Greetings, AI Enthusiasts!

Welcome to another captivating edition of our AI newsletter, your inside track to the remarkable world of artificial intelligence. 🚀

This issue explores the busy AI landscape—from pivotal partnerships advancing open machine learning to imaginative new models pushing boundaries while prompting responsibility questions. You’ll get,

🛠️ Useful AI tools & resources

📈 The latest AI trends

As researchers create transformative real-world applications, the immense potential of AI rapidly unfolds across sectors. Join us tracking the future being created now!

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📰AI and Tech Today

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FTC Launches Inquiry into Top Generative AI Creators

The Federal Trade Commission has opened a major investigation into the business practices of leading generative AI companies Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Alphabet. The probe follows several high-profile multi-billion dollar investments and partnerships between these giants of AI research and development.

The FTC is concerned these deals may be stifling competition in the rapidly evolving generative AI sector. Regulators have invoked their authority to acquire information related to the implications, competitive impact, and critical products and services around these collaborations. The investigation aims to understand if the partnerships risk distorting innovation and undermining fair competition in AI. While the companies maintain such deals accelerate progress, they have agreed to comply with the FTC’s demands within 45 days. This inquiry represents the Commission’s broader efforts to promote healthy competition as new technologies create new markets. The findings will shed light on whether the recent partnerships and investments undermine the opportunities for competitive generative AI offerings.

Read the full story ➡

Explicit AI Images of Taylor Swift Spread Across Social Media

A barrage of simulated nude images of Taylor Swift, generated by an AI art tool, recently inundated a leading social media platform. Despite policies against non-consensual fake pornographic content, the images endured for hours before removal. The platform issued a generalized statement about such material but did not address the Swift images directly.

Meanwhile, Swift’s outraged fan base lambasted the platform’s tardy response. They flooded related hashtags with messages of support for the singer to counteract the images.

The incident underscores the ongoing struggle to curb this kind of AI-enabled exploitation as technology advances. It also prompts debate around the accountability of social platforms and AI creators to curb damaging deepfakes and non-consensual content featuring real people.

Read the full story ➡

⚙️ AI Tools and Resources

• Contractable: 💼 AI-based tool that helps create and customize legal contracts easily with natural language.

• HyGen: 🎥 Effortlessly create studio-quality videos with AI-generated avatars and voices, engaging, explaining, and entertaining your audience.

• Speechki: 🎙️ Transform text into engaging audio with AI-powered voices.

• Clearmind: 🧘 AI Therapy for All - Experience personalized meditation, mood-based tools, and emotional tracking to improve your mental wellness.

⏩ Trending in AI

» Hugging Face and Google are teaming up to advance open AI, intending to democratize ethical machine learning through collaboration on open science, open source, cloud, and hardware. The partnership will empower companies to readily build AI using Hugging Face's latest open models and Google Cloud's features, with simplified training and deployment of models on Google's infrastructure and accelerated applications leveraging Google's AI hardware.

» Google's latest AI creation, Lumiere, can generate short, realistic videos of unlikely animal scenarios using text prompts. While demonstrating innovative video synthesis capabilities, Lumiere raises deepfake concerns. Google recognizes the risks of misuse and is emphasizing responsible safeguards to detect bias and prevent harmful applications as this powerful technology advances.

» OpenAI released new embedding models and API enhancements, including two advanced text embedding models, upgraded GPT-3 and GPT-4 preview versions, and an improved text moderation model. For developers, new API key controls enable permission assignment and detailed usage metrics. The updates aim to provide greater capabilities, performance, and cost-efficiency across OpenAI's offerings. 

» Prophetic AI has unveiled MORPHEUS-1, the world's first multi-modal generative ultrasonic transformer aimed at inducing and stabilizing lucid dreams. The device will be accessible to beta users in Spring 2024. The announcement was made on January 25, 2024, and has garnered significant attention on social media.