's no way this gets regulated or stopped. I won't print the reason here, but if you're interested, reach out and I'll explain it in a private email.)" I had no idea how many of you were going to email and text me about this. So, instead of a private email, here's my reasoning… Continue Reading →

I'm not sure if George Lucas was prescient (or just lucky) when he wrote C-3PO's famous self-introduction: "I am C-3PO, human/cyborg relations." It always announced itself as a purpose-built artificial life form. Ethics? Protocol? Law? Truth in labeling? Requirement? We won't need to recognize the future; it's already here. Continue Reading →

Have you seen Google’s “Dear Sydney” Olympic ad featuring a father using Gemini AI to help his young daughter write a fan letter to Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone? It is one of the most disturbing commercials I’ve ever seen. Continue Reading →

It started in 2022 with perplexity.ai, which (when it was working great) allowed you to do 10 minutes of Google searches in about 10 seconds. Google's answer? AI Overviews, which got everyone's knickers in a knot because there were no links, which meant no revenue for content creators or publishers. Now, there's OpenAI's newly announced SearchGPT, which will not only presents links, but also organizes and contextualizes information with summaries, insights, and detailed answers. To quote Yoda: "Begun, the search wars have." Continue Reading →

I spent so much time waiting for delayed flights since the official release of Meta's new Llama 3.1 that I had plenty of opportunities to run some tests. However, the quality of the model is not the key insight; instead, what you want to think about is Zuck's open source playbook. Continue Reading →

Meta has introduced Llama 3.1, its most advanced open-source AI model to date. Offering significant improvements over its predecessor, Llama 3.1 includes a longer context window (up to 128k), better language support, and advanced tools for data generation and model distillation. Developers will like this a lot, particularly in handling complex tasks and multilingual applications. Continue Reading →

Condé Nast (the media giant behind The New Yorker, Vogue, and Wired) has sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI search startup Perplexity, demanding that Perplexity stop plagiarizing Condé Nast content. Continue Reading →