Sunday Signal #19

The AI Arms Race Heats Up, Apple Transforms Fitness & OpenAI's $300M Funding Announcement

Hey friends 👋 ,

Happy Sunday my AI compadres. This week’s been huge for media, funding, and regulation with thousands of announcements. Luckily, you’re reading Sunday Signal where I filter > 500 pieces of AI-related content and deliver them straight to your inbox. It’s 18°C here in London, so in the spirit of warmer weather and longer days, let's get into this week's best AI news.

🤖 AI Summary

This week’s newsletter, summarised with humour, by ChatGPT in 3 sentences:

Today’s edition features news on Palantir's launch of their Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) for private networks, Hugging Face's open-source competitor to ChatGPT called HuggingChat, and the EU's draft AI Act, among others. The newsletter also includes cool creations such as Apple's Quartz, an AI-powered health coach, and startup spotlights on OpenAI, Pinecone, and Harvey. Additionally, readers can teleport to 175 AD with AI chatbot AskMarcus and listen to Grimes' offer to share profits from AI-generated music.

Today's Through the Noise is brought to you by Content at Scale.

The Best AI Writer for SEO Blogs

Content at Scale is the world's best long-form AI writer. In just five minutes, you can generate high-quality, engaging, and fully original research-backed 2,500-word-plus blogs. 📝

Built with a mix of three different AI engines, NLP, and semantic analysis algorithms, their AI writer crawls Google on the spot the minute you run the engine and parses all the top-ranking content to put entire long-form SEO blog posts together in a few minutes.

By adapting to our AIO model (learn more here), and putting the writer in the driver’s seat of our technology, they’ve helped agencies and marketers save a dramatic but real 10-25x on their typical time and cost of human-only content creation. In one day using Content at Scale’s AI writer, an experienced writer can generate and edit up to ten long-form pieces of content. 💰That’s insane ROI for your business.

Sounds impossible? Try it and believe it when you see it:

⛏ 5 News Nuggets

Peter Thiel (Palantir CEO) / Forbes

  • 🔗 Link: Palantir has launched its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP). The company of billionaire Peter Thiel has developed software designed to run large language models like GPT-4 on private networks, including military operations. In a pitch video, Palantir demonstrated how a military operator could use AIP to order drone reconnaissance, generate several plans of attack and organise the jamming of enemy communications. Not exactly personally applicable to you and I, but it will be interesting to see the macro applications of such technology.

  • 🔗 Link: Hugging Face releases HuggingChat, an open-source competitor to ChatGPT. It can write code, emails, and even rap lyrics like its rival. Their continued dedication to open-source development and accessibility is encouraging, and HuggingChat's release marks a significant step forward for the firm and the development of AI-driven chatbots. It’s currently available on the Google Play store—which, in my opinion, gives them a huge competitive advantage over GPT-4 (still browser only).

  • 🔗 Link: EU lawmakers have passed a draft of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act, which will be the first comprehensive set of laws related to AI regulation. Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT will have to disclose if they have used copyrighted material, and AI models will have to be designed in accordance with EU law and fundamental rights, including freedom of expression. I expect ever-tightening restrictions on AI over the coming months, perhaps we’re in the golden age of access?

  • 🔗 Link: Microsoft has expanded its Designer app preview by removing its waitlist and adding new features to its generative AI-powered graphic design tool. Designer assists users in every stage of the creative process and is now integrated into Microsoft Edge, making it the first browser with an integrated, AI-powered graphic design tool. As I said in last Wednesday’s issue, Microsoft might truly have the ‘Edge’ on Google!

  • 🔗 Link: OpenAI has announced a new feature called 'Incognito mode', which empowers users to safeguard their chat history and data. By activating this mode, their data cannot be used to train future models. This announcement coincides with the launch of ChatGPT for business, which offers greater control over how data is used by allowing business users to impose tighter restrictions.

😎 4 Cool Creations

Apple Quartz / The Verge

  • 🔗 Link: Apple announces the creation and development of Quartz—an AI-powered health coach which will use AI and data from the Apple Watch to make personalised suggestions and create coaching programs to help users improve their exercise, sleep, and eating habits. It’s expected to launch next year but I personally can’t see it ever being as good as a human PT, what do you think?

  • 🔗 Link: RunwayML announces a new iPhone app that lets you transform any video into a new creation using prompts, images, and presets. Their demo video took the internet by storm and sure, the results might look a bit wonky at times, but hey, that's the beauty of generative AI.

  • 🔗 Link: AIHits keeps track of the top AI-generated music. Currently, Drake’s dominating the top of the charts (not abnormal), but faces serious competition from other artists with large, public databases of music. I’m curious, how do you think AI music will impact artists?

  • 🔗 Link: AskMarcus is an AI chatbot that lets you teleport to 175AD to talk to my favourite philosopher—Marcus Aurelius. You’re only allowed 3 questions so ask wisely!

🔦 3 Startup Spotlights

Sam Altman / CNBC

  • 🔗 Link: OpenAI announces $300M in funding to reach a $27bn valuation with investors including Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz. The offer, separate from Microsoft's $10bn investment earlier this year, comes as venture capital firms seek promising AI startups. Furthermore, OpenAI has recently announced GPT-4 + internet access in beta mode for selected individuals—If this rolls out publicly we could see funding and valuations explode!

  • 🔗 Link: Pinecone raises $100M in Series B funding to reach $750M valuation. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from ICONIQ growth and Menlo Ventures. Pinecone will use the funds to enhance its semantic search, built for flexibility and GDPR compliance. The vector database is seen by investors as a key component in the AI data stack and works together with language models to provide a source of truth.

  • 🔗 Link: Harvey, an AI company, has raised $21M in Series A funding led by Sequoia with participation from the OpenAI Startup Fund, Conviction, SV Angel, and Elad Gil. The company believes that large language models have the potential to give knowledge workers superpowers, and the funds raised will help Harvey scale its team, deepen its partnerships, and build the AI systems that are the future of professional services.

🐥 2 Top Tweets

Grimes / Pitchfork

  • 🔗 Link: Following the release of the AI-generated song by Drake and The Weeknd, Grimes has made an announcement that she's willing to share 50% of all profits from AI-composed music. However, existing AI copyright laws seem unprepared to address the rapidly evolving world of AI-generated music.

  • 🔗 Link: A limited number of individuals now have access to a beta version of GPT-4 with internet access. AI Marketing Guy outlines 10 use cases for the model including making travel plans, and real-time content generation.

😮 1 Media Marvel

Unreal Engine 5 / Epic Games

  • 🔗 Link: Bilawal Sidhu has crafted a captivating video utilising the powerful Unreal Engine 5. With the aid of marketplace 3D assets and GPT for scripting, he has brought to life an otherworldly encounter that fully immerses the viewer. The potential here is truly thrilling - with these tools now readily available, even low-budget filmmakers can bring to life immersive environments that were once exclusively reserved for grandiose productions.

What Did You Find Most Interesting?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Let me know what you think

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

What was your favourite find in AI this week? Reply to this email and let me know!

— Alex