Neuralink's telepathic human milestone

PLUS: Yelp rolls out new AI upgrades

Welcome, AI enthusiasts.

Neuralink just reached a new milestone, implanting its brain chip into a human patient for the first time.

If Elon Musk’s ‘Telepathy’ device is successful, it could truly change how we interact with technology forever. Let’s explore…

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Neuralink places first brain chip implant in human

  • Yelp launches new AI features for users, businesses

  • How to summarize a YouTube video or podcast using Bard

  • Tencent details multimodal LLM advances

  • 6 new AI tools & 4 new AI jobs

  • More AI & tech news

Read time: 4 minutes

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

NEURALINK

Image source: Neuralink

The Rundown: Elon Musk just announced that Neuralink successfully implanted its advanced brain chip in a human test subject for the first time, saying the patient is ‘recovering well’ from the surgery in a post on X.

The details:

  • Musk touted "promising neuron spike detection," in the patient, suggesting the chip’s sensors are capturing individual brain cell activity.

  • Musk also revealed that Neuralink’s first product will be called 'Telepathy’, which plans to enable paralyzed patients to control devices by thought.

  • The company’s initial patient trials targeted quadriplegic patients aged 22+ suffering from spinal injuries or ALS.

Why it matters: Did you have telepathy on your 2024 bingo card? Neuralink continues to push the boundaries of brain hardware, with a chance to potentially enable game changing new abilities for paralyzed patients — and push the tech closer to consumer availability.

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YELP

Image source: Yelp

The Rundown: Yelp just introduced several new AI enhancements on the platform, including AI-generated business summaries and insights to help users quickly understand what to expect from local businesses.

The details:

  • One-sentence AI summaries will now describe a business's most notable qualities like atmosphere, service, amenities, and popular menu items.

  • Yelp is also providing business owners new AI-driven recommendations on things like optimal budgets for easier and more cost-effective advertisements.

  • A new AI-powered home feed on iOS aims to help users more easily discover relevant businesses and content on the platform.

Why it matters: With mass amounts of data, Yelp’s AI-driven advancements make a lot of sense — and convenience-type integrations like these are perfect ways to get consumers more comfortable with the tech by improving user experience in subtle ways.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: Google has recently made big improvements to Bard with upgrades from Gemini — and the chatbot has become great at summarizing long videos or podcasts from YouTube.

Step-by-step:

  1. Head to Bard (available in nearly every country except Canada).

  2. Enter prompt: “Write a detailed summary of this video [insert link]. Summarize using bullet points. Include timestamps to the relevant themes/sections. Include quotes”

  3. You now have a summary and the key points of the video or podcast!

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AI RESEARCH

Image source: Tencent

The Rundown: Tencent researchers just released a paper highlighting the rise and advancement of multimodal LLMs (MM-LLMs), including best practices and future outlooks for the powerful models.

The details:

  • MM-LLMs combine powerful language models with other modalities like images, audio, and video, enhancing cognitive capabilities.

  • The paper analyzed 26 MM-LLMs, comparing them across benchmarks and detailing ‘key recipes’ for enhancing the models.

  • Key advancements include progression from single modality input/output towards versatile "any-to-any" functionality.

  • Research also found significant improvements in alignment, instruction tuning, and conversational abilities.

Why it matters: This new research helps document emerging best practices in multimodal LLMs — while also highlighting the wild advancements we’re about to see as models become more versatile.

NEW TOOLS & JOBS

  • 🔥 Sparks AI- Develop, share, and monetize your AI bots and tools (link)

  • 📈 Stock Robo GPT- An economic analyst who assists with forecasting and analyzing US stocks and ETFs (link)

  • 🚀 Omnipilot- An AI copilot that streamlines your workflows on macOS (link)

  • 🎭 Meme Magic GPT- Easily generate creative and customized memes in seconds (link)

  • 📸 Shakker AI- Stylize, remix and transform your images (link)

  • 👍 Huudle- Boost productivity and enhance relationships with AI-powered async video communication (link)

  • 🧮 Anthropic- Finance Systems Engineering Lead (link)

  • 🎯 Sanctuary AI- Principal Program Manager (link)

  • 👩‍💼 Cohere- Sales Development Representative (link)

  • 🔧 Open AI- Reliability Engineer, Research Platform (link)

QUICK HITS

Scott Galloway's edtech company Section is conducting a survey to assess AI readiness across industries, roles, and companies. Take the survey and get a discount code to Section's upcoming AI Crash Course. (Sponsor)

Humanoid robotics startup Figure AI is reportedly in talks for a funding round of up to $500M led by Microsoft and OpenAI, potentially putting the company at a $1.9B pre-money valuation.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin released a paper on the intersections of crypto and AI, detailing the pros and cons of how blockchain tech and decentralization can and will be integrated with artificial intelligence.

OpenAI quietly rolled out another new ChatGPT feature to ensure coding responses generate fully, rolling out in settings under ‘General’ → ‘Always expand code output’.

The New York Times is forming an "AI initiatives" team, including engineers and editors to prototype generative AI uses for reporting and presentation — though emphasizing its journalism will still be human-written.

The Biden administration will begin requiring AI firms to disclose safety testing results to the government under the Defense Production Act before public release in an effort to manage AI risks.

Samsung is considering a subscription model for advanced AI features on Galaxy devices after 2025, though no definitive plans have been set.

THAT’S A WRAP

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