Weekly roundup — The top AI stories you might have missed: - Natural language processing startup AI21 Labs secured a $64M funding round at a $664M valuation. Tel Aviv-based AI21 Labs is focused on both AI research and commercial applications. It created AI21 Studio, a platform for developers to build chatbots and other text-based applications.
- Volunteer researchers released an open-source large language model, Bloom, that's free to try and download on Hugging Face's website. The text-prediction model can write and summarize texts, create poems and recipes, output code, and more. At 176 billion parameters, Bloom is similar in size to OpenAI's GPT-3.
- Tesla senior AI director Andrej Karpathy announced he is leaving the company. Karpathy led the computer vision team for Autopilot. In addition, records confirmed Tesla laid off 229 employees at its now-shuttered San Mateo office, many of whom were data labelers on the Autopilot team.
- Greece's data protection authority fined U.S. facial recognition firm Clearview AI $20.1M and ordered it to delete and stop collecting and processing the data of its citizens. The Athens-based agency found that Clearview violated articles of the EU's GDPR data protection rules. Similar sanctions have been made against Clearview by privacy regulators in the U.K., Italy, and Australia.
- Meta introduced Make-A-Scene, an AI-powered image generator that lets people combine freeform sketches and text inputs to produce their own art and other images. It is similar to OpenAI's Dalle-E 2 but adds the ability to sketch a design for users to be more specific. The model is an "AI research concept" and is not available to the public yet.
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Phaidra, a startup supplying AI software to curb energy consumption at power plants and other industrial facilities, recently closed $25M in Series A funding. Phaidra co-founders Jim Gao and Vedavyas Panneershelvam previously led energy efforts at Alphabet's DeepMind AI lab. Phaidra worked with DeepMind to manage temperature control at Google data centers, leading to a 40% cooling energy reduction. More: - Phaidra claims its system can reduce a plant's energy consumption by as much as 30%. It has since expanded its technology for use by pharmaceutical plants, steel mills, chemicals plants, and other "mission-critical industries."
- The company says it uses reinforcement learning algorithms to select the best temperatures to improve energy efficiency, thermal stability, and more.
- Its cloud-based service integrates with existing control systems to analyze sensor data. Using that data, the closed-loop AI control system automatically controls and optimizes facilities. It learns and self-improves over time.
- Phaidra also hired Johnson Controls SVP Robert Locke as president and chief strategy officer.
BLOOMBERG 
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 DALL-E Mini's developer has renamed the publicly available text-to-image generator at the request of DALL-E's creator OpenAI. Now called "Craiyon," the spin-off app pays homage to DALL-E and DALL-E 2 but is freely available to use. More: - Craiyon is computer engineer Boris Dayma's own reproduction of the art generator for anyone to use through an easily accessible web app.
- Since it has no relation to OpenAI or DALL-E, it appears that the AI company requested that Dayma change the name.
- Craiyon generates nine different pictures based on a single text prompt. It has become popular on social media for people to show off their own AI-generated art.
- Meanwhile, OpenAI has granted access to DALL-E to select people, such as artists and developers, so far. CEO Sam Altman recently tweeted that the AI research lab is "working hard" on opening up public access to DALL-E, and it should not be "too much longer."
CNN
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The Mark Cuban AI Bootcamp for high school students is now accepting applications through Sept. 1. The program will teach basic AI skills and concepts to underserved students over four consecutive Saturdays in October and November. More: - During the half-day sessions, students will watch live-streamed presentations and learn from volunteer instructors. They'll also work with Microsoft's cloud computing platform to build their own Al applications for chatbots, computer visions, ML, and natural language processing.
- The Bootcamp also introduces students to the ethical implications of AI, as shown through TikTok recommendations, smart home assistants, self-driving cars, and other technology.
- No prerequisite courses or coding knowledge is required. Students must be in grades 9-12 and live within a 15-20 mile radius of a U.S. host city. (The list of 30 host cities for fall 2022 is available here.)
- The Mark Cuban Foundation provides all the curriculum materials and recruits and selects students. It also works with host companies to provide food, laptop access, and more to students.
- The foundation said it has impacted 450+ students to date. The goal is to have 1,000 students graduate from its Al Bootcamp in 2023.
KHON2
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IT consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton launched a $100M venture capital fund to invest in early-stage companies focused on AI/ML, defense, cybersecurity, and deep tech. The VC arm, Booz Allen Ventures, will invest on behalf of the federal defense contractor in "strategic" defensive and offensive technologies, which could in turn support Booz Allen's government clients. More: - Booz Allen Ventures will provide capital as well as access to its client, executive, and engineering teams and potential contracts with its customers.
- It plans to invest in four to six companies (seed, Series A, and Series B) per year. Dollar amounts will range from the hundreds of thousands to the low millions. It could reinvest earned funds and expand to more technologies in the future.
- The fund builds on Booz Allen's tech scouting efforts, where it has recently backed other AI companies, including Synthetaic, Latent AI, and Reveal Technology.
Zoom-out: - The defense industry is hoping to fund more companies developing new AI and other capabilities, according to Booz Allen's Brian MacCarthy.
- He cited the National Security Commission on AI's 2021 report, which calls for additional major AI R&D investments to the tune of $32B per year by 2026.
- Last year, Booz Allen Hamilton spun out its deep tech software platform, Modzy, into a standalone company. It still has a minority stake in the MLOps specialist.
DEFENSE NEWS
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Amazon's doorbell-camera company, Ring, declined a U.S. senator's request to never incorporate AI voice recognition into its products. In June, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) sent a letter to Ring seeking more information about its relationship with police agencies and consumer surveillance issues. More: - Markey asked Ring if it would commit to never adding voice recognition tech to its internet-connected doorbells with cameras and other surveillance products.
- Ring only answered that it "does not currently offer voice recognition."
- The company previously declined to make the same commitment to never use facial recognition technology, according to Markey.
- Ring also told Markey that it provided customer video footage to law enforcement without a warrant or consent 11 times in the first six months of 2022. They were a response to emergency disclosure requests filed by police.
- Markey used the occasion to call on Congress to pass the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, which he introduced alongside other lawmakers last year. The bill seeks to ban federal use of biometric technologies like facial recognition and limit federal grant funding to state and local governments that don't place moratoriums on the tech.
Related: - Amazon has been granted at least 17 patents that mention facial recognition for its Ring products.
- The technology, which may or may not come to fruition, could help identify "suspicious" people in neighborhoods. The patents describe using facial, voice, palm, finger, retina, iris, typing, and "gait" recognition.
GIZMODO
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- Prosus Ventures led a $28M Series B funding round into AI-based SaaS enterprise Detect Technologies, an Indian cloud-based applications developer.
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 |  | Beth is a writer and analyst at Inside.com covering artificial intelligence and daily tech news. Since starting work at Inside, she has covered various topics including virtual reality, drones, and e-commerce. Prior to that she was a public policy and investigative reporter for The Arizona Republic, where she won a Pulitzer Prize nomination and First Amendment Award for reporting on the rising costs of pensions. Reach her at Beth.Duckett@inside.com. |   | | Editor | Aaron Crutchfield is based in the high desert of California. Over the last two decades, he has spent time writing and editing at various local newspapers and defense contractors in California. When he's not working, he can often be found looking at the latest memes with his kids or working on his 1962 Ford. | |
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