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| Here's a look at today's AI briefing: - AI coding startup Cognition in talks to raise funds at $2B valuation.
- U.S. and U.K. sign AI safety agreement.
- Google's AI-powered search produces inaccurate answers, testing shows.
- Apple develops AI system for more natural Siri interactions.
- Yum Brands incorporating AI across its operations.
Beth
p/beth-duckett | |
| 1 | | Cognition Labs, known for its AI code-writing tool, is in talks with investors to raise funds at a valuation of up to $2B, according to the Wall Street Journal. The startup was valued at $350M earlier this year after raising a $21M Series A funding round led by the Peter Thiel-founded Founders Fund. More: - Silicon Valley venture firms, including Founders Fund, are now in discussions to invest in Cognition's current funding round.
- Its potential $2B valuation would mark a sixfold increase in weeks, with reports suggesting the startup has declined offers at a $1B valuation.
- Originally founded as a crypto company, Cognition redirected its focus to AI to capitalize on the increasing interest in technology.
Zoom out: - Cognition recently unveiled Devin, its AI coding tool built on OpenAI technology.
- Devin, dubbed "the world's first fully autonomous AI software engineer," can handle more complex coding tasks like crafting personalized websites.
- While Chatbots like ChatGPT can generate code, Devin also determines solutions and can write, test, and implement the code.
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| 2 | | The U.S. and the U.K. have partnered to pool talent and knowledge on AI and test the risks of advanced AI models. The agreement marks the world's first bilateral arrangement on AI safety. More: - U.K. Science Minister Michelle Donelan and U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo signed the agreement on Monday.
- Under the terms, the U.K.'s new AI Safety Institute and its yet-to-begin U.S. equivalent will share knowledge and exchange researchers for temporary assignments.
- The institutes will also collaborate on independently evaluating private AI models.
- The partnership is structured similarly to the tie-up between the U.K.'s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).
- Donelan told FT they need to act quickly because the next generation of AI models could be "game-changers," with capabilities yet to be fully understood.
Zoom out: - In November, the U.S., U.K., and other global powers released non-binding guidelines for how companies should develop and deploy AI models.
- While not legally binding, the agreement offers general recommendations, including monitoring AI model infrastructure, vetting software suppliers, detecting tampering pre and post-release, and training staff on cybersecurity.
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| 3 | | Google's AI-powered search can produce inaccurate information, including fabricated facts and outdated data, while favoring lower-quality websites as sources, according to The Washington Post. Google has been testing its "experimental" AI version of Google Search for nearly a year, recently expanding it to more users. 
Background: The AI search feature, called Search Generative Experience (SGE), was previously only available to people who signed up to test it. Now, some U.S. Google users are getting AI responses on specific topics even without signing up, suggesting Google could roll out the feature to the public at some point. What happened: The Washington Post's Help Desk chose to test out the new AI Search and found that it sometimes "makes up facts, misinterprets questions, delivers out-of-date information and just generally blathers on." SGE fabricated details, such as saying there were "long lines and crazy wait times" for a non-existent restaurant in San Francisco. In some cases, the AI Search did worse in surfacing correct answers than regular Google Search. Its answers were significantly longer, as SE Ranking tested 100,000 keyword queries and found that the average AI answer spanned 3,485 characters, longer than a one-spaced page. SE Ranking also revealed social Q&A site Quora as the most-linked source by SGE, with LinkedIn and Reddit ranking fifth and sixth, raising concerns about the quality of answers. Response: Elizabeth Reid, a Google VP in charge of SGE, told the Post that SGE remains a work in progress while acknowledging "there are times the AI is helpful and other times it's not." Reid said SGE's hallucination rates have dropped significantly since May, but didn't give exact numbers. Google also disagreed with SE Ranking's research on SGE's use of low-quality sources, saying it didn't reflect real-world searches. What brand should care: While still the dominant global search engine, Google faces competition from Perplexity, a generative AI search engine positioning itself as a Google rival. Perplexity, which recently secured a $73.6M funding round from investors like Jeff Bezos, uses AI to provide answers sourced from the web and is about to sell advertising for the first time. | | | |
| 4 | | Apple researchers developed an AI system that can facilitate more natural interactions with Siri. The ReALM system, or Reference Resolution As Language Modeling, converts context into text for easier processing by large language models. More: - ReALM uses large language models to make it easier to figure out what visual elements on a screen are being talked about, turning it into a simple language task.
- The system can comprehend ambiguous references to on-screen entities and contextual cues, allowing for more natural interactions with voice assistants.
- The smallest ReALM models showed comparable performance to OpenAI's GPT-4 but with significantly fewer parameters, making them suitable for on-device applications.
- When ReALM's parameters were increased, the models significantly outperformed GPT-4.
Zoom out: - The Apple researchers pointed out that dealing with complex visual references, such as distinguishing between multiple images, would probably require integrating computer vision and multi-modal AI techniques.
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| 5 | | Yum Brands, owner of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC, is investing more in AI and automation to cut costs and boost sales, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company is testing generative AI in its mobile app for restaurant managers and voice AI for taking orders from customers in drive-thrus, among other initiatives. More: - Yum Brands had added generative AI to its SuperApp to answer employee questions.
- The company is also testing AI to recommend supply orders, optimize menu offerings and pricing, and deliver personalized offers to customers based on data.
- Yum is also using image-recognition AI to count vehicles in its drive-thrus and digital tools to manage kitchen appliances.
- Yum Brands said it invested $21M in digital, tech, and innovation capabilities last year, up from $11M in 2022.
- "If you think about the major journeys within a restaurant that can be AI-powered, we believe it's endless," Yum's chief digital and technology manager Joe Park told the WSJ.
Zoom out: - California's new $20 per hour minimum wage law for fast-food workers has spurred some operators to adopt AI to cut costs and increase sales.
- A fully autonomous restaurant powered by AI opened this year in Pasadena, California. The "CaliExpress by Flippy" restaurant has a "BurgerBot" for grilling patties and a short-order cooking robot called Flippy, developed by Miso Robotics.
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| 6 | | AI Events and Conferences: - World Summit AI Americas: April 24-25, Montreal.
- Data Innovation Summit: April 24-25, Stockholm and online.
- Rise of AI Conference: May 14-15, Berlin, Germany, and virtual.
- Enterprise Generative AI Summit West Coast: May 21-22, Silicon Valley, California.
- AI Expo Tokyo: May 22-24, Tokyo.
- Data Cloud Summit 2024: June 3-6, San Francisco.
- SuperAI: June 5-6, Singapore.
- The AI Summit London: June 12-13, London, U.K.
- 2024 IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence: June 25-27, Singapore.
- Ai4 2024: Aug. 12-14, Las Vegas, Nevada.
- The AI Conference: Sept. 18-19, San Francisco.
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 | AI and technology writer | | Beth is a contributing editor and writer of Inside's AI and Tech newsletters. She has written for publications including USA Today, the Arizona Business Gazette, and The Arizona Republic, where she received recognition with a Pulitzer Prize nomination and a First Amendment Award for collaborative reporting on state pension cost increases. You can reach her at Beth.Duckett@yahoo.com. | | This newsletter was edited by Beth Duckett | |
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