Elon Musk’s xAI secures $6B to challenge OpenAI in AI race

Elon Musk xAI secures $6 billion to challenge OpenAI in AI race

Elon Musk founded xAI last summer, and The Verge just reported that it's already making waves by announcing a massive $6 billion funding round. According to the company, this money will help bring xAI's first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate research and development efforts into future technologies.

Musk has some history in the AI space. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 alongside the current CEO, Sam Altman, and others. However, he parted ways with...

29 May 2024 | Artificial Intelligence

Google ushers in the “Gemini era” with AI advancements

Google has unveiled a series of updates to its AI offerings, including the introduction of Gemini 1.5 Flash, enhancements to Gemini 1.5 Pro, and progress on Project Astra, its vision for the future of AI assistants.

Gemini 1.5 Flash is a new addition to Google's family of models, designed to be faster and more efficient to serve at scale. While lighter-weight than the 1.5 Pro, it retains the ability for multimodal reasoning across vast amounts of information and features the...

15 May 2024 | Applications

ML Olympiad returns with over 20 challenges

The popular ML Olympiad is back for its third round with over 20 community-hosted machine learning competitions on Kaggle.

The ML Olympiad – organised by groups including ML GDE, TFUG, and other ML communities – aims to provide developers with hands-on opportunities to learn and practice machine learning skills by tackling real-world challenges.

Over the previous two rounds, an impressive 605 teams participated across 32 competitions, generating 105 discussions and...

8 April 2024 | Applications

Google engineer stole AI tech for Chinese firms

A former Google engineer has been charged with stealing trade secrets related to the company's AI technology and secretly working with two Chinese firms.

Linwei Ding, a 38-year-old Chinese national, was arrested on Wednesday in Newark, California, and faces four counts of federal trade secret theft, each punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

The indictment alleges that Ding, who was hired by Google in 2019 to develop software for the company's supercomputing data...

7 March 2024 | Artificial Intelligence

Google pledges to fix Gemini’s inaccurate and biased image generation

Google's Gemini model has come under fire for its production of historically-inaccurate and racially-skewed images, reigniting concerns about bias in AI systems.

The controversy arose as users on social media platforms flooded feeds with examples of Gemini generating pictures depicting racially-diverse Nazis, black medieval English kings, and other improbable scenarios.

Google Gemini Image generation model receives criticism for being 'Woke'....

22 February 2024 | Applications

Google launches Gemini 1.5 with ‘experimental’ 1M token context

Google has unveiled its latest AI model, Gemini 1.5, which features what the company calls an "experimental" one million token context window. 

The new capability allows Gemini 1.5 to process extremely long text passages – up to one million characters – to understand context and meaning. This dwarfs previous AI systems like Claude 2.1 and GPT-4 Turbo, which max out at 200,000 and 128,000 tokens respectively:

“Gemini 1.5 Pro achieves near-perfect recall on...

16 February 2024 | Artificial Intelligence

Google launches Gemini to replace Bard chatbot

Google has launched its AI chatbot called Gemini, which replaces its short-lived Bard service.

Unveiled in December, Bard was touted as a competitor to chatbots like ChatGPT but failed to impress in demos. Google staff even called the launch “botched” and slammed CEO Sundar Pichai.

Now rebranded as Gemini, Google says it represents the company's "most capable family of models" for natural conversations. Two experiences are being launched: Gemini Advanced and a mobile...

9 February 2024 | Applications

DeepMind framework offers breakthrough in LLMs’ reasoning

A breakthrough approach in enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) has been unveiled by researchers from Google DeepMind and the University of Southern California.

Their new 'SELF-DISCOVER' prompting framework – published this week on arXiV and Hugging Face – represents a significant leap beyond existing techniques, potentially revolutionising the performance of leading models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s PaLM 2.

The framework...

8 February 2024 | Artificial Intelligence

Google announces UK data centre to meet ‘growing demand’ for AI

Google has announced plans to invest $1 billion in a new data centre in the UK which it says will help to meet “growing demand” for its AI and cloud services.

The 33-acre site in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire will bring much-needed compute capacity to businesses, supporting AI innovation and ensuring reliable digital services for Google Cloud customers and general consumers relying on products like Search, Maps, and YouTube.

Ruth Porat, Alphabet's president and chief...

19 January 2024 | Artificial Intelligence

DeepMind AlphaGeometry solves complex geometry problems

DeepMind, the UK-based AI lab owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, has developed an AI system called AlphaGeometry that can solve complex geometry problems close to human Olympiad gold medalists. 

In a new paper in Nature, DeepMind revealed that AlphaGeometry was able to solve 25 out of 30 benchmark geometry problems from past International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) competitions within the standard time limits. This nearly matches the average score of 26 problems solved...

18 January 2024 | Applications