Weekly bulletin from AIport, issue #21

Nvidia becomes world’s number one, UNESCO warns about GenAI, Japanese giant joins the AI race, and much more.

Hello and welcome to the latest issue of our AI bulletin. Enjoy this week’s selection of the most relevant news, arranged from the newest to the oldest. Don’t forget to give us a like and have a nice weekend!

North America

• Former Chief Scientist at OpenAI launches a new AI company, promising to build safe superintelligence.

• After an in-house investigation, San Francisco-based Wired publishes an article calling the AI-powered search engine Perplexity a “bullsh*t machine” that steals content via scraping and fabricates facts. 

• Thanks to the ongoing AI boom and increased demand for memory chips, Nvidia becomes the world’s most valuable company.

• McDonald’s decides to end its AI-powered drive-thru experiment. 

• Meta’s FAIR announces four new AI models, offering them to developers free of charge. 

• Apple open-sources 20 new models for on-device AI and four datasets via Hugging Face. 

Europe

• In the UK, the Prince Charles Cinema in London scraps an AI-scripted movie premiere, Nature Communications publishes a seminal paper on using machine learning to predict Parkinson’s disease, and DeepMind releases a new video-to-audio GenAI tool.    

• Paris-based UNESCO publishes a new report warning that GenAI distorts history and downplays the Holocaust. 

• Spain’s Correcto, an AI-enabled Grammarly-like solution made in Madrid, is amassing more users and beginning to venture into the Latin American market.   

Asia

• Japan’s internet giant GMO announces the creation of its new unit, GMO AI & Robotics, to help the nation combat labor shortages with AI robots.

• China’s AI startup DeepSeek introduces Coder V2, an open-source MoE language model promising better performance than GPT-4 Turbo in code-specific tasks. Meanwhile, SCMP reports that new AI-powered sex robots from Starpery are about to hit the nation’s shelves.

Australia

• Australia’s top three AI innovators receive cash prizes in the country’s first AI Sprint, with Google supporting the initiative and launching its own accelerator in parallel to bolster the country’s AI entrepreneurship.