A billion images 🖼️

Hey folks,

In today’s update:

📰 News: A billion images by AI.

🛠️ Tools: Your personal data analyst.

🎲 Misc: Elon musk launches a new AI company.

Reading time is 4 minutes. Let’s dive in 🤿

 STARTUPS

Google Bard

Google released a major upgrade to Bard, its flagship AI chatbot and ChatGPT competitor.

Three core updates -

More languages: Bard can now understand 40+ languages, including Arabic, Chinese, German, Hindi, and Spanish, significantly increasing its potential user base.

Customization: You can now listen to Bard’s responses and personalize the tone and style in one of the five different options: simple, long, short, professional, or casual.

Productivity Boost: New features to pin and rename your conversations with Bard, export Python code to Replit, share your Bard chat with your network, and use images with prompts.

Bigger Picture: Google had everything it needed to dominate the AI industry -

• Top Talent: Google’s AI research unit invented the transformer neural architecture and attention mechanism, which is now used by almost all LLMs.

• Computation Resources: Google invented Tensor Processing Units (TPU) and had all the resources required to train AI models.

But it failed to materialize this lead into a successful product. Either an AI chatbot was not the priority (since it could jeopardize Google’s search based revenue) or the leadership miscalculated.

Either way, its now at risk of disruption by newcomers - ChatGPT is the most popular AI chatbot but have you ever heard someone use Bard?

 BIG TECH

A Billion Images

More than a billion images have been created by Adobe’s AI-powered image tool, Firefly!

Firefly was initally launched in March as a standalone service and later integrated into photoshop, and people absolutely love it!

Bigger Picture: AI to create images from text inputs have been around for a while, and one might argue Midjourney and Stable diffusion create better images.

But Adobe nailed the implementation, solving two major blockers to wider adoption:

1. Copyrights: AI models are trained from publicly accessible images but scraping them is in legal gray zone, preventing commercial use by businesses. Adobe solved this issue and is the only product on market that guarantees protection against copyright lawsuits!

2. Ease of use: Firefly is directly integrated into Photoshop. For millions of users, the AI is just another tool in their already familiar workspace.

Google executives likely need to take a page out of Adobe’s playbook.

LEVERAGE AI

Analyze your data

Ana: Analyze, summarize and visualize your data. This tool acts like your personal data analyst, helping you find in-depth business insights, track sales trends, or fine-tune your marketing campaigns.(link)

Streamline HR

Policy Pro: AI chatbot helps you navigate your company’s policy documentation labyrinth. It extracts policy info from a company's Standard Operating Procedures to provide real-time answers to internal users, saving time and streamlining HR.(link)

 MISC

What’s happening in Tech

• 🎥 Media: Hollywood studios want to replace background actors with AI after paying them for only one day - Futurism

• 🤖 xAI: Elon musk launches new AI company to understand the ‘true nature of universe’ and build OpenAi alternative - Verge

• 🧑‍⚖️ Legal: Google hit with lawsuit alleging it stole data from millions of users to train its AI models - CNN

• 💰 Money: Voice cloning startup, Resemble AI, lands $8M in funding - Techcrunch