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- OpenAI co-founder announces new AI startup
OpenAI co-founder announces new AI startup
PLUS: xAI's gigafactory of compute
Rowan Cheung
June 20, 2024
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Welcome, AI enthusiasts.
We may never truly know what he saw, but one thing’s for sure — Ilya is BACK.
Just a month after departing OpenAI, Sutskever just launched his new AI venture — with a ‘cracked’ team focused on safely unlocking superintelligence. Let’s explore…
In today’s AI rundown:
Sutskever launches new AI venture
Tech giants team up on AI factory for xAI
Create consistent characters with Midjourney
Perplexity faces legal action
6 new AI tools & 4 new AI jobs
More AI & tech news
Read time: 4 minutes
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
ILYA SUTSKEVER
Image source: Ilya Sutskever
The Rundown: Ilya Sutskever just launched a new AI venture focused solely on developing safe and powerful superintelligence, coming just a month after his official departure from OpenAI.
The details:
The company, called Safe Superintelligence (SSI), is co-founded by Suskever, former Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross, and Ex-OpenAI engineer Daniel Levy.
SSI’s singular mission is to create beneficial superintelligent AI, which Sutskever believes could emerge ‘within a decade’.
Unlike OpenAI’s shift toward commercial products, SSI will be a pure research organization ‘fully insulated’ from short-term outside business.
Funding has not been disclosed, but Gross said ‘of all the problems we face, raising capital is not going to be one of them.’
Why it matters: What did Ilya see? Maybe it was a vision for a new, safe path to superintelligence. After months of speculation following Sutskever’s board drama and fallout with OpenAI, SSI opens a new path to build the safety-focused AI lab he wanted — and the company should have no trouble with funding or talent.
TOGETHER WITH SYNTHFLOW
The Rundown: Synthflow is a no-code platform allowing users to build powerful AI voice assistants tailored directly to their business needs — automating key tasks like customer support, sales, and more.
Synthflow allows you to:
Train AI voice assistants quickly with your data to handle any business process
Integrate seamlessly with essential apps like HubSpot and Google Suite
Customize voice assistants to reflect your brand's unique tone and personality
Start your 14-day free trial today and enjoy unlimited access to all features.
DELL, XAI AND NVIDIA
Image source: Michael Dell (@MichaelDell on X)
The Rundown: Dell, Nvidia, and Super Micro Computer are collaborating to build an AI factory for xAI’s massive supercomputer, which will train and scale its Grok AI chatbot.
The details:
Dell is assembling half of the server racks for xAI's planned supercomputer, with Super Micro handling the other half.
The system aims to use up to 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, potentially making it 4x larger than the biggest existing AI clusters.
Musk wants the supercomputer to be fully operational by Fall 2025 to accelerate the development of advanced Grok models.
Why it matters: This powerhouse partnership shows the staggering scale of compute power required to push the boundaries of AI. With huge capital flowing in, this massive cluster could provide a critical edge in evolving Grok to be a serious competitor to the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: Midjourney's new ‘Character Reference’ feature helps you create consistent characters across multiple images with a simple parameter.
Step-by-step:
Upload a reference image of your character on Midjourney’s Discord. Note: You need to have a paid account to generate images.
Right-click the image and copy its link.
Add the link to your prompt using the "--cref URL" parameter.
Adjust the reference strength using "--cw" followed by a value from 0 to 100 (optional)
Generate images featuring your consistent character in different scenarios and styles!
Example prompt: “Realistic street style photo of a young male model --cref https://www...”
PRESENTED BY NOMUSCAPITAL
The Rundown: Alternative investments often outperform public markets — but can be notoriously complex and difficult to access. With Nomuscapital, investors can complete the puzzle of a well-rounded portfolio with tailored solutions to a range of alternative investment opportunities.
With Nomuscapital, you can:
Access a comprehensive range of offerings across the investment spectrum
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PERPLEXITY
Image source: Perplexity
The Rundown: News publisher Forbes is reportedly threatening legal action against AI search startup Perplexity, alleging the company’s chatbot stole and republished original reporting without proper attribution.
The details:
Forbes claims Perplexity's chatbot summarized one of its investigative articles, copying with minimal sourcing.
The AI-generated version was then pushed to Perplexity subscribers and turned into a YouTube video that outranked Forbes' own content.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas responded that the product still has “rough edges”, and the company is working on ways to align with publishers.
A WIRED investigation found Perplexity scraping sites that actively blocked crawlers, while also hallucinating info and containing incorrect attributions.
Why it matters: Tensions between AI firms and media companies continue to escalate. While legal grounds surrounding scraping and repurposing with AI are still murky, publishers are in a bind when it comes to protecting IP. The only viable options right now seem to be cashing out with licensing deals or taking legal action.
NEW TOOLS & JOBS
💫 LensStudio GenAI Suite - Build Snapchat lenses from images or text prompts
🔎 Genspark - AI search engine for unbiased and time-saving results
🪄 Mojo AI Reveal - Animate any logo with AI
🤖 QueryPal - Chatbot trained on your company documents
🏠 Remodel AI - Take photos of your home and get remodeling inspiration
🧪 Character AI - Research Engineer, Science of Deep Learning
📋 Glean - User Researcher
👷♀️ Grammarly - Data Scientist, Trust & Safety
🎯 C3 AI - Director/Senior Director, Strategic Solutions
QUICK HITS
Free resource: The Executive's Guide to Generative AI. If you need an all-in-one resource on AI leadership, we recommend this one. Download here.*
Microsoft unveiled Florence-2, a new AI vision model that uses prompt-based instructions to excel in tasks like captioning, object detection, and segmentation.
OpenAI has reportedly shut down tools used by two AI political candidates, for violating the company’s policy against political campaigning with the technology.
Elon Musk said he agrees with ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton’s estimation of a “10-20% probability of something terrible happening with AI”, but said the most likely outcome is an abundance of services available to anyone.
Canva introduced Connect APIs, empowering developers to integrate the design platform into workflows to manage creative assets, automate designs with data, and streamline design feedback.
Snap previewed a real-time image diffusion model capable of generating AR experiences on smartphones alongside new AI tools for AR creators within its Lens Studio 5.0.
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