Sam Altman stepped down from OpenAI's Security Committee; Meta will resume AI training in the UK; OpenAI launched o1; Bookkeeping platform finally raised $200M; Palantir and BP announced a 5-year strategic partnership; Pixtral 12B is Mistral AI's first open-source multimodal model; and more
Fei-Fei Li's AI startup World Labs, backed by $230 million in funding and reportedly valued at over $1 billion, is developing large world models to enable AI systems to reason about the physical world, with applications in design, gaming, visual effects, and potentially robotics.
Meta is resuming training its AI models using public data from UK-based, adult Facebook and Instagram users. The company acknowledged the support of the UK's Information Commissioner’s Office, which accepted Meta's alleged 'legitimate interest' as a legal basis for its data collection practices.
Meta has updated its AI labeling approach, distinguishing between AI-generated and AI-edited content by making the label less prominent for edited content and relocating it to the post's menu. However, concerns remain about the potential misinterpretation of heavily manipulated images.
The Biden-Harris Administration has secured voluntary commitments from major AI companies to combat AI-generated image-based sexual abuse through responsible data sourcing, safeguards in development processes, and dataset modifications.
Osavul, a Kyiv-based media intelligence company founded in response to the Russian Invasion and using AI to counter information warfare, has secured €2.78M in funding from 42CAP, u.ventures, and SMRK to expand globally, develop its algorithms, and offer B2B solutions.
AI data analytics startup Purple Transform has raised £4.5 million to expand its AI-powered railway safety system. The system has shown significant results in incident reduction. As a result, Purple Transform will leverage the funds to expand its operations.
London-based startup Tem has raised $13.7 million in Series A funding to expand its AI-powered marketplace that directly connects businesses with renewable energy sources, potentially reducing costs by up to 25% and disrupting the traditional utility model.
The Irish Data Protection Commission is investigating whether Google should have conducted a Data Protection Impact Assessment before processing European users' data to train PaLM 2, the precursor to Gemini AI models.
OpenAI has launched its new o1 model family, featuring advanced reasoning capabilities and improved performance in various tasks, but with higher costs and some limitations, marking a significant step in AI development while intensifying competition in the field.
Mistral AI has released Pixtral 12B, its first multimodal model. Pixtral 12B offers competitive performance in image and text understanding tasks, features a 128k context window, and is available under an Apache 2.0 license.
Google's NotebookLM, an AI research assistant powered by Gemini 1.5 Pro, has introduced a new Audio Overviews feature that converts uploaded documents into AI-generated audio discussions between two speakers.