Apple, India, & Elon

The big players are making moves.

The others? Riding the wave.

1/ Apple buys DarwinAI

Many have been criticizing Apple for not playing a bigger part in the AI wave- seems to have gotten to their M & A division- they just bought DarwinAI, a startup that used AI to visually inspect components during the manufacturing process. 

What’s interesting here is that Apple can utilize this startup’s processes and talent to build in AI as part of the core, fundamental design experience of the hardware.

AI running straight on the device- have a feeling Steve Jobs would have pushed for this too.

Siri 2.0 on the horizon?

2/ More Apple- Apple is in talks with Google’s Gemini to power its AI system- it would afford Apple access to the worlds largest datasets.

However, after what Gemini showed in terms of “woke” bias- it may negatively affect certain outputs.

3/ AI regulation expanding in the EU- the EU’s parliament on Wednesday approved the world’s first major set of regulatory ground rules to govern mediated AI

This will certainly slow innovation in the EU- they categorize levels of AI risk from low hazard to unacceptable.

The problem with government intervention at the early stages of AI is that what seems like a risk now may actually turn out to be very useful and non hazardous. And vice-versa.

The better solution is to let AI progress accelerate, and when certain things need fixing, then involving regulation when absolutely needed.

Pre-emptively invoking government regulation will massively slow down the AI innovation curve.

Speaking of this…

4/ India Unbans the AI launch Approval requirement 

Last week, India sent out a memo saying they would require company’s to be approved before launching AI models.

This, understandably, caused a lot of uproar among innovators.

If it went into effect- it would put India way behind in terms of the rate of AI development 

Good thing it was retracted!

5/ AI and the revival of consumer startups

Many investors and entrepreneurs over the last few years have stuck to B2B enterprise businesses, companies that sell software to other businesses. And they viewed consumer applications as risky- think Clubhouse, for example.

Now, with AI, the biggest success stories so far seem to be consumer.

Midjourney, a consumer AI image model startup,  just hit $200 million in revenue with under 20 employees. And of course, we’ve got ChatGPT and other models being widely adopted by consumers. Countless others- PlaygroundAI, ElevenLabs, etc…

6/ Elon and xAI have open-sourced Grok

Its a 314B parameter LLM (2x the size of GPT-3.5).

Overall, this is a big win for open source AI development.

It’s never been a better time in history to start something innovative.

Anyways, peace.