LWiAI podcast #177 - Instagram AI Bots, Noam Shazeer -> Google, FLUX.1, SAM2

Our 177th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

NOTE: apologies for this episode again coming out about a week late, next one will be coming out soon...

With hosts Andrey Kurenkov (https://twitter.com/andrey_kurenkov) and Jeremie Harris (https://twitter.com/jeremiecharris)

If you'd like to listen to the interview with Andrey, check out https://www.superdatascience.com/podcast

If you would like to get a sneak peek and help test Andrey's generative AI application, go to Astrocade.com to join the waitlist and the discord.

In this episode, hosts Andrey Kurenkov and John Krohn dive into significant updates and discussions in the AI world, including Instagram's new AI features, Waymo's driverless cars rollout in San Francisco, and NVIDIA’s chip delays. They also review Meta's AI Studio, character.ai CEO Noam Shazir's return to Google, and Google's Gemini updates. Additional topics cover NVIDIA's hardware issues, advancements in humanoid robots, and new open-source AI tools like Open Devon. Policy discussions touch on the EU AI Act, the U.S. stance on open-source AI, and investigations into Google and Anthropic. The impact of misinformation via deepfakes, particularly one involving Elon Musk, is also highlighted, all emphasizing significant industry effects and regulatory implications.

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• (00:00:00) AI Song / Intro Banter

• (00:05:32) Response to listener comments / corrections

• Tools & Apps

  • (00:10:16) Apple Intelligence to Miss Initial Launch of Upcoming iOS 18 Overhaul

  • (00:16:35) Instagram starts letting people create AI versions of themselves

  • Lighting round

    • (00:22:49) Runway just dropped image-to-video in Gen3

    • (00:25:41) Midjourney drops surprise v6.1 update — now humans look more real than ever

    • (00:28:07) AI-Powered Necklace Will Be Your Friend for $99

    • (00:30:06) Microsoft is adding AI-powered summaries to Bing search results

• Applications & Business

  • (00:31:44) Character.AI CEO Noam Shazeer returns to Google

  • (00:39:41) Perplexity is cutting checks to publishers following plagiarism accusations

  • Lighting round

    • (00:43:30) Nvidia reportedly delays its next AI chip due to a design flaw

    • (00:41:08) Neura shows off humanoid robot 4NE-1

    • (00:46:0) Yes, there are more driverless Waymos in S.F. Here’s how busy they are

    • (00:57:27) Canva acquires Leonardo.ai to boost its generative AI efforts

• Projects & Open Source

  • (00:59:19) Black Forest Labs Open-Source FLUX.1: A 12 Billion Parameter Rectified Flow Transformer Capable of Generating Images from Text Descriptions

  • (01:01:59) Google releases new ‘open’ AI models with a focus on safety

  • Lighting round

    • (01:05:09) Stability AI releases super-fast model for 3D asset image generation

    • (01:09:29) OpenDevin: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents

• Research & Advancements

  • (01:12:10) Meta AI Introduces Meta Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2): The First Unified Model for Segmenting Objects Across Images and Videos

  • (01:19:20) MoMa: Efficient Early-Fusion Pre-training with Mixture of Modality-Aware Experts

  • Lighting round

    • (01:25:00) AssistantBench: Can Web Agents Solve Realistic and Time-Consuming Tasks?

    • (01:26:19) Trust or Escalate: LLM Judges with Provable Guarantees for Human Agreement

    • (01:31:15) Stretching Each Dollar: Diffusion Training from Scratch on a Micro-Budget

• Policy & Safety

  • (01:33:03) World's First-Ever AI Law Now Enforced in Europe, Targeting US Tech Giants

  • (01:39:12) White House says no need to restrict ‘open-source’ artificial intelligence — at least for now

  • Lighting round

    • (01:41:12) With Smugglers and Front Companies, China Is Skirting American A.I. Bans

    • (01:44:03) UK antitrust body probes Google’s ties with AI rival Anthropic

    • (01:45:20) Elon Musk posts deepfake of Kamala Harris that violates X policy

• (01:50:10) AI Outro