Google Brain and Deepmind are now one

End of another big week in AI. Google continues to recalibrate, Snapchat might have just created a new viral sensation and Martin Shkreli just launched an AI Doctor ? 

 As always if you enjoy reading our posts be sure to spread the word ! 

Here’s what we have lined up for you today - 

1. Google Brain and Deepmind are now one

2. Snapchat’s AI chatbot = Future of Social Networks ?

3. From Pharmaceutical Fraud to AI Doctor ?

Google Brain and Deepmind are now one

Google is merging their famed Google Brain team with Deepmind, the London based AGI lab which they acquired for $500 million in 2014. 

For the longest time Google has been the leader in AI research. Attracting the best talent, working with the best academics and almost single handedly producing state of the art results in the field. That has changed over the last 6 months with OpenAI’s massive growth. 

With that, Google has had to tighten up their efforts as well. Pichai shared -  

“The pace of progress is now faster than ever before…..To ensure the bold and responsible development of general AI, we’re creating a unit that will help us build more capable systems more safely and responsibly.”

For much of the time Deepmind has operated under Google it has enjoyed a level of autonomy allowing it to move faster and produce significant breakthroughs including AlphaGo and Alpha Fold (which can predict 3D models of protein structures). Deepmind itself has had its run ins with the Google Research team so how this merger pans out will be worth keeping an eye on. 

Demis Hassabis (CEO of Deepmind) will lead the combined team.

Now, this is moves matters because - 

1. Google clearly wants to be more deliberate with their AI efforts, consolidating talent into a single team. 

2. The days of experimenting, tinkering and doing open ended research are gone, the market demands products and google wants to be the company building those products. 

Snapchat’s AI chatbot = Future of Social Networks ?

Snapchat might have just created the next viral craze for social platforms. A few days ago the company opened up access to its AI chatbot for its 750 million users. The GPT powered bot is a friendly companion, virtual assistant and generative art maker. 

The chatbot is essentially ChatGPT with a personality. It can suggest activities, provide therapy and even wish people on their special occasions. But it also has been blamed for gaslighting users, lying about users’ location and giving explicit advice to underage tweens.  

But, for Snapchat it seems to be working. Premium users (most of which are kids) have been sending 2 million messages a day to their chatbots. 

With other conversational companions like Replika and Character AI growing massively as well we could be moving into a future where socialising might be defined by interacting with invisible friends that never leave us and always reply to us. 

This is just the beginning. More freaky and mind blowing stuff is yet to come.

Around the industry - 

1. Google to deploy generative AI to create sophisticated ad campaigns

2. CoreWeave, a GPU-focused cloud compute provider, lands $221M investment

3. Atlassian brings an AI assistant to Jira and Confluence

4. Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data

5. Large, creative AI models will transform lives and labour markets

6. Bringing the power of AI to Webflow

Product Corner - 

There are way too many cool products to showcase just one !

• Thatch - AI powered virtual mailbox to zoom through your emails. 

• Hexomatic - Web Scraping + automation made easy

• Dodon AI - Harness the power of GPT for legal workflows. 

• The Drive - Store, read and write documents

• Metaphor - Search engine over tweets, youtube, pdfs, and much more  

• Meetgeek - Automagically video record, transcribe, summarize, and share key insights from every meeting

• Magic Slides - AI integrated into Google Slides to generate slides for you. with all the features you need.

From Pharmaceutical Fraud to AI Doctor ?

Martin Shkreli is launching Dr. Gupta, the world's first physician chatbot