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Daily Digest #353

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Hello folks, here’s what we have today;

PICKS

1. I wrote a deep dive on how Glean built a $Bn AI product³³. Chatting with the founder who first conceived the idea while at Google.

2. Google’s been pumping the weights for the past couple of weeks, trying to flex its AI muscles but every time it backfires on them. On Wednesday, Google

   • released Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B³⁷⁷, two SOTA open models.

   • made Gemini available for Workspace⁴⁹¹ users.🍿More here.¹⁷

   And guess what people are talking about? That its flagship chatbot, Gemini, is not creating pictures of white people. So, we wrote a bit about how 🍿AI is becoming Google’s Midas Touch.²⁸ (also below)

3. Remember Monday’s big news? A big AI company managed to get Reddit’s data for $60M a year. Reuters report that’s also Google.⁴³⁶

4. The second edition of Ben’s Bites Marketing⁴¹⁹ is out now. We are covering how long context lengths are helpful to marketers along with marketing-specific news and tools.

TOP TOOLS

• Athena⁴²⁷* - Enterprise AI Data Analyst: Text-to-SQL, collaborative reports, Jupyter notebooks & multi-modal data explorer w/ co-pilot & agent mode.

• Hyper Place⁶²⁸ - Make place for hobbies, creativity and learning.

• Retell AI⁴⁴¹ - Conversational voice API for your LLM.

• Aperture v4 by Lexica⁴⁹² - Natively generate near 4k resolution images.

• Longshot⁴⁹⁴ - AI platform for all your content needs.

• Swizzle⁴⁸⁴ - Build apps in your browser with natural language.

• Sheet Savvy AI³⁵⁶ - Use AI to save hours on repetitive tasks in Google Sheets.

• NotesLlama³⁸⁴ - Talk to local LLMs in Apple Notes.

• Retool forms¹⁹² - Build forms from databases, be it Postgres, MySQL or MSSQL.

• Brev 2.1²⁰⁸ - Transparent billing, more A100s and stability upgrades to fine-tune, train, or deploy your models.

View more →¹⁸²
*sponsored

NEWS

• ChatGPT went off the rails for some time. But OpenAI found a fix.⁶⁵⁴

• Things I don’t know⁶⁸² about AI.

• ChatGPT is funnier⁶⁰² than you.

• Elemental Cognition benchmarks complex reasoning performance¹⁷⁵ of GPT-4 and EC AI.

• The ‘Magic’ breakthrough³⁶³ that got $100M from Friedman and Gross.

• Microsoft will work with Intel¹⁵¹ to manufacture its homegrown processor.

• Google DeepMind forms a new org focused on AI safety.¹⁶⁰

• Match Group teams up with OpenAI¹⁶² to spark a love affair with innovation.

• How I built NotesGPT⁴⁴⁹ - a full-stack AI voice note app.

• She’s running a business, writing a book, and getting a PhD—with ChatGPT.⁵⁴⁰

• BRIA raises $24 million¹⁸⁷ in a Series A for responsible AI images (it’s backed by Getty too).

• ps: HF0’s applications¹¹⁰ are open till Sunday midnight - It’s a 12-week program for repeat founders.

View more →⁷⁵

QUICK BITES

Google’s been pumping the weights the past couple of weeks to flex its AI muscles but every time it tries to do something, it either falls short, gets overshadowed by OpenAI or backfires on them. Feels like Google has got the Midas Touch when it comes to AI, the good and bad.

What is going on here?

Google rolls out new AI models and features but faces extreme backlash at the same time.

What does this mean?

Just recently Google announced its new model with 1M tokens context length. A couple of hours later OpenAI slam dunks them with Sora, an AI video model with too real to believe outputs.

But, that’s a week-old story. On Wednesday, Google

• released Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B³⁷⁷, two open models with SOTA performance.

• made Gemini available for Workspace⁴⁹¹ users.🍿More on this here.¹⁷

And guess what people are talking about? Its flagship chatbot, Gemini, is not creating pictures of white people.

So, here’s my attempt at separating the wheat from the chaff and bringing some nuance to the hype chamber.

• Gemini’s image fiasco:

It’s bad. Creating diverse images in response to vague queries is a nice idea but turns out Google’s Gemini takes it too literally. It started generating historically incorrect images of white leaders, misrepresented ethnicities and fictional narratives. Google put a bandaid as entirely refusing to generate images of white people and that added fuel to the fire. Now it’s running around trying to find a fix.¹⁴⁶

Now, here’s the nuance: LLMs and image generators have a bias against minorities. Some moderation is necessary to not further promote that. But it’s hard to find a balance and Google’s first attempt at it “sucked” (to say the least). OpenAI’s ChatGPT has the same issue, but since the model has been public for a while, they have gotten much better at that balance. Google will too.

This is much more likely to be an LLM/image model bug and less likely to be an evil agenda.

• Google open source models:

Google’s back in the “open models” game. Some are claiming that it is “joining” open source but Google’s been at it for years now. Before Llama in mid-2023, Google’s FlanT5 was the best open language model. And based on the benchmarks, it seems like they are again now (in the weight category they are playing—7B).

However early results from the LLM hackers I follow are not as great. Google claims to beat Llama and Mistral both but to recap of what I’ve seen on Twitter, it is more like Llama < Gemma < Mistral.

• Gemini 1.5 Pro:

OpenAI’s Sora overshadowed this baby beast. And there’s some merit behind it. Sora’s insane, and Sam Altman was generating clips for people in real-time. But looks like Google has learnt somewhat.

More devs are getting access to these models and getting blown away. Google’s team is also actively sharing more demos including some insane ones.³²²

Why should I care?

This time, I have a weird answer: care less i.e. focus on what matters to you. Grand narratives are likely someone playing with your focus. Be vigilant, participate in discussions around safety, features, limitations, etc., and question things that make you doubtful but don’t let it get to your head.

Google’s gonna win some and lose some in the AI battle. Find your moments¹⁰⁶ of stricking the gold in between all this.

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