Weekly bulletin from AIport, issue #11

Beavis and Butt-Head learn about AI, honeybees in the UK receive ML assistance, Africa uses AI to rescue indigenous languages, and much more.

Hello and welcome to our special weekend edition of the AI bulletin! This issue includes both the hottest news from last week, as well as the latest happenings from the weekend. As always, don’t forget to subscribe and hit that like button. Enjoy!

North America:

• A discussion on AI with an academic is suddenly interrupted by Beavis and Butt-Head during a viral SNL sketch. 

• Elon Musk’s xAI previews its first multimodal LLM, Grok-1.5. 

• A key data industry player, Snowflake, launches an AI-powered SQL assistant. 

• Google releases Gemini 1.5 Pro with native speech comprehension in 180+ countries.

Europe: 

• Honeybees in the UK get an AI boost to help with the ongoing fight against killer hornets and changing weather. 

• MIT Technology Review publishes an interview with Dragoș Tudorache, the Romanian politician instrumental in passing the recent EU AI Act.

Asia:

• In line with the promises made last year during Sam Altman’s meeting with Japan’s PM Fumio Kishida, OpenAI opens its first foreign office in Tokyo.

• China’s Huawei introduces its first AI-powered laptop with Intel Core Ultra 9 processor.

Australia:

• Australian journalist tests Suno AI, a novel solution that generates music based on simple user prompts.

Africa:

• Mali is utilizing AI to teach indigenous languages to students, reports The Washington Post.