THE WEEKLY NEWSLETTER OF AIM. Sunday, Mar 24, 2024 | Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here By Amit Naik |
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Apple just announced the dates for its most exciting developers’ conference, WWDC 2024, happening on June 10-14. So, folks, it's time you start working on your ‘AI’ drinking game—it's bound to be a highlight and, hopefully, won’t leave you sober! |
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While the excitement continues, there is a lot of hype around a revamped version of Siri— which is so dumb that it’s embarrassing —alongside the iOS 18 release and other AI integrations in the Messages App, Apple Music, iWork apps, Xcode for developers and more. |
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“It’s going to be Absolutely Incredible!” said Greg Joswiak, the SVP of marketing at Apple, announcing the dates for the event and dropping subtle hints about how AI will be the theme for this year’s developers’ conference. |
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GenAI to take centre stage at WWDC For quite some time now, Apple has been coolly ignoring the presence of generative AI. “Apple has reached AGI (Apple Giving up on Intelligence),” quipped AI scientist Pedro Domingos recently. But now, it seems Apple realises that it can run, but it can’t hide. With barely two months left until the event, the Cupertino-based tech giant seems to have actively sought partnerships to enhance its generative AI capabilities with the likes of Google Gemini, Baidu Ernie 4.0, besides OpenAI and others. At a recent earnings call, CEO Tim Cook said that the company will continue to ‘spend a tremendous amount of time and effort’ on AI and technologies that will shape the future. “We’re excited to share the details of our ongoing work in that space later this year,” he said, possibly hinting at the upcoming WWDC. Recently, Apple also unveiled MM1, a family of multimodal AI models, with the largest being a 30B parameter model, hinting at its efforts at building in-house LLM capabilities. |
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Jason Snell writer and former editor-in-chief at Macworld, highlighted in a recent podcast episode of MacBreak Weekly that Apple might not have its LLM ready for WWDC. Still, it will demonstrate AI capabilities utilising third-party models in a privacy-focused manner. |
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AI Meets Privacy This is surely expected of Apple, where it is most likely to combine advanced AI models (third-party models) with a mix of cloud-based and on-device machine learning to bolster features while ensuring privacy preservation. Apple will most likely be working on something similar—i.e. bringing privacy to LLMs. Check out Apple WWDC 2024 predictions here. |
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How Databricks Came to Ola Krutrim’s Rescue |
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| “The Krutrim model was launched using our platform,” said Naveen Rao, VP of generative AI at Databricks, in an exclusive interview with AIM ahead of the release of the world’s most powerful open-source model, DBRX. He said the team custom-trained it on their own mixed Indian language dataset. Read the full story here. |
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Zoho’s ManageEngine Invests $10 Mn in GPUs |
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ManageEngine, the enterprise IT management division of Zoho Corporation, has been accelerating its infrastructure development exponentially to unleash generative AI offerings for its customers. The company recently invested nearly $10 million in procuring GPUs from all three majors. “We are working closely with Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD,” said Shailesh Kumar Davey, co-founder and VP of engineering of ManageEngine, in an exclusive interview with AIM. |
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Are Bangalore Data Centres the Real Reason for Water Crisis? In the latest episode of Story Kya Hai, AIM investigates Bengaluru's water crisis, focusing on the water consumption by the city's data centres, alongside exploring their efforts to minimise water usage and more. |
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Cypher 2024, Now in the USA |
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| Cypher 2024 India edition will be held in Namma Bengaluru on September 25-27, 2024. |
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- OpenAI announced its latest model, Voice Engine, built to generate natural-sounding speech from text input and a mere 15-second audio sample.
- Elon Musk’s xAI recently announcedGrok-1.5. This new model has improved reasoning capabilities and a 128K content window.
- AI21 released Jamba, a novel AI model combining Mamba SSM and Transformer architectures, offering high efficiency and a large 256K context window.
- LatentView Analytics acquiredDecision Point to enhance its data and AI capabilities, expanding to the US and Europe regions.
- Hume AI recently introduced a conversational AI named Empathic Voice Interface (EVI), with emotional intelligence. Click here to try it out.
- NVIDIA has solidified its dominance in generative AI by unveiling performance metrics in the latest MLPerf benchmarks. Check it out here.
- OpenAI kickstarted the GPT earnings programme in the US. Know more about the initiative here.
- Microsoft Leadership Shuffle:Mikhail Parakhin recently stepped down from his role leading Microsoft's Windows and web experiences team, while Pavan Davuluri, an IIT Madras alumnus with 23 years at Microsoft, becomes the new head of Windows and Surface teams.
- At the annual Adobe Summit 2024 in Las Vegas, the design powerhouse unveiled new features. See all the major announcements here.
- Tokyo-based tech giant Rakuten recently released RakutenAI-7B, a suite of LLMs in the Japanese language. Check it out here.
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