Taiwan Earthquake threatens AI chip production

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: An earthquake in Taiwan has threatened advanced semiconductor production + Anthropic exposes an LLM jailbreaking technique that can bypass safety guardrails

💰 Funding: YCombinator’s latest cohort was dominated by AI startups. Check out the highlights from their demo day

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1.Taiwan's most significant earthquake in 25 years has disrupted semiconductor production, affecting global tech industries reliant on advanced chips.

• The 7.4-magnitude quake caused extensive damage, including building collapses, at least seven fatalities, and over 800 injuries, with the full impact still being assessed.

• TSMC, a key supplier to Apple Inc. and Nvidia Corp., evacuated staff and is evaluating the quake's effects on its operations. United Microelectronics Corp. also halted some machinery and evacuated facilities.

• The earthquake's disruption poses a risk to chip production processes, which require weeks of uninterrupted conditions, highlighting the fragility in the global semiconductor supply chain. 

2. Anthropic exposes a 'many-shot jailbreaking' vulnerability in LLMs that can bypass safety guardrails, prompting a call for community-wide mitigation efforts.

• The technique exploits the expanded context window of LLMs, which has grown significantly, allowing for inputs as large as several long novels, to manipulate models into generating harmful responses.

• By inserting a large number of faux dialogues in a specific configuration within a prompt, researchers demonstrated that LLMs could be "jailbroken" to provide answers to potentially dangerous queries, overriding their safety training.

3. The U.K. and U.S. governments have agreed to collaborate on safety testing the most advanced AI models, aiming to establish global standards for AI safety.

• The partnership, formalized by U.K. Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Michelle Donelan and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, will involve sharing methods, infrastructure, and conducting joint testing exercises.

4. Stability AI releases Stable Audio 2.0, allowing users to upload audio samples for AI-enhanced song creation, extending song length to three minutes.

• Stable Audio 2.0 is freely available to the public, contrasting with OpenAI's Voice Engine, which has limited access, aiming to democratize AI-generated music.

• The new version improves song structure, featuring intros, progressions, and outros, though the quality and "vocals" may not yet meet professional standards.

5. Major tech companies, including Cisco, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, SAP, and Accenture, have formed the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium (ITC) to address concerns about AI leading to job losses.

• The consortium aims to explore AI's impact on jobs, connect people with AI-related training programs, and match businesses with skilled workers.

6. Over 200 musicians, including high-profile names like Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, and Katy Perry, have signed an open letter calling on tech companies to responsibly use AI in music creation.

7. Cohere announces Command R+, an LLM that excels in retrieval augmented generation (RAG) with citation, which is optimized for enterprise applications, offering enhanced performance and multilingual support.

8. Microsoft 365's Copilot introduces GPT-4 Turbo for business users, offering advanced AI tools for $30 per user/month.

9. Opera introduces a feature for users to download and use LLMs locally, offering users enhanced control, offline accessibility, and privacy over AI interactions.

10. The New York Times is set to offer the majority of its articles as automated voice narrations, aiming to become a leading global audio news provider.

11. Generative AI search engine Perplexity, (which aims to position itself as a Google competitor), has announced plans to start selling ads.

12. Google is exploring the introduction of "premium" AI-powered search features as part of its subscription services, marking a significant shift from its traditionally ad-supported model.

13. From adding elements to removing objects, OpenAI’s DALL·E interface now offers a seamless way to refine AI-generated images with user-defined edits.

14. Tesla is boosting AI engineer salaries to counter OpenAI's poaching, as the war for AI talent heats up.

15. Microsoft is testing an animated AI-powered Xbox chatbot designed to automate support tasks, enhancing user experience with quick and efficient responses to queries.

16. AWS and Mistral AI are strengthening their collaboration to advance generative AI, bringing Mistral Large and future models to Amazon Bedrock.

17. Oracle and Palantir partner to deliver advanced AI and cloud solutions, aiming to bolster global business and government operations.

18. Replit's AI initiative transforms code debugging with novel AI-native models, focusing on efficient code repair through innovative data pipeline and LLM training.

💰 Top Funding News:

1. YCombinator recently had it’s demo day for its Winter 2024 batch, w/ about 70% of the cohort being AI startups. Here’s a rundown of some the highlights and a closer-look at the ones that are more consumer focused. 

2. Yahoo is acquiring Artifact, the AI-driven news recommendation app developed by Instagram's co-founders, aiming to infuse Yahoo News with a tech-forward edge. 

3. Hailo Technologies, an AI chipmaker that designs processors for edge computing, enabling AI computing needs to be handled locally on devices like smartphones and robots, raised a $120M Series C.

4. SiMa.ai, a chip startup focused on developing processors designed to accelerate AI applications in consumer devices such as cameras, cars, and more, raised $70M in funding led by Maverick Capital, w/ Point72, Jericho, Amplify Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, and Fidelity Management. 

5.Datavolo, which specializes in building scalable and secure multimodal data pipelines for AI, raised $21M+ in financing, led by General Catalyst, w/ Citi Ventures, Human Capital, Rob Bearden, and MVP Ventures. 

6. Read AI, which specializes in AI-powered summarization tools for video calls across platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet, raised a $21M funding round led by Goodwater Capital with Madrona Venture Group.

7. Higgsfield AI, which is using proprietary AI tech to democratize social media video creation, raised $8M in seed funding led by Menlo Ventures, w/ Charge Ventures, Bitkraft Ventures, K5 Tokyo Black, AI Capital Partners (Alpha Intelligence Capital’s U.S.-based fund), DVC, and other funds. 

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