Snapchat's AI chatbot goes rogue

Hey there,

Is the Tech Job Recession finally over? Bernstein Research analysts seem to think so, prompting them to discontinue their monthly layoff tracker.

The industry might be on a positive turn with renewed excitement over generative AI.

In today’s edition:

📰 News: Snapchat’s “My AI” chatbot went rogue, new startups building AI stack

🛠️ Tools: Self-hosted private chatbot and a Video editing tool to automatically remove periods of silence.

🎲 Misc: New device converts brain thoughts into speech.

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

 AI

Snapchat’s AI chatbot goes Rogue

TL;DR: Snapchat’s AI-chatbot, “My AI”, glitched yesterday and posted snap stories without user permission.

If AI-gone-rouge is trending in your feed, Snapchat’s ‘My AI’ might be the reason. The chatbot posted 1 second stories without user permissions after experiencing a glitch yesterday.

 Startups

Boom in startups offering AI-stack

TL;DR: Sharp increase in funding for startups developing tools to build AI applications.

There is a growing race to develop tooling and infrastructure for AI applications, commonly referred to as the "AI Stack".

Marqo, an Australian startup, recently secured $4.4M in seed funding to create a vector database service, a core component of the AI stack.

Vector databases store unstructured data like images, videos and text as “vector embeddings” to enable AI models to quickly look up information, paving the way for features like real-time indexing, search, and personalization.

The sector is witnessing a surge in VC investments. Just in the past few months:

1. Pinecone: $100 million

2. Zilliz: $60 million

3. Weaviate: $50 million

4. Chroma: $18 million

5. Qdrant: $7.5 million

Bigger Picture: Integrating AI into your products currently requires collaborating with multiple vendors, each offering a distinct API. Marqo addresses this complexity by introducing an all-encompassing system that amalgamates vector generation, storage, and retrieval.

Leverage AI Tools

• Video Editing: Gling AI automatically detect and remove periods of silence and unwanted segments from your videos. It eliminates manual cutting, trimming, or prolonged editing sessions.(link)

• Image editing: Opendream brings much needed and familiar features, such as layering, non-destructive editing, portability, and easy-to-write extensions, to your Stable Diffusion workflows. (link)

• Self-hosted chatbot: Llama-GPT is a self-hosted, offline, ChatGPT-like chatbot. Powered by Llama 2. 100% private, with no data leaving your device. (link)

• Metaverse AI: AI-Town is deployable starter kit for building and customizing your own version of AI simulation - a virtual town where AI characters live, chat and socialize (link)

P.S: Too many tools to keep track of? Refer a friend to get instant access to our curated list of Top 50 AI tools.

 Today in Tech

• Space Warfare: US Space Force creates first unit dedicated to targeting adversary satellites. (link)

• Discord Breach: The data of 760,000 Discord.io users was put up for sale on the darknet (link)

• Decline of Threads app: Despite a record-breaking start engagement with Meta's Threads app is down 79% from a high of 2.3 million active users in early July to 576,000 as of August 7th. (link)

• A Metaverse play?: OpenAI acquires Global Illumination, a startup working on a browser-based multiplayer Minecraft clone (link)

• Software-locked for lower range: Tesla’s $10,000-cheaper Model S, X are software locked for less range, only 73% of battery capability is available unless you pay more (link)

• Device converts thoughts into speech: Scientists reconstructed a Pink Floyd song from Brain Activity, paving the way for devices that help people who lost the ability to speak communicate more naturally. (link)