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Kolena, a startup building tools to test, benchmark and validate the performance of AI models, today announced that it raised $15 million in a funding round led by Lobby Capital with participation from SignalFire and Bloomberg Beta.

The new cash brings Kolena’s total raised to $21 million, and will be put toward growing the company’s research team, partnering with regulatory bodies and expanding Kolena’s sales and marketing efforts, co-founder and CEO Mohamed Elgendy told TechCrunch in an email interview.

“The use cases for AI are enormous, but AI lacks trust from both builders and the public,” Elgendy said. “This technology must be rolled out in a way that makes digital experiences better, not worse. The genie isn’t going back in the bottle, but as an industry we can make sure we make the right wishes.”

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Google announced this morning it will be shutting down its Google Podcasts app later in 2024 as part of its broader transition to move its streaming listeners over to YouTube Music. The company earlier this year announced YouTube Music would begin supporting podcasts in the U.S., which will expand globally by year-end, and more recently said it was adding the ability for podcasters to upload their RSS feeds to YouTube also by year-end.

Today, Google says it plans on further increasing its investment in the podcast experience on YouTube Music and making it more of a destination for podcast fans with features focused on discovery, community and switching between audio podcasts and video. The latter is something rival Spotify has also been working on with its rollout of video podcast support to creators worldwide last year, along with community features like Q&As and polls.

However, to make YouTube Music the new home for podcasts, that means moving users away from the current offering, Google Podcasts. The company notes this plan reflects how people are already listening. According to Edison, about 23% of weekly podcast users in the U.S. say YouTube is their most frequently used service versus just 4% for Google Podcasts.

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The two major problems with most AI generated human images is with teeth and fingers. Most of the AI tools don’t get these two human features correct. But The Multiverse has eliminated the problem by training their model and eliminating the need to include fingers in your headshots. The company recently announced its latest AI model, Upscale to further enhance the AI headshots.

Upscale is a new imaging model that improves lighting, skin texture, and hair which are notoriously challenging for imaging models. The results are really good. I’ve been following The Multiverse AI on socials, and have been reading great things about them, so much so that their revenue has grown more than 10 times through word of mouth in a period of last four weeks.

The Multiverse AI works by leveraging a latent diffusion model to engineer a custom headshot. According to the company, up to “80% of images look like studio quality professional headshots of the user, with the percentage depending on the quality of input images.” While there is no criteria to define and measure that percentage, I agree on the part that at least a few of the 100 generated images can be used on your LinkedIn and resume.

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A faster-than-light (FTL) warp drive would arguably represent the most important invention of all time. In 1994, Miguel Alcubierre gave all of us hope as he found a solution within general relativity that would cause the necessary warping of space. But after nearly 30 years of further study, what does our current understanding of physics say about the feasibility of a warp drive?

Written & presented by Prof. David Kipping. Thanks to Bobrick Martire for clarifications and to John Michael Godier and team for audio from their interview with Alcubierre (https://youtu.be/JafY92PhgKU). Thumbnail image by Zamanday Yolculugunu (www.zamandayolculuk.com)

→ Support our research: https://www.coolworldslab.com/support.

Continue reading “What’s Stopping Us From Building a Warp Drive?” | >

Let’s say that it is a curse. The issue is he is also against life extension entirely. Maybe I want 200 years. Or 1,000. I have zero concern over a boredom problem as it is brain process which can eventually be controlled. And I am disgusted with the idea that I have to die because we might not progress very fast? Ugh.

Elon Musk has said a lot of potentially stupid stuff about aging and longevity, from saying that people shouldn’t live very long because society would ossify to advocating that we judge people based on their chronological age. Most recently, he’s taken to Twitter (aka X) to say “May you live forever is the worst possible curse once you understand deep time.” In this case though, he’s not wrong.

In this episode, we explore the diverse perspectives and heated debates triggered by Elon’s provocative statements on aging and the prospect of eternal life. We navigate through the complexities of deep time, the philosophical implications of living forever, and the importance of autonomy and control. Join host Ryan O’Shea as we examine arguments in favor of human’s being able to end their own lives, and explore how this played out in NBC’s The Good Place, starting Kristen Bell.

Continue reading “Elon is Right. Having to Live Forever is a Curse. Here’s How to Solve It” | >

The SN40L chip will allow for improved enterprise solutions.

Palo Alto-based AI chip startup SambaNova has introduced a new semiconductor that can be used in running high-performance computing applications, like the company’s LLM platform SambaNova Suite, with faster training of models at a lower total cost.

SambaNova announced the chip, SN40L, can serve a 5 trillion parameter model with 256k+ sequence length possible on a single system node. It is being touted as an alternative to NVIDIA, which is a frontrunner in the chip race and recently unveiled what will possibly be the most powerful chip in the market – GH200 – which can support 480 GB of CPU RAM and 96 GB of GPU RAM.

A ‘game changer’

The… More

Continue reading “SambaNova’s new chip runs AI models to 5 trillion parameters” | >