TLDR AI 2024-08-12

La Plateforme introduces customizations for LLMs, including Mistral Large 2 and Codestral, offering developers the ability to fine-tune models with specific domain knowledge. An alpha release of 'Agents' provides layered, complex workflows integrated with Mistral Large 2 capabilities. Mistralai SDK has hit a stable 1.0 release for Python and Typescript, improving usability and consistency.

Zico Kolter, a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and expert in AI safety and robustness, has joined OpenAI's Board of Directors and its Safety and Security Committee. His extensive research in AI safety, alignment, and model robustness will enhance OpenAI's efforts to ensure AI benefits humanity.

Uber's Q2 results emphasized its growing AV segment, highlighting a 6x rise in autonomous trips year-over-year and partnerships with AV leaders like Waymo and Alphabet. CEO Khosrowshahi expressed confidence in Uber's global AV acquisition strategy, distancing from a winner-take-all approach. The presentation also hinted at future AV developments, including a collaboration with BYD on autonomous-capable EVs.

Bias-aware low-rank adaptation (BA-LoRA) is a new technique for fine-tuning LLMs that addresses bias propagation from pre-training data.

This is an extension of Ring Attention, which allows for extremely long context by scaling across multiple GPUs. The researchers derive an energy function to inform how models should be sharded.

Researchers explore the potential of images in improving temporal event forecasting using LLMs. Their proposed framework, MM-Forecast, identifies two crucial roles of images — highlighting and complementing textual data.

PufferLib is a wrapper and accelerator for reinforcement learning libraries to unify the interface. It is extremely fast and contains a number of useful baselines.

Trans-tokenization is a cross-lingual strategy that enhances language models for low and mid-resource languages by leveraging high-resource language data.

A vector database built on top of the powerful SQLite technology. It can handle millions of queries and has a nice API for vectors.

Apple's AI features in the upcoming macOS Sequoia will be available for Mac users in the EU, unlike on iOS and iPadOS 18, per the latest beta release notes. The EU exclusion, which is due to Digital Markets Act compliance issues, does not apply to Macs. Mac users will likely be able to access Apple Intelligence if they set their system to U.S. English.

Sonova has introduced Phonak Audéo Sphere, a hearing aid featuring AI and dual-chip technology that promises a 53x boost in speech understanding in noisy environments. Developed over years, the platform combats the key challenge for hearing aid users — clarity in noise — using the DEEPSONIC chip with advanced DNN capabilities. With this leap in tech, Sonova aims to significantly improve the quality of life for the hearing impaired.

Scale has become the predominant driver of performance in the field of AI and machine learning. The substantial capital required has led to market consolidation, with only a few suppliers capable of employing productive ML researchers. This dynamic mirrors the historical consolidation seen in chip design, suggesting a future downturn in the prestige and salaries for ML roles as supply outstrips demand. Aspiring ML professionals should carefully assess their career motivations in light of these industry trends.

Waymo is expanding its robotaxi service areas in San Francisco and Los Angeles, indicating confidence in its autonomous vehicle technology.

Hey AI leverages AI-to-AI based engagements to disrupt the traditional dating app.

Intel reportedly passed on acquiring a stake in OpenAI, which is now a significant player in AI, during 2017-2018 due to then-CEO Bob Swan's hesitation on AI market readiness.