🥟 Chao-Down #332 Google shows off general AI assistant Project Astra, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever leaves the company, Meta explores building AI-equipped earbuds with cameras
Plus, Expedia begins testing an AI-based search and travel planner.
Among the many things Google announced yesterday including cheaper and more powerful Gemini models, what caught many people’s attention was Google’s foray into a general AI assistant called Project Astra.
Short for “advanced seeing and talking responsive agent,” Astra is an early version towards the vision of artificial general intelligence from DeepMind founder Denis Hassabis.
A major difference between Astra and what OpenAI showed off with GPT-4o is their release philosophy. OpenAI is making the experience public to everyone from day 1 while Google has no stated release date and has only allowed a select number of journalists and influencers to test drive Astra in-person during the conference.
What did you think of Astra and the Google IO demos?
-Alex, your resident Chaos Coordinator.
What happened in AI? 📰
Google I/O 2024: Here's everything Google just announced (TechCrunch)
Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever leaves OpenAI six months after Altman ouster (Ars Technica)
Meta exploring AI-assisted earbuds with cameras, The Information reports (Reuters)
Google’s invisible AI watermark will help identify generative text and video (The Verge)
Expedia starts testing AI-powered features for search and travel planning (TechCrunch)
From Baby Talk to Baby A.I. (The New York Times)
Always be Learnin’ 📕 📖
Superhuman? - What does it mean for AI to be better than a human? And how can we tell? (One Useful Thing)
How does ChatGPT ‘think’? Psychology and neuroscience crack open AI large language models (Nature)
AI Engineer Compensation Trends Q1 2024 (levels.fyi)
Projects to Keep an Eye On 🛠
prometheus-eval/prometheus-eval: Evaluate your LLM's response with Prometheus (Github)
upstash/semantic-cache: A fuzzy key value store based on semantic similarity rather lexical equality. (Github)
philz1337x/clarity-upscaler: Clarity AI | AI Image Upscaler & Enhancer - free and open-source Magnific Alternative (Github)
The Latest in AI Research 💡
You Only Cache Once: Decoder-Decoder Architectures for Language Models (arxiv)
xLSTM: Extended Long Short-Term Memory (arxiv.org)
In-Context Learning with Long-Context Models: An In-Depth Exploration (arxiv)
The World Outside of AI 🌎
Astronauts could run round ‘Wall of Death’ to keep fit on moon, say scientists | Science (The Guardian)
The Battle for Attention - How do we hold on to what matters in a distracted age? (The New Yorker)
The Diminishing Returns of Having Good Taste (The Atlantic)
US TikTok ban: how the looming restriction is affecting scientists on the app (Nature)
How the world wastes hundreds of billions of meals yearly, in 3 charts (Vox)
Environmental Changes Are Fueling Human, Animal and Plant Diseases, Study Finds (The New York Times)
One Last Bite 😋
