AI Weekly Digest #25: Best AI Innovations in 2023

Hello, tech enthusiasts! This is Wassim Jouini and Welcome to my AI newsletter, where I bring you the latest advancements in Artificial Intelligence without the unnecessary hype.

You can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter and Medium! Let’s connect!

Now let's dive into this week's news and explore the practical applications of AI across various sectors.

Main Headlines

Here are the three main trends to keep in mind if you are working in AI today.

#1 StackOverflow has laid off 28% of its staff as generative AI for coders gains momentum

StackOverflow, long considered a coder's best friend, is losing momentum as an increasing number of developers turn to generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and various open-source models to write, update, and fix code.

Read more: AI coding assistants’ landscape is evolving fast, with open source models already beating ChatGPT when it comes to coding. 

#2 Google has increased its stake in Anthropic by investing an additional $2 billion

Anthropic, with Claude, its ChatGPT rival, is attracting attention and funds! Everyone seems to want a piece of it.

Here a timeline summarizing the latest events!

• April 2023: Google invested $300 million in Anthropic, obtaining a 10% stake in the artificial intelligence startup.

• May 2023: Anthropic raised a substantial $450 million in a funding round, which was the largest funding round for an AI company since Microsoft's investment in OpenAI in January.

• September 25, 2023: Amazon announced a significant $4 billion investment in Anthropic.

• This week, October 27, 2023: Google further solidified its commitment to Anthropic by agreeing to invest an additional up to $2 billion, which included a $500 million upfront cash infusion and $1.5 billion to be invested over time.

Note: Claude is now available in 95 countries, but not yet in Europe

#3 The Best Inventions of 2023

Time released its selection of “200 innovations changing how we live”, including 14 AI innovations, to name a few:

• ChatGPT & GPT4, by OpenAI: do I really need to introduce this one?

• Dalle3, by OpenAI: text to image generation supercharged by ChatGPT

• Generative Fill, by Adobe: image editing

• Gen2, by RunwayML, text to video generator

• SeamlessM4T, by Meta quickly translate and understand almost 100 different languages, whether they are spoken or written

Find the full list of innovations here!

#4 Fuyu 8B, a lightweight, super fast, alternative to GPT4-V?

We covered last week, GPT4-Vision’s capabilities.

Unfortunately,

• Its API isn’t available yet (we do speculate about its release though)

• Only accessible to ChatGPT Plus subscribers today

• It takes a few seconds to answer your prompt

• and we anticipate it to be quiet expensive (at least as much as GPT4)

Now Imagine a GPT4-V alternative, that can run on a single GPU, can answer within ~100ms, and can be fine-tuned on your own scenarios.

That’s the promise of Fuyu 8B recently released by adapt.ai ; Designed specifically for image and text understanding & optimized for speed!

Read all Fuyu 8B here.

#5 Boston Dynamics turned its robot dog into a talking tour guide with ChatGPT

Boston Dynamics used ChatGPT to train its four-legged bot to answer questions and generate responses about its facilities. The result? a convincing “british” tour guide! Check the video below to see it interact with humans.

Read more about Robots connected to Large Language Models in this blog post.

This is it for Today!

Until next time, this is Wassim Jouini, signing off. See you in the next edition!

Have a great Sunday and may AI always be on your side!