⚙️ Google responds to OpenAI with high-tech unveils — Nvidia is the real winner

37% of you are not cool with it, but as one reader wrote: “They will do it anyway.”

35% don’t really care

28% are perfectly alright with it; as one reader wrote: “If you don't want it out there for all to do with (as) they choose, don't post it.”

🚘 Cruise returns to the streets

🚔 Waymo is under investigation 

🛜 Here’s how to understand the capabilities of LLMs

📺 Google unveils new AI tech at I/O conference

Cruise said that it will gradually expand this supervised autonomous driving effort into the other cities in which it operates. 

In October of last year, a San Francisco pedestrian, after being hit by another car, was dragged 20 feet by a Cruise robotaxi (the woman was injured, but survived). 

After the incident, Cruise halted its activity and brought in a whole new leadership team as it re-examined its operations and safety standards. Last month, the company laid out a road to resuming its driverless operations; this step gets everyone that much closer to autonomous Cruise fleets once again roaming the streets.

The safety regulator flagged 22 incidents where Waymo’s autonomous vehicles either broke traffic laws or caused single-car accidents with everything from parked vehicles to “gates and chains.”

The report also identified situations where Waymo cars drove “in opposing lanes with nearby oncoming traffic.”

NHTSA also recently opened an investigation into Zoox, Amazon’s self-driving unit. 

I’ve spoken with multiple AI/autonomous driving experts over the past year, and the consensus toward current autonomous vehicles is skeptical. Yes, improvements are coming fast, but since the AI powering this tech lacks the human ability to reason, it becomes very difficult to adequately train an AV for edge cases. 

• These companies might rack up millions of miles, but a lack of reasoning means that those miles will not prepare the vehicles for each unique element of a random, unexpected edge case. And edge cases are where things go wrong.

Leverage AI for streamlined task management, significantly enhancing time efficiency

Utilize AI tools to elevate decision-making and maximize workflow efficiency across teams

Explore comprehensive templates and detailed examples to master straightforward AI delegation

Evaluate and optimize productivity by assessing measurable impacts of AI on your daily output

Mitchell said that, even as LLMs might excel on certain benchmarks, we don’t “know the extent to which the test items in a benchmark appeared in the training data.”

• It’s hard to tell if models are reasoning, or if they are good at pattern retrieval based on their training data. 

• As one computer scientist once put it to me: Imagine a law student who reads textbooks and passes the bar exam, versus a student (with a photographic memory) who was trained on thousands of bar exams, then passes the bar exam.

  • In this example, if there were no bar exams in the training data, an AI passing the bar exam becomes a much bigger deal. 

In this paradigm, models are tested on pairs of tasks that require the same type of reasoning:

• The first features content likely in a model’s training data.

• The second features content unlikely in the training data.

  • Using this, scientists can determine the extent that reasoning might be present in an LLM. 

“In short, LLMs seem to have some ability to reason, but without stress-testing them (e.g., with counterfactual tasks), one can’t conclude that they are reasoning in a general way rather than relying on their training data in ways that won’t generalize to out-of-distribution examples.”

Python AI & ML Developer: Deloitte · United States · Philadelphia, PA, Hybrid · Full-time · (Apply here)

Applied Scientist II — Generative AI Innovation Center: Amazon · United States · Multiple Locations · Full-time · (Apply here)

AI Product Strategist: Verizon · United States · New Jersey or Texas, Hybrid · Full-time · (Apply here)

Ai4, the world’s largest gathering of artificial intelligence leaders in business, is coming to Las Vegas — August 12-14, 2024.

• Don’t wait — passes are going fast. Apply today for a complimentary pass or register now for 41% off final prices.

April wholesale inflation came in hotter than expected (CNBC).

Kyle Vogt (Cruise co-founder) is launching a bot company — the bots will “do chores so you don’t have to” (Kyle Vogt).

Meta is developing AI-powered earphones with cameras (The Information).

Google launches a new model – and Google Drive gets an AI companion

• Google introduced Gemini 1.5 Flash into its lineup of AI models, a model that’s just as powerful as the pro version, but is optimized for “narrow, high-frequency, low-latency tasks.”

• Google also made improvements to its flagship Gemini 1.5 model & Gemini 1.5 Pro is rolling out to Google Drive as an on-hand assistant (for paid subscribers) next month. 

AI is coming to Google Search (this week):

• Google’s Search Generative Experience is leaving its beta round  — “AI Overviews” will be integrated into Google Search this week in the U.S.

• Now, when you search on Google, the first thing you’ll see is an AI-generated summary of the information you might have been looking for. Publishers, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for … say ‘goodbye’ to your Google web traffic. 

A Google AI assistant is coming to Chrome:

• Starting with Chrome 126 (we’re in 124 at the moment) Gemini Nano will be a built-in feature. 

Project Astra: Google’s response to OpenAI’s GPT-4o:

• Project Astra is a conversational multimodal AI assistant that can receive input in the form of images, videos and text — the goal is for this prototype to become the basis for natural, universal AI agents that can interact with people and the world around them (very similar to OpenAI’s GPT-4o).

Also worth noting that, with all these unveils, Google still did not spill the beans on its training data (which is particularly interesting for the multimodal model), or the energy cost of training/running all these models. 

I’m wondering if a lot of people who’d rather not deal with AI in search are about to have no choice in the matter, or, perhaps, vice versa.

Cargo: A tool to enhance your CRM, aggregate your workflow & drive revenue.

Yoodli: An AI tool to improve your speaking skills.

Venturefy: A tool that provides a wiki of B2B relationships — a “blue check” for businesses.