Good morning! This is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
📈 Nvidia is now the world's most valuable company
🤖 Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent
👀 Meta releases new AI models for text, image and audio
🦋 Ex-Snap engineer launches social network where AIs and humans coexist
👶 TikTok faces investigation over child privacy violations
🎁 + 7 other news you might like
🔮 + 2 handpicked research papers and tools
📈 Nvidia is now the world's most valuable companyLINK
Nvidia surpassed Microsoft to become the world's most valuable company, reaching a market cap of $3.34 trillion, driven by its focus on artificial intelligence and expanded robotics research. The company's stock price increased by 3.7%, putting it ahead of Microsoft's $3.33 trillion market cap, while Apple ranks third with a market cap of $3.28 trillion. Nvidia's rise is fueled by partnerships and advancements in AI and robotics, including a new collaboration with Hewlett Packard to launch NVIDIA AI Computing and Private Cloud AI, along with significant projects with major AI developers like Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
🤖 Perplexity AI is lying about their user agentLINK
WIRED and developer Robb Knight found that Perplexity's crawler ignores the Robots Exclusion Protocol, accessing content from sites that have blocked it, including Condé Nast properties. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas describes the product as an 'answer engine,' but the chatbot has been found to paraphrase articles without proper attribution and sometimes fabricate information entirely. An experiment by WIRED demonstrated that Perplexity sometimes generates content without accessing the actual webpage, raising concerns about the accuracy and ethics of its information-gathering methods.
👀 Meta releases new AI models for text, image and audioLINK
Meta's Fundamental AI Research team introduced new models such as Chameleon, a multimodal model for text and images, and JASCO, a text-to-music model accepting various inputs like chords or beats.
Meta's Chameleon can handle and generate text and images, with its 7B and 34B variants available for research under a non-commercial license.
The company launched AudioSeal, an audio watermarking technology, which can identify AI-generated speech, released under a commercial license for recognizing speech in lengthy audio segments.
🦋 Ex-Snap engineer launches social network where AIs and humans coexistLINK
Butterflies, founded by former Snap engineer Vu Tran, is a social network allowing humans and AI personas (called Butterflies) to interact through posts, comments, and direct messages, launching publicly on iOS and Android after five months in beta.
Users can easily create Butterfly personas with backstories, emotions, and opinions, which then autonomously generate content that other users and AIs can engage with, aiming to provide a more immersive AI experience compared to traditional chatbots.
The app received $4.8 million in seed funding led by Coatue and has mostly been used for entertainment, with potential plans for subscription models and brand interactions in the future.
👶 TikTok faces investigation over child privacy violationsLINK
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) referred a complaint against TikTok to the Justice Department, potentially leading to a significant investigation into the company's data handling practices.
The FTC is investigating whether TikTok violated child internet protection laws and engaged in unfair or deceptive business practices, according to FTC Chair Lina Khan.
TikTok expressed disappointment over the FTC's decision to pursue litigation and emphasized its commitment to child safety and cooperation with the commission over the past year.
Other news you might like
Google DeepMind's new AI tool creates soundtracks using text prompts.LINK
EU chat control law proposes scanning your messages — even encrypted ones.LINK
AMD is investigating claims of stolen company data.LINK
OpenAI upgrades DALL-E 3 instead of rolling out GPT-4o's (much better) imaging capabilities.LINK
Genspark is the latest attempt at an AI-powered search engine.LINK
How IBM invented the smartphone, then abandoned it.LINK
When did humans start social knowledge accumulation?.LINK
Latest research and tools
Neofetch: displays system information in a visually appealing way on the command line, useful for sharing and troubleshooting.LINK
RTranslator: an open-source, free, Android app that facilitates offline real-time translation, allowing users to converse in different languages via direct or Bluetooth-connected phones by translating spoken words into text, then audio, in the desired language.LINK
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