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- AI glasses doxx strangers in real-time
AI glasses doxx strangers in real-time
PLUS: Inflection pivots with Intel partnership
Rowan Cheung
October 08, 2024
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Welcome, AI enthusiasts.
Two Harvard students just demonstrated an unexpected capability of Meta’s smart glasses, instantly accessing strangers’ identities with AI.
As powerful AI systems and wearables collide, it’s time to start getting vigilant about privacy and surveillance concerns. Let’s get into it…
In today’s AI rundown:
Students turn AI glasses into doxing devices
Inflection and Intel team up on enterprise AI
Write an impressive cover letter with Claude
Checklists improve AI model evaluation
5 new AI tools & 4 new AI jobs
More AI & tech news
Read time: 4 minutes
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
META
Image source: AnhPhu Nguyen (@AnhPhuNguyen1 on X)
The Rundown: Two Harvard students just demoed a proof-of-concept system using Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses that allow the wearer to access personal information about strangers, raising major privacy concerns.
The details:
AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio combined Meta’s smart glasses with custom software, enabling the ability to ID people and retrieve personal data.
The system, I-XRAY, uses a combination of facial recognition, reverse image search, and LLMs to find names, addresses, phone numbers, and other details.
The students tested I-XRAY on Harvard’s campus, correctly identifying strangers and their personal info.
The privacy concerns come as Meta recently confirmed it may use any images and videos shared with Meta AI for training purposes.
Why it matters: This demo exposes how much privacy and surveillance are about to change in the AI age—and it is coming fast. If a couple of students can achieve these abilities with a pair of Meta smart glasses and publicly available tools, what will dedicated corporations and governments be capable of?
TOGETHER WITH HUBSPOT
The Rundown: Agent.ai's Company Research Agent is an interactive tool that generates detailed reports on any company in minutes — transforming how you gather business intelligence.
With Agent.ai, you can:
Access demographic information to understand a company's workforce and audience
Analyze funding data for financial health and investment trends
Examine web traffic patterns to gauge digital engagement
Conduct competitor analysis to stay ahead in your industry
Get started for free and automate your company research today.
INFLECTION AI
Image source: Inflection
The Rundown: Inflection AI just launched Inflection for Enterprise, a new system built in partnership with Intel and designed for large-scale business deployments – featuring both a cloud service, new commercial API and upcoming local appliance.
The details:
Inflection for Enterprise is built on the new Inflection 3.0 model family and powered by Intel's Gaudi 3 AI accelerators.
An on-premises AI appliance is planned for Q1 2025 release, promising up to 2x improved price-performance over competitors.
Inflection 3.0 comes in two variants — Pi 3.0 for chatbots and Productivity 3.0 for instruction-following tasks.
Inflection also released a commercial API, enabling developers to build advanced conversational AI applications.
Why it matters: After a turbulent year following founder Mustafa Suleyman and much of the team’s departure to Microsoft, Inflection is pivoting from consumer-focused apps to enterprise solutions. While the startup will face no shortage of competitors, a partnership with Intel is a positive start for the new regime.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: With this workflow, you can use Claude to draft personalized and compelling cover letters based on company analysis that capture the attention of hiring managers.
Step-by-step:
Access Claude AI.
Gather the job description, your resume, and company information.
Have Claude analyze the job description and company.
Prompt Claude to create a tailored cover letter based on the company analysis and your resume.
Pro tip: Add your personal touch to Claude's draft to make sure the final version truly represents your voice and experiences.
PRESENTED BY SECTION
The Rundown: Join AI experts from leading companies like Moderna and S&P Global on Nov. 14 at Section’s AI: ROI Conference — a virtual event for leaders looking to achieve tangible results with AI.
At this free event, you’ll discover:
Strategies to prioritize AI initiatives that deliver real returns
Lessons from real AI success stories and case studies
How to achieve ROI from productivity gains to securing investor support
AI RESEARCH
Image source: Oxford
The Rundown: Researchers from the University of Oxford and Cohere just developed TICK, a new approach for evaluating AI language models that use AI-generated checklists to improve assessment accuracy and interpretability.
The details:
TICK uses an AI model to generate a checklist of yes/no questions to evaluate how well another AI model followed a given instruction.
The checklist-based method showed 5.8% higher agreement with human evaluators than standard AI evaluation techniques.
The researchers also developed STICK (Self-TICK), which uses the checklists for self-improvement, leading to 7.8% better performance on reasoning tasks.
TICK can be fully automated, making it faster and cheaper than checklist-based evaluations requiring human input.
Why it matters: LLMs are weird — and sometimes even simple formatting quirks (remember the ‘take a deep breath’ prompt?) can lead to unexpected results. When looking for new techniques to get the most out of AI models and evaluations, maybe it’s ideal to return to the basics of human organization and learning.
NEW TOOLS & JOBS
🤖 Dashworks Bots - Create AI assistants that answer your team’s questions
📜 Theneo - Generate Stripe-like API docs in seconds
📸 Flash - Supercharge your learning with AI-powered flashcards
🔥 Firebender - A privacy-first coding assistant for Android Studio
🏠 Bramble - AI-backed real estate brokerage to buy a home end-to-end
📈 Lakera AI - Senior Marketing Manager
🖥️ Waymo - Backend Software Engineer
📝 Databricks - Sr. Corporate Communications Manager
📱 Cohere - Social Media Strategist
QUICK HITS
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt argued at the Washington AI Summit that AI advances should take precedence over climate goals, saying, “We're not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we're not organized to do it.”
Northrop Grumman unveiled an AI-powered enhancement to its Forward Area Air Defense system, enabling rapid decision-making against drone swarms.
Grindr is developing an AI "wingman" for its dating app that can scout prospective partners, set up dates, and interact with other AIs to find potential matches.
Nvidia and Peking University researchers introduced EdgeRunner, a new model for high-quality, detailed 3D mesh generation.
Enterprise GenAI startup Writer is reportedly set to raise between $150-200M at a $1.9B valuation, doubling its valuation from its $100M Series B round last September.
Security researcher Harish SG published research showing evidence that LLMs can be prompted to achieve reasoning levels of powerful models like OpenAI’s o1 using a combination of advanced prompt tactics.
THAT’S A WRAP
That's it for today!Before you go we’d love to know what you thought of today's newsletter to help us improve The Rundown experience for you. |
See you soon,
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