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AI took the spotlight at the VivaTech 2024 Conference, showcasing groundbreaking innovations and deep discussions from industry leaders. From OpenAI’s captivating demo to Anthropic’s ethical considerations and Elon Musk’s regulatory insights, the event highlighted both the immense potential and the challenges AI presents. Let’s unpack this…

Today’s Summary:

• 🎤 AI dominates VivaTech 2024

• 📞 Arc introduces Call Arc feature

• 🌐 Cohere unveils Aya 23 model

• 💸 Meta considers paid AI models

• 🧐 Google’s AI Overviews feature criticized

• 🛠️ 2 new tools

TOP STORY

AI takes center stage at VivaTech Conference 2024

The Summary: VivaTech 2024, Europe's largest startup and tech event, was dominated by discussions and demonstrations around AI. From OpenAI's multimodal AI demo to insights from AI leaders like Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Baidu's Robin Li, and Elon Musk, the event emphasized AI's rapid advancement and the societal opportunities and challenges it introduces.

Key details:

• OpenAI's demo: Sora AI generated a vintage film clip from text, with GPT-4 analyzing video frames to auto-write a descriptive narration. The voice engine then cloned the narrator’s voice for multilingual narration, with transcriptions automatically added as subtitles

• Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO) discussed the importance of ethical AI development and strategies for mitigating biases

• Robin Li (Baidu CEO) compared China's app-driven AI focus to the Western emphasis on creating AI models

• Elon Musk advocated for AI regulation and predicted that AI will lead to universal high income, not just universal basic income

Why it matters: AI's growing influence across industries was the central theme at VivaTech, showing the need to address ethical considerations such as bias mitigation, truthfulness over ideology, regulation, and societal impact. As AI technology continues to evolve, tackling these issues is crucial to ensure it benefits humanity.

HOWTO

"Call Arc" lets you phone an AI for voice responses

The Summary: Arc Search has launched Call Arc, a new voice interface that allows users to ask questions by phone and receive instant voice responses from the AI assistant. This feature enhances hands-free intreraction, making it easier to get answers while on the go, complementing Arc Search’s existing voice search capabilities with a conversation-like experience.

Key details:

• Call Arc can be accessed by holding your phone to your ear using the Arc Search app

• Users can ask questions by voice and receive spoken answers, with visual feedback provided by an animated face

• Call Arc supplements Arc Search's typed queries and voice search, reducing the need to look at the screen while retrieving information

Why it matters: Call Arc represents an innovative way to interact with AI assistants, offering a more natural and accessible voice query interface, especially in scenarios where typing or reading is inconvenient. It shows Arc’s commitment to creating user-friendly AI experiences.

NEW RELEASES

Aya 23: Cohere's new multilingual language model

The Summary: Cohere has launched Aya 23, a state-of-the-art, multilingual AI model family covering 23 languages. Available as open-source, with 8B and 35B-parameter versions, Aya 23 continues Cohere’s committment to advancing multilingual AI research.

Aya 23 builds on the Aya initiative, an open science project involving 3,000 collaborators from 119 countries. The models excel in performing complex tasks across diverse languages, addressing the needs of nearly half of the world’s population.

Key details:

• Aya 23 covers 23 languages, expanding AI’s reach and capabilities

• Unlike Aya 101, which focused on breadth across 101 languages, Aya 23 emphasizes depth

• Outperforms existing open-source multilingual and instruction-tuned models on benchmarks

• Includes the Aya dataset with 513 million prompts across 114 languages

Why it matters: Aya 23 is a pivotal development multilingual AI, treating multiple languages as essential rather than secondary. This initiative addresses the language limitations of existing models, which primarily support a few languages, and works to democratize access to AI globally.

QUICK NEWS

Quick news

• Meta is considering a paid version of its AI models

• Google’s AI Overviews feature faces criticism for delivering incorrect answers

TOOLS

🥇 New tools

• Call Arc - Get quicker answers via voice interaction on iOS

• Granola - Make your meeting notes awesome with AI