AI News & Launches

Microsoft's new AI tool, Windows Recall, is designed to take screenshots every five seconds to enable a natural language search of users' activities on their PCs. However, security experts warn that the tool's unencrypted database makes it vulnerable to abuse. Ethical hacker Alex Hagenah demonstrated that with his tool TotalRecall, one can extract all data recorded by Windows Recall, raising significant privacy concerns.

Canadian AI startup Cohere raised $450 million, backed by Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures, aiming for a $5 billion valuation. The previous valuation was $2.2 billion, and they reported $35 million in annualized revenue by March end. Cohere competes with AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

AI weather forecasting is significantly advancing as it may revolutionize predictions during the impending historic hurricane season. Utilizing extensive data sets like the publicly available ERA5, AI models provide superior outputs to traditional methods, some already surpassing decades-old global weather models without needing powerful supercomputers.

Shortbread, presented by Kurukuru Inc., offers bite-sized comics perfect for indulging in the most tantalizing, binge-worthy stories on the go. Available for mobile devices, Shortbread serves up a diverse array of comics anytime and anywhere, easily accessible through both iOS and Android platforms.

Scott Arciszewski's blog post discusses the often undefined threat model for Encryption At Rest, focusing on web and cloud applications. He highlights the importance of clearly understanding the risks and the limitations of full disk encryption, which does not protect against an online attacker accessing application or database software. The post emphasizes the need for client-side encryption and proper key management, as well as the dangers of 'confused deputy' attacks, which can be mitigated by context-binding mechanisms.

A security researcher found Microsoft's newly introduced AI feature, Windows Recall, on Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs, to be insecure. The data collected by Recall is stored locally and is unencrypted when a user is logged in. Although encrypted when logged out, the data is vulnerable to malware attacks when the user is active, raising security concerns.

StatuteMatcher.org is an AI-powered platform providing real-time legal resources tailored for domestic violence survivors. It offers seamless statute matching to aid legal advocacy and is free, bilingual, and maintains anonymity. Not a substitute for professional legal advice.

apna AI is India's premier multilingual generative AI app that aims to bring the AI revolution to India. It is supported by Invenics, offering tools to embrace AI technologies.

ChatGPT service faced an outage, and OpenAI has identified and is mitigating the issue. Users were first notified of the problem as the team began investigating, followed by an identification and ongoing fix updates.

MailMaestro is an AI email assistant compatible with Outlook and Gmail designed to help users write better emails faster, offering a 2-week free trial without the need for a credit card. Trusted by professionals, it provides a range of features for quick, high-quality, and personalized email composition with enterprise-grade security.

Clixie AI offers an interactive video platform that transforms traditional video and audio content into engaging interactive experiences with quizzes, chapters, bookmarks, and more. Its no-code solution caters to corporate training, sales, education, and continuing education, fostering deeper student involvement and providing insightful data analytics for learning improvements.

DevRev offers a customer support and product experience platform powered by AI, providing self-service support and personalized search capabilities for websites and apps.

Time tracking standups - Jira Timesheets & Resource Planner by Standuply, Inc. is designed for Jira Cloud with an aim to automate time tracking, enhance workflow integration, and improve project deadline management. It offers AI-driven features for dynamic resource planning and task management within Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Underlord by Descript is an AI-powered editing assistant positioned within Descript, providing a variety of tools for video and podcast editing, transcription, and creative content generation. It simplifies audio and video editing processes and enhances content with features like AI voices and automatic retake removal.

Roundtable AI offers an easy-to-integrate API solution for cleaning survey data. It saves manual work by auto-flagging suspicious responses, supports real-time behavioral tracking, and has multilingual functionality. The platform is trusted by industry leaders and designed for speed and scalability, with over 5 million open-ends analyzed.

Roast My Design offers a free AI-powered design audit service where users can upload their design images and receive an AI-generated critique. This platform allows designers to get quick feedback on their work.

Circled is a platform designed to facilitate community engagement and management, offering tools for content organization, member collaboration, and subscription-based monetization.

OAM AI is a virtual concierge service designed to manage guest inquiries and property operations for AirBNB hosts and hoteliers. Offering seamless check-in and check-out, a reference library, instant recommendations, multi-lingual support, and a central mission control dashboard, OAM aims to reduce the workload on property managers for just $5 a month.

Kroolo is an AI-powered productivity platform designed to optimize team performance and efficiency. It offers over 80 features, including project management tools, document generation and summarization with AI, task assignment and management, and integration with 20+ apps, all with a workspace tailored to various needs. The platform facilitates agile project coordination, goal setting with OKR, chat functions, and team collaborations without requiring a credit card for its free tier.

Windows 11’s new AI-powered Recall feature, set to launch on June 18th, is criticized for potential security flaws. It takes snapshots of everything users do, stores data in plain text, and may allow malware to scrape data, warned cybersecurity expert Kevin Beaumont.

The article by Narayanan and Kapoor warns against over-reliance on AI in scientific research due to issues with hype and flawed methodology leading to non-reproducible results. They discuss the prevalence of data leakage and other errors, highlighting the need for better practices and scrutiny in using AI as a tool, rather than an oracle.

SnapMagic is seeking a Technical Project Manager for their San Mateo, CA office offering $130K-$180K/year. The role includes leadership in software project sprints, communications with stakeholders, and driving continuous improvement. Candidates should have 5+ years of project management experience.

Trellis, an AI-powered platform akin to Snowflake for unstructured data, is seeking a Founding Engineer with 3+ years experience and expertise in backend development and ML infrastructure. Offering a salary range of $110K to $225K with equity options, the role seeks individuals with skills in languages like Python or Go, and familiar with ML/NLP libraries. The position is based in San Francisco, CA.

Tri Dao's recent blog post introduces Mamba-2, enhancing the earlier State Space Model (SSM) with a Structured State Space Duality (SSD) approach for efficiently processing sequences in deep neural networks. Key advancements include linear computation in SSM mode and efficient matrix multiplication in SSD mode, which enables larger state dimensions and faster training. Mamba-2's dual mode algorithm combines both approaches during training for high efficiency.

Linkz.ai provides live link previews to enhance user engagement, reduce bounce rates, and improve website performance. Installation is simple and quick, with just one line of code. The service includes rich previews for popular URLs and analytics with the premium plans.

Deepshot 2.0 is a cutting-edge software offering fully customizable dialogue generation and replacement, revolutionizing the way professional videos are produced. With features like multilingual translation, A/B content testing, and easy error correction, Deepshot streamlines video production for creators.

Advomate is an AI-powered platform that automates legal processes such as research generation, document review, and working with legislation and case law, helping legal professionals work more efficiently.

Experts debate the feasibility of replacing CEOs with AI, arguing that many of a CEO's tasks are data-driven and could be handled by AI. Phoebe Moore and Anant Agarwal contribute to the debate, with some CEOs already relying on AI like ChatGPT for decision-making. Despite the potential for bias and flaws, the trend towards AI leadership, exemplified by companies like Dictador, continues to grow.

At Computex 2024, AMD announced an accelerated pace for data center AI innovation with an expanded Instinct GPU roadmap. The AMD Instinct MI325X accelerator will be available in Q4 2024, featuring 288GB of HBM3E memory. Following in 2025, the MI350 series based on AMD CDNA 4 architecture is expected to bring a 35x generational increase in AI inference performance. Dr. Lisa Su highlighted the annual cadence of leadership AI performance and memory capabilities that each generation will deliver.

Neven Mrgan shares feelings of repulsion upon receiving an AI-written email from a friend. Mrgan, uninterested in AI for personal creativity, draws a line between helpful tools and AI takeovers. The AI email felt impersonal, like a form letter from a friend. Mrgan values human effort and presence, worrying about future indistinguishable AI communications from real ones.

A study titled 'Re-evaluating GPT-4’s bar exam performance' critically examines the claim of GPT-4's 90th percentile score on the Uniform Bar Exam, revealing methodological shortcomings and suggesting overinflated estimates of its legal reasoning capabilities.

AI startup Hugging Face detected 'unauthorized access' to Spaces, their platform for AI model hosting. Suspected accessed secrets may have prompted token revocations, and users are advised to update their credentials. Investigations with cyber security experts and reports to law enforcement are underway.

A study by Arizona State University reveals a strong similarity between Scarlett Johansson's voice and OpenAI's 'Sky' voice assistant, causing a stir with Johansson's disapproval and raising questions about AI voice creation ethics.

Novy, a consultancy firm, collaborated with economist Emily Oster to develop Zelma, an AI-driven educational app designed to make U.S. state assessment data accessible. The project entailed overcoming data accuracy and query speed challenges, optimization using AI, and a robust stack including GCP, Kubernetes, and Postgres.

New York Tech Week offers a diverse set of events tailored for founders, investors, and tech enthusiasts. Highlights include networking dinners, pitch competitions, and insightful panels focused on AI and the Latinx tech community.

LearnerOn is an AI-powered smart learning platform geared towards satisfying individual and organizational learning needs. It integrates a catalog of over 500,000 learning resources with customizable learning paths, allowing talent leaders to focus on human-centric aspects of Learning & Development (L&D).

Vagabond is your go-to platform for effortless and immersive travel planning, offering a personalized journey with unforgettable itineraries suited to your preferences.

The article 'What We've Learned From A Year of Building with LLMs' by Eugene Yan and colleagues compiles tactical, operational, and strategic insights gained from a year of building real-world applications with large language models (LLMs). It provides practical guidance on prompt engineering, evaluation, data consideration, workflow optimization, and team collaboration aimed at developing successful products around LLMs.

Artizyou offers cutting-edge, blockchain-backed copyright protection for artists and creators, ensuring their work is secured against theft and unauthorized use with vigilant digital monitoring and immediate legal action support.

Sony Pictures plans to adopt artificial intelligence in movie and show production as stated by CEO Tony Vinciquerra. Amidst negotiations with Hollywood's major crew union, AI utilization emerges as a focus point. Vinciquerra mentions AI's role in streamlining productions in a cost-effective manner. The move aligns with current trends in the entertainment industry, where AI tools, despite causing job concerns, are seen as potential enhancers of the filmmaking process.