This Week's Biggest AI News: July 3rd, 2024

In today's episode of the Daily AI Show, Brian, J, Andy, Beth, and Karl discussed the most intriguing AI news from the past week. They touched on issues surrounding AI companies and their use of content, recent advancements in AI technologies, and major announcements from tech giants.

Key Points Discussed:

Perplexity Controversy:

• The team explored the recent controversy involving Perplexity AI, which has been accused of plagiarism and illicitly scraping content from sites like Forbes and Wired. They debated the complexities of web crawling, attribution, and legal implications surrounding robots.txt protocols.

Perplexity's New Features:

• Perplexity AI has introduced upgrades to its Pro Search capabilities, including multi-step reasoning, advanced math and programming functions, and nearly unlimited access for Pro subscribers. These enhancements aim to improve user experience and research efficiency.

Meta's Text-to-3D Generator:

• Meta's new text-to-3D generator creates entire 3D objects, including the mesh framework and textures, in about a minute. The team highlighted its potential impact on industries like 3D printing and video game development.

Runway's Gen 3 Alpha:

• Runway released their Gen 3 Alpha, which is now available to all account holders. The panel discussed its capabilities and their plans to experiment with it over the coming weeks.

Apple's AI Developments:

• Apple announced the release of their 4M model specification on Hugging Face and their Pixel 9 phone, which includes numerous AI features. The crew speculated on Apple's strategic shift towards a more open AI development approach.

Google's AI Advances:

• Google increased the context window for its Gemini 1.5 model from 1 million to 2 million, introduced the efficient Gemma 2 model, and added 110 new languages to Google Translate, aiming to preserve endangered languages.

11 Labs' Voice Partnerships:

• 11 Labs partnered with estates of deceased celebrities like Judy Garland and Burt Reynolds to use their voices for audiobooks and other projects, emphasizing ethical considerations and the potential for personal voice cloning.

Anthropic's Safety Benchmark:

• Anthropic is developing a safety benchmark for AI, aiming to standardize and measure AI safety across different models, reflecting the growing emphasis on ethical AI development.

The episode concluded with teasers for upcoming shows, including discussions on Critic GPT, Langraph, Runway ML's Gen 3, and Amazon's new chatbot, among other AI-related topics.