AI Roundup 074: Amazon's Adept acquisition
July 5, 2024.
Amazon's Adept acquisition
Amazon hired the CEO and co-founders of Adept, which builds AI agents for enterprise customers. The team will join Amazon's AGI team, along with a sizable portion of Adept's employees.
Why it matters:
The deal is strikingly reminiscent of Microsoft's "acquisition" of Mustafa Suleyman and the Inflection AI leadership team.
It's another reason (in my opinion) to be bearish on the long tail of foundation model companies. Raising hundreds of millions isn't enough to compete at the highest levels.
And whether regulators will have a problem with these deals remains to be seen - the FTC is currently investigating Microsoft/Inflection.
Elsewhere in the FAANG free-for-all:
Meta releases new models that leverage a novel multi-token prediction approach and generate 3D assets in seconds.
Chrome is baking a Gemini Nano model into the browser, accessible via
window.ai.And Apple is working to bring Apple Intelligence to the Vision Pro, as it seeks to secure an observer seat on OpenAI's board.
Figma AI
Last week, Figma unveiled Figma AI, a suite of AI-powered design tools baked into the popular design software. This week, it's pulling one of those tools in repsonse social media criticism.
The big picture:
Most of the criticism came after "Make Designs," a tool to convert text prompts to UI layouts and components, seemingly rendered a near-exact replica of Apple's Weather app UI.
Dylan Field, Figma's CEO, took responsibility for the issue. He explained that the tool uses "out-of-the-box" models and was not trained on user content or designs.
Still, it showcases one of the current major hurdles for "AI-enabled" software: people assume the worst about how companies use data and training models, even when they publicly attest otherwise.
Elsewhere in AI anxiety:
YouTube lets people submit takedowns of AI content simulating their face or voice.
Despite potential productivity boosts, European fintechs are seemingly reluctant to use AI over regulatory concerns.
And the Center for Investigative Reporting filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.
Patent power
A new report from the UN breaks down the landscape of generative AI patents - with over 50,000 filed in the past decade.
Between the lines:
Over a quarter of those patents were filed in 2023 alone - a hard data point on the scale of the AI arms race.
The report fuels additional concerns about China's position in said arms race - the country has filed more than six times the number of patents as the US, its next closest rival.
But the US wants to close that gap, via policies like regional AI funding and export controls on Nvidia GPUs (despite international GPU smugglers).
Elsewhere in AI geopolitics:
Singapore is becoming a preferred locale for Chinese AI startups, due to their less stringent AI regulations and access to the latest chips.
Brazil's National Data Protection Authority suspended Meta's privacy policy over its use of personal data to train AI models.
And EU antitrust regulators are looking for more information on Google and Microsoft's recent deals on AI.
Things happen
How AI is helping investors simplify due diligence and streamline tasks. US nuclear power plants in talks to provide electricity for AI data centers. AI's $600B question. Blumhouse's AfrAId brings AI terror to the smart home. Ukraine is weaponizing consumer tech using AI and hobbyist computers. Stable Diffusion 3 has had a less-than-ideal launch. Chinese models Hugging Face's Open LLM Leaderboard v2. Microsoft AI CEO claims web content is "freeware" due to fair use. I received an AI email. The limitations of generative AI. ElevenLabs will (legally) offer the voices of Judy Garland and Burt Reynolds. OpenAI had an internal security breach last year. Teachers embrace new AI grading tools for faster student feedback. Why AI infrastructure startups are challenging to build. Goldman Sachs warns of disappointing ROI for AI. Cloudflare enables blocking AI bots with a single click. My fine-tuned models beat GPT-4. Perplexity upgrades 'Pro Search' for improved math and research capabilities.
