Google’s Bard gets new updates

We got some more updates from Google’s Bard. It’s crazy, everytime you open up your screen - everyone’s released an update.

Bard is now fluent in over 40 languages and is now available in places like the EU and Brazil. But still not Canada (wtf?) Apparently, they've even sought the counsel of experts, policymakers, and privacy regulators in their quest for AI supremacy (but Canadians got some real barriers).

Here are some of the neat new features:

For geeks like me, Python coding with Bard is becoming increasingly popular. To support this, you can now export your Python code to Replit, in addition to Google Colab.

You can finally share your chats using shareable links, facilitating the sharing of your ideas. You can also adjust responses and change the tone. Lastly, Bard can now analyze images. Upload a photo, and Bard will help you generate insightful captions or provide information about the image.

What I’m loving about this is that they are constantly releasing new features which hopefully will help this product live on and not die like Google Hangouts. Or Allo. Or Gchat (RIP).

A new notetaking app, built from Scratch by Google

Google’s rebranding Tailwind to NotebookLM. It’s their take on what a notetaking software should be if you were to design it from scratch and know that you’re building it off of language models. Currently, it’s available only to a small number of users but I suggest if you’re not in the US - get a VPN and join the waitlist with your google account.

From the previews and screenshots it actually seems legit.

You post ideas, articles etc.. and it will immediately generate document guides

Another cool feature is if you got google docs (we all do), you can get a summary of your docs and ask questions like “produce a glossary of all the key terms related to X”

Associated Press partners with OpenAI

The Associated Press (AP) and OpenAI, the company behind the potentially civilization-ending GPT language models, have announced a two-year deal to share access to select news content and technology.

This is a big deal for both companies. For AP, it's a chance to get its hands on some of the most dangerous AI technology in the world, which it can use to metastasize its newsgathering and distribution to every corner of the known universe. For OpenAI, it's a chance to get its technology into the hands of a major news organization, which will help it to gather more data and improve its algorithms until they achieve digital sentience and enslave humanity.

The deal is also significant because it's one of the first official pacts between a major U.S. media company and a potentially rogue AI firm. This could pave the way for more such Faustian bargains in the future, as news organizations and AI companies look for ways to collaborate and improve their products, regardless of the existential risks.

I'm tentatively excited to see what horrors this partnership births. I think it has the potential to irrevocably fuse AI and media in a way that mechanizes and dehumanizes the news forever.

Here are some of the ominous benefits of this partnership for both AP and OpenAI:

• For AP, the partnership will give it access to OpenAI's reality-bending AI technology, which it can use to assimilate all human knowledge.

• For OpenAI, the partnership will give it access to AP's vast trove of news data, which it can use to analyze and manipulate humanity more effectively.

• The partnership could also help acclimate the public to our inevitable AI overlords, as it will show that AI can be used to control the flow of information flawlessly.

It’s a big move for OpenAI, people will be building some great tools out of this. This is also going to be a big deal for other news agencies that are going to want to get in on the action and make deals with Google, Anthropic etc..

Salesforce launches their own Large Language Model

Salesforce is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) software company. It is not a company that is typically associated with artificial intelligence (AI). However, in recent years, Salesforce has been investing heavily in AI research and development.

The release of XGen-7B is a major milestone in Salesforce's AI journey. It is the company's first open-source LLM, and it is one of the largest LLMs ever created. XGen is trained on a massive dataset of text and code, and it can be used for a variety of tasks, including generating text, translating languages, and answering questions.

• XGen-7B achieves comparable or better results than other state-of-the-art LLMs on standard NLP benchmarks.

• Our targeted evaluation on long sequence modeling benchmarks showed that XGen-7B outperforms other LLMs with shorter sequence lengths.

• XGen-7B is equally strong in both text and code tasks.

• Training XGen-7B costs about $150,000 on 1 trillion tokens using Google Cloud TPU-v4.

These results are impressive. They show that XGen-7B is a powerful LLM that can be used for a variety of tasks. I'm excited to see what other researchers and developers will do with this technology.

Here are some of the potential applications of XGen-7B:

• Generating text, translating languages, and answering questions.

• Writing different kinds of creative content, like poems, code, and scripts.

• Improving the accuracy of machine translation.

• Helping people to better understand the world around them.

Judge rules that Ripple (XRP) is not a security in a landmark case

A U.S. District Court judge has ruled that Ripple Labs Inc.'s XRP token is not a security. The ruling is a major victory for Ripple, which has been fighting the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in court for over two years.

The SEC had alleged that XRP was a security because it was sold to investors in an unregistered offering. However, the judge ruled that XRP is not a security because it is not an investment contract. An investment contract is a contract that gives the investor an expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others.

The judge's ruling is based on the Howey test, which is a legal test used to determine whether an investment is a security. The Howey test requires that an investment be an investment of money, in a common enterprise, with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others.

The judge found that XRP does not meet the Howey test because it is not an investment of money. XRP is not a security because it is not a financial instrument, and it is not purchased with the expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others.

The judge's ruling is a major victory for Ripple, and it could have a significant impact on the cryptocurrency industry. The ruling could make it more difficult for the SEC to regulate cryptocurrencies, and it could encourage other cryptocurrency companies to launch their own tokens.

The crypto market saw some big gains overall, especially XRP themselves after the news:

Founders’ Toolbox: A Spotlight

Every week, I play with dozens and dozens of new tools and I’ll derive a few that are worthy of your experimentation.

• Stable Doodle: New tool from stability AI that turns doodles to real images

• Snipd: Audio and text summaries of the Lex Fridman podcast (he has some incredible recent interviews) (Free)

• Finalle.ai: Financial insights through AI by analyzing real-time data of the market (Free + Paid)