Weekly bulletin from AIport, issue #16

Sony warns AI companies, Claude and Grok get launched in Europe, China introduces low-cost AI solutions, and much more.

Hello and welcome to the latest issue of our AI bulletin! This week is full of interesting developments, so let’s dive in without further ado. Don’t forget to subscribe and comment — we’re always keen to hear from you. Have a splendid weekend!

North America:

• Sony Music sends out a letter to over 700 AI developers and music streaming services, warning them not to use the label’s artists’ music to train AI models. 

• The US Senate Rules Committee passes three bills aimed at protecting elections from AI-generated deepfakes. A video of the hearing can be seen here.

• Google DeepMind talks to MIT Technology Review about its upcoming solution, Astra, which the company promises will be “the most advanced type of AI assistant it’s ever launched.”

• OpenAI unveils its most capable model to date, GPT-4o. Here’s a video presentation from the team. The so-far unsuccessful Humane AI Pin has added the new model to its gadget, says its product design lead.

• Intel introduces Aurora, the fastest AI supercomputer that has broken the exascale barrier.

Europe:

• The British government announces its decision not to investigate Microsoft’s relationship with Mistral AI any further. Meanwhile, the EU Commission gives Microsoft until May 27 to provide information on Bing’s potential GenAI risks.

• Google’s European headquarters in Dublin holds the European AI Conference 2024. Check out the video here.

• Anthropic officially launches its flagship AI chatbot, Claude, in Europe. The same goes for xAI’s Grok.

Asia:

• India’s spending on AI is expected to triple, reaching $5 billion over the next three years, report multiple sources citing a recent study. 

• In China, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, launches Doubao AI — a series of LLMs that cost a tiny fraction of OpenAI’s GPT-4. Meanwhile, Tencent releases Hunyuan-DiT — a text-to-image diffusion transformer with fine-grained understanding of both English and Chinese.

• The Technology Innovation Institute, based in Abu Dhabi, UAE, rolls out Falcon 2, a new multilingual LLM with vision-to-language capabilities that reportedly outperforms Meta’s Llama 3.

Australia:

• Conservationists on Tasmania’s King Island are using AI to save endangered birds from feral cats.