Elon's Grok 2 shocks the AI world

PLUS: Apple's iPad is getting a robotic arm

Author

Rowan Cheung
August 15, 2024

Welcome, AI enthusiasts.

Elon Musk’s xAI has officially proved itself as a major competitor in the AI race after launching the new version of its Grok-2 chatbot.

In just over a year, the AI startup has created a state-of-the-art model that outperforms versions of GPT-4 and Claude. Let’s get into it…

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Grok 2 reaches state-of-the-art status

  • Apple’s iPad is getting a robotic arm

  • Creating sound effects with text

  • Google’s Imagen 3 tops Midjourney, DALL-E

  • 5 new AI tools & 4 new AI jobs

  • More AI & tech news

Read time: 4 minutes

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

XAI

Image source: xAI

The Rundown: xAI’s newest AI model, Grok-2, is now available in beta for users on the X platform — achieving state-of-the-art status and outperforming versions of Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT-4.

The details:

  • In addition to Grok-2, Grok-2 mini is also now available to users on the X platform in beta with an enterprise API release planned for later this month.

  • Both Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini show significant improvements in reasoning with retrieved content, tool use capabilities, and performance across all academic benchmarks.

  • Grok-2 can now create and publish images directly on the X platform, powered by Black Forest Lab's Flux 1 AI model.

  • Grok-2 surpasses OpenAI’s latest GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet in some categories, making it one of the best models currently available to the public if based purely on benchmarks.

Why it matters: Grok-1 debuted as a niche, no-filter chatbot, but Grok-2’s newly achieved state-of-the-art status has catapulted xAI into a legitimate competitor in the AI race. The startup is looking to have a bright future with its new Supercluster, Elon’s ability to attract talent, and vast amounts of real-time training data available on X.

TOGETHER WITH PODCASTLE

The Rundown: Podcastle is your go-to platform for effortlessly producing studio-quality audio and video content, making professional content creation accessible to everyone.

With Podcastle, you can:

  • Record and edit content in a simple-to-use studio and editing suite.

  • Enhance your video and audio quality with a single click.

  • Create content quickly and at scale with AI Voices and Voice Cloning.

Try it out for free, or schedule a personalized demo with our team of experts.

APPLE

Image source: Midjourney

The Rundown: Apple is reportedly ramping up development on a high-end tabletop smart home device with a robotic arm, an iPad-like display, and Siri voice command to operate its AI features.

The details:

  • The project, codenamed J595, reportedly involves a team of several hundred people and could launch as early as 2026 or 2027.

  • The device combines an iPad-like display with a thin robotic arm that can tilt, spin 360 degrees, and move the screen around.

  • It is expected to run a modified version of iPadOS making it a familiar smart home command center, videoconferencing tool, and remote-controlled home security device.

  • Apple is targeting a price point of around $1,000 for the product.

Why it matters: Apple is doubling down on its commitment to artificial intelligence by ramping up the development of a strange new Siri-powered, countertop robotic arm. With Apple Intelligence launching later this year, the tech giant seemingly has big plans for implementing AI into its hardware.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: ElevenLabs now offers a text-to-sound feature that allows users to generate sound effects by writing a simple description of the noise they want.

Step-by-Step:

  1. Visit ElevenLabs and log in or create an account. You can try this feature for free.

  2. Select "Sound Effects" from the left sidebar.

  3. Describe your desired sound effect in the text box.

  4. Adjust settings for duration and prompt influence.

  5. Click "Generate Sound Effects" to create your sounds.

PRESENTED BY ANGEL AI

The Rundown: Angel AI offers a secure, AI-powered browser designed to provide children with safe, age-appropriate internet experiences.

Angel AI provides children with:

  • Content tailored to your child's interests and stage of development

  • Safe video streaming without ads, inappropriate content, and autoplay

  • The ability to ask questions and receive age-customized answers

Be the first to gain access by joining Angel’s waitlist today.

GOOGLE

Image source: Google DeepMind

The Rundown: Google DeepMind recently published the paper for it’s new state-of-the-art AI image generation model, Imagen 3, flexing that it beat DALL-E 3, Midjourney v6, and Stable Diffusion 3 in human performance evaluations.

The details:

  • The human evaluations asked participants to rank their preferred models for overall quality and adherence to detailed prompts.

  • Imagen 3 excelled particularly in generating high-quality, realistic images that closely match long and complex text descriptions.

  • Despite its capability to accurately generate photorealistic images, it struggles with certain tasks requiring numerical reasoning, understanding scale, and depicting actions.

  • Imagen 3 is available to try via ImageFX and Vertex AI.

Why it matters: Google struggled to find its footing early in the AI text-to-image category, but with its latest Imagen 3 release, it’s beating the top tools in the space. It’s another win for Google after also beating OpenAI in the race to widespread rollouts of advanced voice AI just yesterday.

NEW TOOLS & JOBS

  • 🧠 OpenAI - Product Manager, Model Customization

  • 👁️ Meta - AI Research Engineer, VLLM (vision large language models)

  • 📊 Databricks - Sr Manager, Presales (Data & AI)

  • 🧪 Tempus - Molecular Lab Supervisor

QUICK HITS

Free eBook: The AI Proficiency Report from Section. 7% of the workforce is getting all the benefits of AI. Download the report to see what they do differently.*

Anthropic launched prompt caching for Claude, reducing costs for developers by 90% and latency by 85% for longer prompts.

OpenAI’s new ChatGPT-4o model update tested under the codename “anonymous-chatbot” and reclaimed the top spot on LMSYS Arena.

MIT CSAIL released its first-ever AI Risk Repository, a comprehensive database of over 700 AI risks from 43 existing frameworks.

A Powell Tribune resigned after admitting to using AI to generate fake quotes in multiple published articles.

SAG-AFTRA video game performers strike against major gaming companies over AI protections in contract negotiations.

Radical Ventures raised nearly $800 million to invest in the AI space with backing from Fei-Fei Li, Geoffrey Hinton, Canada pensions.

*Sponsored listing

THAT’S A WRAP

SPONSOR US

Get your product in front of over 600k+ AI enthusiasts

Our newsletter is read by thousands of tech professionals, investors, engineers, managers, and business owners around the world. Get in touch today.

FEEDBACK

How would you rate today's newsletter?

Vote below to help us improve the newsletter for you.

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

If you have specific feedback or anything interesting you’d like to share, please let us know by replying to this email.

Reply

or to participate.