Innovation Profs - 11/26/2024

Your weekly guide to generative AI tools and news

Innovation Profs
November 26, 2024

HOLID-AI is back

Join us for HOLID-AI 2, a free event on Dec. 6, to learn about recent updates in the world of generative AI. We will discuss ChatGPT with Canvas, computer use with Claude, the potential plateau of LLM abilities, and the latest movement in the chatbot leaderboard.

On the multimedia side, we will discuss updates to the Midjourney editor, new Ideogram features and Meta's new AI video tool. Did we mention the event is free? What are you waiting for? Sign up today.

Generative AI News

Amazon doubles down on AI startup Anthropic with $4bn investment

Amazon’s investment in Anthropic, the company behind the LLM Claude, has reached a total of $8 billion, as Amazon is literally doubling down on their previous $4 billion investment in Anthropic. As part of the deal, Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services for their cloud services and will work with Amazon on the development of their Trainium chips, which will be used to train future Claude models.

New York Times Says OpenAI Erased Potential Lawsuit Evidence

A new development in the ongoing legal battle between the New York Times and OpenAI over OpenAI’s potential copyright violation in using NYT articles to train their LLMs: OpenAI engineers inadvertently erased data that the NYT was using as evidence in their lawsuit, as a result of what OpenAI’s legal counsel referred to as a “glitch.” However, it sounds like much of that data has been recovered, but the NYT alleges that the data is missing the original file names and folder structure, which makes the data largely unusable for legal purposes. When I (Porter) asked ChatGPT to comment this development, it responded, “It feels like a stark reminder of how fragile trust and accountability are in the intersection of groundbreaking technology and the legal system.”

Anthropic proposes a new way to connect data to AI chatbots

This week Anthropic introduced the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that allows models to “draw data from sources like business tools and software to complete tasks, as well as from content repositories and app development environments.” MCP is a single protocol that provides two-way connections between data sources and chatbots as an alternative to building custom connections for each data source. According to Anthropic: “As the ecosystem matures, AI systems will maintain context as they move between different tools and data sets, replacing today’s fragmented integrations with a more sustainable architecture.”

Microsoft’s 10 new AI agents strengthen its enterprise automation lead

Microsoft announced the launch of ten new AI agents at Ignite 2024 that are now available for enterprise use, with applications in areas including financial services, supply chain management, and manufacturing. Among these agents are Financial Meeting Prep, Financial Insights Agent, Factory Operations Agent, Factory Safety Agent, Retail Industry Data Model, and Personalized Shopping Agent. This move puts Microsoft at the forefront of Agentic AI.

Quick Hits

Is AI hitting a wall?

Now, the buzz is turning to ‘reasoning’ and AI agents.

www.theverge.com/2024/11/22/24303470/ai-model-llm-progress-hitting-scaling-wall

Claude Artifacts Is a Game-Changer That No One Is Talking About

This is actually useful AI!!

www.howtogeek.com/claude-artifacts-is-a-game-changer-that-no-one-is-talking-about

‘An AI Fukushima is inevitable’: scientists discuss technology’s immense potential and dangers

Experts are optimistic about energy and drug production breakthroughs but also fear its potential misuse

www.theguardian.com/science/2024/nov/22/an-ai-fukushima-is-inevitable-scientists-discuss-technologys-immense-potential-and-dangers

DeepMind Developed… and Shelved… an AI Music Generator

Google’s DeepMind unit created an artist-mimicking AI music generator, codenamed “Orca,” that allegedly worked so well the tech giant couldn’t release it for fear of legal fallout.

futureparty.com/google-deepmind-ai-music-generator-copyright

I write about AI for a living and Suno v4 is so good it put a smile on my face

Lyrical mastery from AI

www.tomsguide.com/ai/i-write-about-ai-for-a-living-and-suno-v4-is-so-good-it-put-a-smile-on-my-face

MIT researchers develop an efficient way to train more reliable AI agents

MIT researchers developed an efficient approach for training more reliable reinforcement learning models, focusing on complex tasks that involve variability. This could enable the leverage of reinforcement learning across a wide range of applications.

news.mit.edu/2024/mit-researchers-develop-efficiency-training-more-reliable-ai-agents-1122

Hume AI gives Anthropic’s Claude a voice — more human-like than ChatGPT

Hume AI has entered the chat

www.tomsguide.com/ai/hume-ai-gives-anthropics-claude-a-voice-more-human-like-than-chatgpt

Netflix removes AI art poster for Arcane after an outcry from creators

Arcane artists angry about AI

www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/netflix-removes-ai-art-poster-for-arcane-after-an-outcry-from-creators

Tool of the week: Adobe Enhance Speech

Adobe last week released version 2 of it’s audio editing tool Enhance Speech. Enhance Speech uses artificial intelligence to turn low-quality audio (badly muffled, background noise, etc.) and convert it to studio-quality recording. Try it out on audio files as part of Adobe’s podcast tools. Premium users can use the tool with video files.

AI-generated image of the week

We hopped on the trend where you ask ChatGPT to make an image based on everything it knows about you. Here are the results (Porter on the left, Snider on the right).

Prompt: make a picture based on everything you know about me

Get starting with Generative AI

New to generative AI? Here are some places to start…

What we found

Luma AI Dream Machine platform got an update this week. Dream Machine can create images and videos. The update if faster and better at text. It can generate consistent characters and maintain them across images and videos.

Try it out for free here.