Elon Musk is looking to raise $1 billion for xAI

Elon Musk is looking to raise 1/44 of a Twitter for his AI company, xAI. In other words, the man behind Tesla, SpaceX and X is seeking $1 billion in funding for his next venture. According to an SEC filing, Musk has raised about $135 million so far from four unnamed investors, with the first sale o

Bing’s new ‘Deep Search’ feature offers more comprehensive answers to complex search queries

Microsoft Bing is getting a new “Deep Search” feature powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4. The feature is designed to give users more relevant and comprehensive answers to complex search queries. Microsoft notes that Deep Search is not a replacement for Bing’s existing web search, and

Analytics can solve generative AI apps' product problem

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming a commodity. A year after ChatGPT's release, there's a straightforward formula to launch an AI assistant: Stick a wrapper around GPT-4, hook it up to a vector database, and invoke some APIs based on user inputs. But if that's all you do, don'

Visual Electric launches an AI-powered image generator with a designer workflow focus

Visual Electric, a company backed by Sequoia Capital, has launched its generative AI-based image-generation tool aimed at designers. The company was founded in November 2022 by CEO Colin Dunn, a former executive at Universe, a mobile building site (Dunn also worked at Facebook and Dropbox); Chief P

Meta and IBM form an AI Alliance, but to what end?

Meta, on an open source tear, wants to spread its influence in the ongoing battle for AI mindshare. This morning, the social network announced that it’s teaming up with IBM, whose audience is decidedly more corporate and enterprise, to launch the AI Alliance, an industry body to support ̶

‘Animate Anyone’ heralds the approach of full-motion deepfakes

As if still-image deepfakes aren’t bad enough, we may soon have to contend with generated videos of anyone who dares to put a photo of themselves online: with Animate Anyone, bad actors can puppeteer people better than ever. The new generative video technique was developed by researchers at A

Mastercard launches Shopping Muse, an AI-powered shopping assistant

Mastercard is launching a new generative AI shopping tool called “Shopping Muse” that is designed to help users get personalized product recommendations. The tool is powered by Dynamic Yield, a personalization company that was acquired by Mastercard in April 2022. Mastercard says the id

AI invades ‘word of the year’ lists at Oxford, Cambridge and Merriam-Webster

Few would disagree that 2023 was, in the world of technology at least, dominated by artificial intelligence. The dictionaries have taken note in their “word of the year” lists, and notably all the AI-related words they highlight are, in fact, existing words that have been appropriated a

OpenAI’s GPT Store delayed to 2024 following leadership chaos

OpenAI’s app store for AI, the GPT Store, will not launch this year as previously announced, but rather on an unspecified date in early 2024, the company said. The delay is almost certainly due to the leadership shakeup that occurred in November, just after the initial announcement. The news

Makers of popular Dream by Wombo AI app launch a new app for AI avatars

Wombo, the makers of viral AI-generated art app Dream by Wombo, is back with another new AI-powered app called Wombo Me. The new AI avatar app from the Canadian startup lets you turn a single selfie into multiple lifelike avatars. Although there are several popular AI avatar apps already on the ma

On ChatGPT’s first anniversary, its mobile apps have topped 110M installs and nearly $30M in revenue

It’s officially been one year since ChatGPT launched, taking the world by storm as the research preview turned into an everyday tool that brought AI chatbot technology to mainstream users. A large part of that effort was driven by the release of the ChatGPT mobile app, whose May 2023 launch o

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels on culturally aware LLMs, developer productivity and FemTech

"speakable-summary" style="text-align: left;">By tradition, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels caps off the AWS re:Invent conference with his last-day keynote. A more recent tradition is that he also uses that day to publish his predictions for the coming year. This time around, I sat down with Vogels for a w

One year later, ChatGPT is still alive and kicking

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s viral AI chatbot, turns one today. A year ago, OpenAI released ChatGPT as a “low-key research preview” — reportedly spurred in part by an intense rivalry with AI startup Anthropic. The goal, OpenAI leadership told the OpenAI rank-and-file at the time, was t

Apple and Google avoid naming ChatGPT as their ‘app of the year,’ picking AllTrails and Imprint instead

Both Apple and Google today announced their best apps and games of the year, with the hiking and biking companion AllTrails winning as Apple’s iPhone App of the Year in 2023, while the educational app Imprint: Learn Visually won as Google Play’s best app. Meanwhile, Apple and Google agr