Good morning! This is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
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In today's Techpresso:
🍎 Apple quietly acquires another AI startup
🤖 Mercedes tests humanoid robots for ‘low skill, repetitive’ tasks
🚫 Midjourney bans prompts with Joe Biden and Donald Trump over election misinformation concerns
💰 El Salvador stashes $406 million in bitcoin in 'cold wallet'
🤔 Microsoft calls out Google dominance in generative AI
📝 Anthropic releases affordable, high-speed Claude 3 Haiku model
🎁 + 6 other news you might like
🔮 + 3 handpicked research papers and tools
🍎 Apple quietly acquires another AI startupLINK
Apple acquires Canada-based DarwinAI, an AI startup focusing on vision-based technology to improve manufacturing component efficiency. DarwinAI's team members have joined Apple's machine learning teams, as indicated by their LinkedIn profiles. This acquisition could bolster Apple's efforts in introducing on-device generative AI features in iOS 18, as the company seeks to catch up with competitors like OpenAI and Google in the generative AI space.
🤖 Mercedes tests humanoid robots for ‘low skill, repetitive’ tasksLINK
Mercedes-Benz is testing humanoid robots, specifically Apptronik's bipedal robot Apollo, for automating manual labor tasks in manufacturing.
The trial aims to explore the use of Apollo in physically demanding, repetitive tasks within existing manufacturing facilities without the need for significant redesigns.
The initiative seeks to address labor shortages by using robots for low-skill tasks, allowing highly skilled workers to focus on more complex aspects of car production.
🚫 Midjourney bans prompts with Joe Biden and Donald Trump over election misinformation concernsLINK
Midjourney, an AI image generator, has banned prompts containing the names of Joe Biden and Donald Trump to avoid the spread of election misinformation.
The policy change is in response to concerns over AI's potential to influence voters and spread false information before the 2024 presidential election.
Despite the new ban, Midjourney previously allowed prompts that could generate misleading or harmful content, and it was noted for its poor performance in controlling election disinformation.
💰 El Salvador stashes $406 million in bitcoin in 'cold wallet'LINK
El Salvador plans to move a significant portion of its bitcoin holdings to an offline cold wallet stored in a physical vault within the country, announced by President Nayib Bukele.
The country's bitcoin assets are valued at close to $407 million, as stated by President Bukele on social media.
El Salvador was the first country to make bitcoin legal tender in September 2021 despite criticism, notably from the International Monetary Fund.
🤔 Microsoft calls out Google dominance in generative AILINK
Microsoft has expressed concerns to EU antitrust regulators about Google's dominance in generative AI, highlighting Google's unique position due to its vast data sets and vertical integration, which includes AI chips and platforms like YouTube.
The company argues that Google's control over vast resources and its own AI developments give it a competitive advantage, making it difficult for competitors to match, especially in the development of Large Language Models like Gemini.
Microsoft defends partnerships with startups like OpenAI as essential for innovation and competition in the AI market, countering regulatory concerns about potential anticompetitive advantages arising from such collaborations.
📝 Anthropic releases affordable, high-speed Claude 3 Haiku modelLINK
Anthropic PBC released Claude 3 Haiku, a new, affordable, and high-speed model in its Claude 3 large language model family, offering significant speed and efficiency improvements for enterprises.
Haiku processes workloads three times faster than its peers, capable of handling up to 21,000 tokens per second, making it ideal for rapid analysis and customer service applications.
The model claims affordability with a 1:5 pricing model for input-to-output token ratio and is available on Amazon Web Services and soon on Google Cloud Vertex AI, in addition to being accessible via Anthropic's API and Claude Pro subscription.
Other news you might like
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wishes 'ample doses of pain and suffering' on Stanford students.LINK
Apple reaches $490 mln settlement over CEO Cook's China sales comments.LINK
Uber and Lyft say they’re done in Minneapolis because $15.57 minimum wage would be ‘unsustainable’.LINK
Meta kills data tool that helped researchers uncover shady stuff on Facebook, Instagram.LINK
Google Chrome enhances Safe Browsing with real-time protection against malware.LINK
‘AI-powered’ ad ignites creator controversy on Instagram.LINK
Latest research and tools
TextSnatcher: copies text from images on the Linux desktop using Tesseract OCR 4.x for character recognition, featuring drag-and-drop functionality and a user-friendly interface.LINK
Quiet-STaR: language models can teach themselves to think before speaking by practicing self-reflection prior to generating responses.LINK
Fast Inner-Product Algorithms and Architectures for Deep Neural Network Accelerators: a publication detailing a new algorithm and architecture, FFIP, which can achieve the same ML accelerator performance with half the multipliers by utilizing low-bitwidth additions, applicable to various ML model layers and increasing compute efficiency.LINK
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