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- Humane seeks AI Pin exit
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Welcome, AI enthusiasts.
Just weeks after it’s launch of the AI Pin wearable hailed as a ‘smartphone killer’, Humane is now reportedly considering selling the company.
With several devices struggling with poor reviews and adoption, and vast upgrades coming to smartphones — is the wearable AI sector about to go bust? Let’s explore…
In today’s AI rundown:
Humane seeks buyer after AI Pin launch
Scientists plan a head transplant system
How to access Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash
Chameleon: Meta’s new multimodal LLM
6 new AI tools & 4 new AI jobs
More AI & tech news
Read time: 4 minutes
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
HUMANE
Image source: Humane
The Rundown: Humane is reportedly exploring a potential sale of the company, just weeks after its highly-anticipated AI Pin wearable device launched to poor public reviews.
The details:
Humane's AI Pin, a magnetic device that clips onto clothing, was touted as a potential "smartphone killer".
The $699 device was criticized for issues with reliability, practicality, and its additional $24/month subscription fee.
As reported by Bloomberg, Humane is seeking a lofty sale price between $750M and $1B despite its rocky debut.
The company has raised $230M from notable investors, including Sam Altman, and was valued at $850M last year prior to the AI Pin’s launch.
Why it matters: Despite wearables like the AI Pin, Rabbit’s r1, and others hitting the market, we’ve yet to really see one truly break through to broader adoption. With AI rapidly coming on-device and Siri 2.0 on the way, our smartphones might just evolve to being the only AI device users really need.
TOGETHER WITH JURNY
The Rundown: Jurny is an AI platform automating hotel and short-term rental operations, targeting over $355B in inefficiencies to revolutionize the hospitality market.
Jurny's competitive edge includes:
Partnerships with Airbnb, Vrbo, and Expedia
5x customer growth and $35M+ bookings last year
$12M raised from top VCs and 1,200+ investors
Featured on CNBC’s Squawk Box and in Skift, Forbes, and Bloomberg
Interested in investing alongside top VCs? Click here to learn more.
BRAINBRIDGE
Image source: BrainBridge
The Rundown: Neuroscience startup BrainBridge just introduced a new concept for an AI-driven robotic system capable of performing head transplants — aiming to help patients with terminal illnesses and paralysis.
The details:
The CGI demo proposes a system that uses advanced robotics, AI, and real-time molecular imaging to transfer a patient’s head or face onto a donor body.
The company hopes to conduct the first surgery within eight years, and is releasing the concept early to attract top scientists.
A headband with a brain-computer interface (like Neuralink) would help patients communicate and execute tasks during recovery using their minds.
Why it matters: While the mind-blowing (🥁) system seems highly speculative and more sci-fi than reality — so did Neuralink’s brain chips. While we’re likely a long way from this becoming possible, with the rate of advancement in robotics and AI it’s tough to rule anything out over the next decade.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: Google just released Gemini 1.5 Flash, a lightweight AI model optimized for speed and efficiency, with multimodal reasoning and an impressive 1M context window.
Step-by-step:
Go to Google's AI Studio and sign in with your Google account.
Select "Gemini 1.5 Flash" from the "Models" dropdown menu.
Configure the run settings (temperature, token count, stop sequences, safety) and system instructions to your needs.
Type your prompt and click "Run" to generate high-quality results, fast!
THE RUNDOWN UNIVERSITY
The Rundown: Zapier Central is one of the most powerful AI tools — allowing you to automate actions across 6,000+ apps. Tomorrow, we’re hosting a live workshop going in-depth on how to build out automations to speed up your work.
Join us free and learn:
The capabilities of Zapier Central and how to download the free Chrome extension.
A step-by-step guide to Zapier Central’s AI bot-building: Behaviors, Instant actions, and Data sources.
Real-life use cases of Zapier, such as how we use it to automate our newsletter job listings.
The workshop will be beginner-friendly and will not require coding skills.
Access with this link to get a free one-week trial to The Rundown AI University (and to attend tomorrow’s workshop for free).
You’ll also get instant access to our 150+ curated AI workflows, daily tutorials, recorded workshops, and so much more!
META
Image source: Meta
The Rundown: Meta’s AI research lab just introduced Chameleon, a new family of ‘early-fusion token-based’ AI models that can both understand and generate text and images in any order.
The details:
Unlike other models that process image and text separately and then combine them later, Chameleon works with linked sequences of both.
Chameleon outperformed all rival models on image captioning and visual questions, while still matching performance on text-only.
The 34B parameter Chameleon also matched or outperformed top models like Gemini Pro and GPT-4V on tests of long-form mixed-modal generations.
Why it matters: Chameleon shows the potential for a different type of architecture for multimodal AI models, with its early-fusion approach enabling more seamless reasoning and generation across modalities and setting new performance bars.
NEW TOOLS & JOBS
📝 Granola - Transcribe meeting notes without meeting bots
🔗 Unify - Access all LLMs with a single API key and standard API
🔍 Findr - AI-powered answers using workplace apps
📞 Ringly - Personalized AI phone customer agent
🗣️ Interviews Chat - Co-pilot for job interviews
📊 User Evaluation - AI-powered agent for qualitative research interviews
QUICK HITS
Free event: AI + Happiness. Join Scott Galloway and Google X's Mo Gawdat for a free, 1-hour discussion on AI and happiness. Learn whether AI will reduce suffering, increase contentment, and deepen connection — or make things worse. RSVP here.*
TikTok launched a new ‘Symphony’ AI suite for advertisers, introducing tools like the Creative Studio to generate videos, Assistant for scriptwriting, and Ads Manager to optimize videos.
IBM announced it will open-source its Granite AI models, also partnering with Saudi Arabia to train its ALLaM Arabic language model using the company’s Watsonx tool.
Amazon is reportedly set to launch an advanced AI-powered Alexa, with plans to charge a monthly fee separate from Prime subscriptions.
Nvidia reported its Q2 earnings, beating estimates and sending the company’s market valuation to over $2.3T — with CEO Jensen Huang saying the company will make new AI chips in a ‘one-year-rhythm’.
Mark Zuckerberg created an advisory group to guide Meta on AI advancements and opportunities, featuring GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, investor Charlie Songhurst, and CEOs from Shopify and Stripe.
*Sponsored listing
THAT’S A WRAP
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