Sign up⁸¹ | Advertise⁴⁸ | Ben’s Bites News⁵⁸
Daily Digest #252

Hello folks, here’s what we have today;

PICKS

1. Amazon Bedrock is generally available now.^1,105 In addition, AWS has announced new AI products, expanding its AI catalogue to help companies adopt generative AI. 🍿Our Summary⁶⁶¹ (also below)

2. AI chips are sealing the deal flow for VCs.²⁹⁹ Venture capital firms are leveraging access to hardware and their relationships with major cloud providers to help AI startups gain access to GPUs needed for developing AI models. 🍿Our Summary²³⁷ (also below)

3. Zapier launched new AI features at ZapConnect⁵¹⁸ to help businesses solve challenges and build custom solutions. The highlight is their new product: Zapier Canvas - A new AI-powered diagramming tool. Along comes updates to their AI editor, an AI chatbot and new integrations. 🍿Our Summary³¹⁷ (also below)

4. Google has created an opt-out tool²⁷⁸ for websites to control whether their content helps improve Google's AI models like Bard and Vertex. All while still being indexed by Google Search. 🍿Our Summary¹⁵³ 

5. AI is changing journalism—faster than you think.⁴²⁵ Over 75% of respondents use AI in news gathering, production or distribution, but only 32% have an AI strategy. 🍿Our Summary²⁵² 

from our sponsor

• Retool is a visual programming tool to build custom AI-powered apps and workflows 10x faster

• Use AI building blocks to summarize text, classify images, and more with any LLM (free tokens to OpenAI’s GPT-4 & 3.5 models included)

• Power chatbots with a built-in vector database—just upload docs, PDFs, and text from SaaS tools to train LLMs on internal data. Get started for free today¹⁸⁹

TOP TOOLS

• Braintrust³⁷⁵ - The enterprise-grade stack for building AI products without guesswork.

• Screenshot AI by Fabric⁵⁰³ - All your screenshots understood, organized and searchable with AI.

• Carton²²⁶ - Run any ML model from any programming language.

• Logo Illusions by Krea⁷⁸⁹ - Create mind-blowing AI videos with your logo.

• Web Search with Poe³¹⁰ - A new bot in Poe that can look up the web for answers.

• Semifrom⁴³¹ - Replace your forms with AI agents.

• Cohere Chat with RAG²⁶⁶ - Cohere’s chat API with retrieval augmented generation is now available in a public beta.

• Ray by Anyscale¹⁴⁵ - Open source framework for scaling and productionizing AI workloads.

View more →¹⁷⁵

NEWS

• Dave Rogenmoser steps down, Timothy Young is the new CEO of Jasper.²⁶³

• Microsoft is opening its fifth AI Co-Innovation Lab¹⁹⁴ in San Francisco.

• AI, hardware, and virtual reality.¹⁶⁵

• Non-engineers guide - Train a LLaMA 2 chatbot.³⁵⁷

• Effective long-context scaling¹²⁰ of foundation models. (Paper behind the new Meta AI)

• Mark Zuckerberg and Lex Fridman²⁵⁷ - First interview in the metaverse.

• Adobe launches Photoshop’s web version²²¹ with Firefly-powered AI tools.

• Medium is opting for default no to AI training¹⁰⁵ on their content. Credit, compensation and consent are required according to the CEO.

• Tencent-backed Chinese AI chip maker Enflame closes $274m Series D.^70†

• Developing AI applications with Google's PaLM model, and Chroma¹¹⁹

View more →⁶⁸

QUICK BITES

AWS launched Amazon Bedrock^1,105, a fully managed AI service giving access to top foundation models, plus other tools to build customized AI apps.

What does this mean?

Amazon Bedrock lets companies easily experiment with leading AI models like Anthropic's Claude and Meta’s Llama 2 through a single API. It simplifies development so companies can focus on creating differentiated AI solutions. Bedrock also helps companies customize models with their own data privately and securely.

Amazon Titan Embeddings model is a new addition to their suite of homegrown models. Amazon CodeWhisperer is getting an enterprise tier with code auto-complete using companies' private code. Amazon Quicksight is evolving into a generative BI platform with natural language data queries.

Why should I care?

Bedrock’s goal is to save Amazon’s position as the top cloud provider. With it Amazon’s trying to cement AWS as a one-stop AI shop. With their own coding and embedding models, they might have an edge over Microsoft which is offering OpenAI models on Azure and paying a hefty fee.

Share this story: https://bensbites.beehiiv.com/p/amazon-bedrock-available-now⁶⁶¹

QUICK BITES

Venture firms are using their connections²⁹⁹ at Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and others to get AI startups preferential access to limited GPU chips.

What does this mean?

Firms like Greylock, Madrona, and Bessemer have been instrumental in helping their portfolio companies like Adept, Inflection, and Laredo Labs land deals for thousands of Nvidia GPUs from cloud providers. This allows startups developing AI models to bypass waits and secure the specialized hardware they need.

Why should I care?

The VC relationships are providing a competitive advantage to their portfolio companies in the race to build cutting-edge AI. Given the current supply constraints on chips, startups not backed by top-tier VC firms can face debilitating delays in getting access. Related read: Lamini ditches Nvidia in favour of AMD chips.⁷⁸

Share this story: https://bensbites.beehiiv.com/p/ai-chips-sealing-deal-flow-vcs²³⁷

QUICK BITES

Zapier is announcing new AI and automation features⁵¹⁸ to help users build one-of-a-kind solutions.

What does this mean?

Zapier redesigned their editor with drag-and-drop and zoom features for easier workflow building. New AI suggestions map fields automatically and generate notes. Users can now edit test records and test in bulk.

They launched the database tool Tables and App Builder Interfaces to create full solutions. AI Chatbot lets users build customized bots, and Canvas uses AI to diagram workflows visually. The focus is making automation more visual, collaborative, and AI-powered.

Why should I care?

These updates can help your business automate routine tasks, gain insights from data, and scale processes without adding headcount - freeing up time and resources to focus on strategic work.

Much of the talk about the business use case of AI feels you need to be too tech-savvy. These new features from Zapier can help those businesses automate routine processes, gain insights from data, and scale operations without adding headcount, potentially freeing up resources and time for strategic work that drives growth.

Share this story: https://bensbites.beehiiv.com/p/zapconnect-2023-building-ai-easier-zapier³¹⁷

Unclassifieds - short, sponsored links

• Pool Planner AI¹²⁶: Visualize your dream swimming pool in <30 mins with AI. 💦🏊‍♀️🥽

Ben’s Bites Insights

We have 2 databases that are updated daily which you can access by sharing Ben’s Bites using the link below;

• All 10k+ links we’ve covered, easily filterable (1 referral)

• 6k+ AI company funding rounds from Jan 2022, including investors, amounts, stage etc (3 referrals)