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  • Lore #77: The Techno-Optimist Newsletter

Lore #77: The Techno-Optimist Newsletter

PLUS: Hume AI voice demo blows people away.

Author

Nathan Lands
April 03, 2024

Good morning,

Today, we're excited to announce a new chapter for Lore as we expand our focus beyond just AI and embrace the philosophy of techno-optimism. Don’t worry. We’ll still be delivering a lot of the same type of content. But, we'll be shifting our lens to highlight how AI and other transformative technologies make the world better.

As outlined in the Techno-Optimist Manifesto by Marc Andreessen, we believe that technology, when harnessed correctly, is the key to unlocking human potential and building a future of abundance. By embracing innovation and channeling our efforts toward progress, we can overcome the challenges we face and create a world where everyone can thrive.

In each issue, we'll continue to curate the most important news stories and breakthroughs, but with an emphasis on how these developments contribute to solving global problems, driving economic growth, and improving lives.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be redesigning parts of the newsletter and changing some things around. Feedback as we make changes will be greatly appreciated!

As The Next Wave begins, we’ll see advancements happen faster than ever before, which could solve some of humanity's most significant issues.

But many forces wish to stop technological progress. Together, let's build a community dedicated to furthering techno-optimism, E/ACC, and related movements to help inspire people to create a better world.

P.S. Thanks to megs for letting us use the Techno-Elysian art style she created for our new banner and website design. I find the style incredibly beautiful and inspiring.

P.S.S. On a personal note, I recently got engaged in Kyoto, and AI played a major role. It's a small but meaningful example of how AI and technology can help improve lives and bring people all around the world together.

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NEWS

xAI introduced Grok-1.5, an AI model with enhanced reasoning and a context length of 128,000 tokens. This update has shown significant improvements in coding and math benchmarks, particularly in MATH and GSM8K, indicating its superior problem-solving capabilities. Grok-1.5's extended context window facilitates the processing of longer documents, increasing its application scope.

Built on a custom infrastructure combining JAX, Rust, and Kubernetes, the model aims for efficient and reliable large-scale training. It will be available to early testers and existing users on the 𝕏 platform, with plans for a wider release and additional features in the future.

Artifact, an app developed by Instagram's co-founders for AI-driven news recommendations, didn't scale as hoped and will soon cease to exist. However, its technology will gain a broader audience through Yahoo's acquisition. Yahoo plans to incorporate Artifact's advanced content taxonomy and recommendation systems into its platform, aiming to enhance personalization for its 185 million monthly users. The co-founders of Artifact will serve as special advisors to Yahoo, focusing on the integration process while contemplating future ventures in AI.

Adobe and Microsoft have announced a collaboration to integrate Adobe Experience Cloud workflows and insights with Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, aiming to boost marketers' efficiency and creativity. Announced at the Adobe Summit, this partnership is designed to overcome silos in applications and data, enabling marketers to more effectively manage workflows across various Adobe and Microsoft applications like Outlook, Teams, and Word.

Other news

  • Washington state judge blocks use of AI-enhanced video as evidence in possible first-of-its-kind ruling (Link)

  • Ukraine’s AI-enabled drones are trying to disrupt Russia’s energy industry. So far, it’s working (Link)

INSPIRING PROGRESS

Devin builds an impressively complex website

OpenAI starts testing usage-based GPT earnings

Hume AI voice demo with emotional intelligence blows people away

Airtable launches AI capabilities to general availability

FURTHER STUDY

  • Jamba: A Hybrid Transformer-Mamba Language Model (Link)

  • ViTAR: Vision Transformer with Any Resolution (Link)

  • Mini-Gemini: Mining the Potential of Multi-modality Vision Language Models (Link)

  • The Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of the Deeper Layers (Link)

  • LLM Agent Operating System (Link)

VENTURE DEALS

  • Anthropic raised an additional $2.75B from Amazon (Link)

  • Celestial AI raised $175M to enhance computer memory systems (Link)

  • Hailo raised $120M to design more efficient AI chips (Link)

  • The Brandtech Group raised $115M for AI-powered marketing (Link)

  • Hume AI raised $50M for its API toolkit for measuring human emotional expression (Link)

  • Robovision raised $42M to accelerate AI-powered industrial automation (Link)

  • Luminance raised £32M for its proprietary legal AI model that automates the negotiation of contracts and other legal documents (Link)

  • Skyflow raised $30M for data privacy (Link)

  • Vizcom raised $20M for AI-powered product design (Link)

  • Gather AI raised $17M for inventory management (Link)

  • MyShell raised $11M for its blockchain platform to build AI girlfriends (Link)

  • Scrut Automation raised $10M to integrate Gen AI in mid-market businesses (Link)

  • StealthMole raised $7M for its AI-powered dark web intelligence platform (Link)

Coming up:

  • A Peter Thiel-Backed AI Startup, Cognition Labs, Seeks $2 Billion Valuation (Link)

That's it!

See you next week!

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