Weekly Digest: April 17, 2024

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Welcome to Salt AI's Weekly Digest, where Alex Duffy, our VP of AI, summarizes the latest updates you should know across the AI industry, ComfyUI, and Salt AI. This week, big news from OpenAI and Adobe, why so many AI companies love Japan, a wave of new multimodal models, and more. Watch the video above and follow along with Alex's notes and links below:

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Big News

• OpenAI Japan - first office in Asia and releasing a GPT-4 custom model optimized for the Japanese language
  • Earlier this year Sakana raised $30m and Japan passed a law allowing training models on anything, copyrighted or not
  • Meanwhile countries like France are also establishing themselves with HuggingFace and Mistral but the EU just passed the EU AI Act
  • They also announced batch pricing, a 50% discount on all tokens and updates to their assistants API
• Stanford  AI Index — a 300-plus-page report tracking 2023’s worldwide trends in AI released
  • Represented in 13 charts , I’d also include this one as far as shipments from NVIDIA
• AI in Design
  • Adobe adding generative AI including directly implementing external companies like OpenAI, Pika Labs and Runway
  • Coinbase using AI for design
  • Reminder, last year Figma announced acquisition of Diagram with a post called AI: The next chapter in design and since have been teasing that they’re working on tools to turn designs into code with AI & integrated it with FigJam

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New in LLMs

• Multimodal continuing to push forward
  • Twitter releases multimodal Grok and Elon Xeet’s about how they are posed to collect quality data with Tesla self driving & touches on synthetic data, the idea of using LLM’s to generate or improve data
    • Microsoft released and then unreleased their open source models that had people excited, but the cat is out of the bag with their license
  • HuggingFace releases their mutlimodal model fully opensource with public dataset
  • Shanghai AI lab released theirs too
• A marketplace for AI to hire Humans
• With some convincing, GPT can be persuaded that your pretty awesome
• Continuing the thread of evaluation, one is official medical boards
• Some really great prompting skills wins a competition & $10,000

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New in Generative AI

• Naval released a social app where you can only talk as input
• New viral videos:
  • C3P0 x Childish Gambino made with AI music, images, video, and more
  • For those that havn’t seen it there were some other classics like Harry Potter Balenciaga and Lord Of The Rings by Wes Anderson also all AI
  • AI replacement of people created a viral meme that was made with comfy!

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New In ComfyUI

• Create viggle person replacement and community working on improving it
• Voice cloning in Comfy!
• Workflows that use videos to drive content

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