Good morning! This is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
🤖 AI start-up unveils avatars that convincingly show human emotions
💰 Zuckerberg says it will take Meta years to make money from generative AI
🍏 Apple enters the open AI arena with CoreNet and OpenELM
🍪 Google delays the end of third-party cookies once again
🔍 Microsoft and Amazon's AI ambitions spark regulatory rumble
🎁 + 9 other news you might like
🔮 + 7 handpicked research papers and tools
🤖 AI start-up unveils avatars that convincingly show human emotionsLINK
An AI startup named Synthesia has created hyperrealistic AI-generated avatars that are extremely lifelike and expressive, pushing the boundaries of generative AI technology.
The avatars can replicate human emotions and mannerisms closely, thanks to advancements in AI and extensive data from human actors, aiming to make digital clones indistinguishable from real humans in videos.
Despite the technological marvel, the creation of such realistic avatars raises significant ethical concerns about distinguishing between real and AI-generated content, potentially affecting trust and truth in digital media.
💰 Zuckerberg says it will take Meta years to make money from generative AILINK
Mark Zuckerberg informed investors that it will take several years for Meta to profit from its investments in generative AI, despite the company's current profitability and revenue growth.
Meta plans to monetize its AI assistant, which has been tried by tens of millions, through methods like business messaging, ads, and paid content within AI interactions.
Zuckerberg highlighted a distinction between Meta and OpenAI's monetization strategies, with Meta focusing on ad quality improvement and OpenAI on subscriptions and enterprise solutions.
🍏 Apple enters the open AI arena with CoreNet and OpenELMLINK
Apple has introduced CoreNet, a library for training deep neural networks, and OpenELM, a state-of-the-art language model family, both available on GitHub and the Hugging Face hub.
OpenELM employs a unique layer-wise scaling strategy in its transformer model for improved accuracy, notably outperforming OLMo by 2.36% with efficient parameter use.
The release marks Apple's significant contribution to the open research community by open-sourcing model weights, training configurations, and providing tools for on-device AI inference, reflecting its commitment to privacy and local processing.
🍪 Google delays the end of third-party cookies once againLINK
Google has postponed the removal of third-party cookies from its Chrome browser yet again, planning to eliminate them by 2024, due to ongoing collaborations with the UK's CMA to ensure new tracking tools are not anti-competitive.
The delay is partly because Google's Privacy Sandbox, intended to replace third-party cookies, has faced criticism from adtech companies, publishers, and ad agencies for being difficult to use, not adequately substituting traditional cookies, and potentially increasing Google's control over online advertising.
Regulatory bodies, including the CMA and the UK-based Information Commissioner’s Office, have expressed concerns about the Privacy Sandbox tools potentially enabling advertisers to identify consumers.
🔍 Microsoft and Amazon's AI ambitions spark regulatory rumbleLINK
UK regulators are investigating Microsoft and Amazon's investments in AI startups, such as Amazon's partnership with Anthropic and Microsoft's dealings with Mistral AI and Inflection AI, for potential anti-competitive impacts.
The CMA is analyzing if these partnerships align with UK merger rules and their effect on competition, following significant investments and strategic hiring by the companies.
Both Microsoft and Amazon assert that their AI investments and partnerships promote competition and are confident in a favorable resolution by regulators, highlighting the uniqueness of their deals compared to other tech collaborations.
Other news you might like
Billionaires race to buy TikTok after Chinese owners ordered to sell app — with Steve Mnuchin in the lead.LINK
Mark Zuckerberg says Threads has 150 million monthly active users.LINK
SpaceX has now landed more boosters than most other rockets ever launch.LINK
IBM moves deeper into hybrid cloud management with $6.4B HashiCorp acquisition.LINK
Nvidia acquires GPU cluster optimization startup Run:ai for reported $700M.LINK
Eric Schmidt-backed Augment, a GitHub Copilot rival, launches out of stealth with $252M.LINK
Two-thirds of top pharma firms ban employees from using ChatGPT.LINK
Stripe unbundles and opens up its payment processing tools to anyone.LINK
Garry’s Mod is taking down 20 years’ worth of “Nintendo Stuff”.LINK
Latest research and tools
Pragmatic drag and drop: a feature-rich, front-end drag-and-drop component library designed to easily integrate with various view layers, enabling the creation of customized drag-and-drop experiences while supporting virtualization and accessibility across major browsers and devices.LINK
Confetti animation library: a front-end module that allows for the incorporation of confetti animations into web projects, which respects users’ preferences for motion, installed via NPM or included from a CDN.LINK
Tiny GPU: a minimal GPU implementation in Verilog optimized for learning about how GPUs work from the ground up.LINK
Tribler: a Bittorrent-compatible platform designed to protect privacy, enable a micro-economy for media without banks or advertisers, and reward content creators directly.LINK
Open-source alternative to HashiCorp/IBM Vault: provides secure access to tokens, passwords, and other sensitive data through a unified interface.LINK
Quaternion Knowledge Graph Embeddings (2019): the paper introduces a method using quaternion algebra to improve the representation of relationships and entities in knowledge graphs.LINK
SoundSeer: a macOS menu bar app that displays the currently playing Spotify song, offering features to skip tracks, directly access songs/artists/albums, and copy song URLs for sharing.LINK
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