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  • DuckDuckGo Introduces DuckAssist, the Private AI Search Assistant

DuckDuckGo Introduces DuckAssist, the Private AI Search Assistant

03-09-2023

March 09, 2023

⚡ Today’s Highlights

  • 📰 News: DuckDuckGo launches DuckAssist and Citadel wants to integrate ChatGPT into operations

  • 💰 Funding: Humane, Socure, Aiberry, and Cognosos

  • 🦾 Tools: Automated customer service and an AI that lets you speak different languages using your own voice

  • 🧠 Resources: Become an AI whisperer

  • 📅 Events: Next week is packed with important events so be sure to sign up this week!

📰 Today's Top Stories

(8 min read) (Source: DuckDuckGo)

TLDR: DuckDuckGo, the free browser and search engine that prioritizes user privacy, introduced DuckAssist, a new feature that generates natural language answers to search queries using Wikipedia. The AI-generated content is integrated into DuckDuckGo Private Search and will appear in search results when users search for questions that have straightforward answers on Wikipedia.

It will scan a specific set of sources using natural language technology from OpenAI and Anthropic to summarize what it finds in Wikipedia, making the answers more directly responsive to users' actual questions. A source link, usually a Wikipedia article, will be linked below the summary, often pointing to a specific section within that article so users can learn more.

(5 min read) (Source: Markets Insider)

TLDR: Ken Griffin, the CEO of Citadel, a Miami-based hedge fund, and Citadel Securities, a capital-markets firm, has stated that his companies are in talks to obtain a business-wide license for OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT. Griffin referred to the chatbot as the "fastest-growing consumer application in the history of the internet" and said that it could have a significant impact on their business by automating a large amount of work currently done by people. This includes helping developers write better code, translating software between languages, and analyzing various types of information. Griffin views the tech as a means of achieving higher efficiency and automation.

The Big Picture: This is a very interesting move from Citadel, especially considering that many other banks are prohibiting the use of ChatGPT due to privacy and security concerns.

(15 min read) (Source: Washington Post)

TLDR: Internal documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reveal the collaboration between the FBI, Defense officials, and academic researchers in developing facial recognition software for advanced surveillance. The project, named Janus, funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA), aimed to improve the power and performance of facial recognition systems to identify faces from partially obstructed angles and at target distances of over half a mile.

The improved facial recognition system was incorporated into a search tool called Horus and made available to federal agencies. However, the documents do not offer detail on the current use or deployment of the research, and the Defense Department and IARPA do not respond to requests for comment.

The documents also reveal federal officials' involvement in the technology's development, even as some states and cities passed laws restricting its use by local police. Nathan Wessler of the ACLU warns that using the tool in domestic mass surveillance would be a nightmare scenario, giving the government the ability to track people pervasively.

(10 min read) (Source: Wall Street Journal)

TLDR: When they were Google researchers, Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer created a chatbot that was capable of debating philosophy and engaging in small talk. However, to the researcher's frustrations, Google executives were not convinced that the chatbot was ready to release to the public or integrate into Google Assistant. The model that they created was Meena, which would be renamed LaMDA and used to power Bard. They left the company in 2021 and founded Character.ai, which recently received $200 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz to continue developing their model at a reported $1 billion evaluation.

The Big Picture: Microsoft has been working for months to incorporate OpenAI’s ChatGPT across its suite of business tools. Meanwhile, Google has been cautious in releasing its chatbot due to the controversies that AI chatbots have faced in the past regarding info inaccuracy and bias, and still managed to fumble into a 10% share price drop upon the launch of Bard.

The company has been trying to balance risk-taking with maintaining its position as a thought leader in the field. Google has been working on chatbots since 2013 and acquired DeepMind to help create artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, with the gap forming between Microsoft and Google, we could see a new top dog in the world of search soon.

💰 Funding Alerts

  1. Humane, an AI technology company, is building a software platform and consumer device designed for AI from the ground up. It raised $100 million in a Series C round led by Kindred Ventures along with Tiger Global, Valia Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, Lachy Groom, and Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI. The funding will help Humane accelerate its mission to create the next era of personal mobile computing powered by AI ahead of its IPO, expected this spring.

  2. Socure is an online trust/digital identity verification platform that applies AI and ML techniques with trusted data intelligence from physical and online sources to verify identities in real-time and eliminate identity fraud on the internet. The company recently secured a $95 million credit facility with J.P. Morgan, Silicon Valley Bank, and KeyBanc Capital Markets to strengthen its financial position and invest in new solutions, verticals, and strategic acquisitions to further distance itself from the competition.

  3. Aiberry, an AI-powered mental health screening platform, has raised $8 million in seed funding led by Confluence Capital Group, Inc. (Stewart Williams, Partner) and Ascension AI. The funds will be used to accelerate the adoption of its AI-powered therapeutic assistant to detect mental health disorders by analyzing what is being said, speech patterns, and facial expressions. The platform's AI/ML technology is based on two decades of research and is designed to eliminate biases related to age, gender, sexual orientation, and race.

  4. Cognosos, a leading provider of intelligent asset tracking solutions for major automobile manufacturers and healthcare providers, has raised $25 million in a growth round from Riverwood Capital (Joe De Pinho, Principal and Eric Ma, VP will join the Cognosos Board). The company utilizes patented wireless networking technology and AI-powered location engines to provide real-time location services and process optimization software platforms. With the investment, Cognosos plans to recruit top talent, expand its go-to-market efforts, and accelerate the development of platform enhancements and complementary offerings.

🦾 Trending Tools

  • Forethought has announced a beta release of SupportGPT, a new tool that brings generative AI to its platform. The product is designed to automatically generate customer service responses without the need for human intervention. SupportGPT has been consciously designed with current generative AI limitations in mind. The company uses SupportGPT Playground, a sandbox where companies can experiment with SupportGPT using their own data, to use a narrower set of data to deliver more accurate responses.

  • VALLE-X is a tool that can help someone who speaks only one language to speak another language using their own voice. It uses in-context learning using sounds and words to help the tool translate what the person wants to say and then creates audio of the translated language in the person’s voice. It can also read written text out loud in another language using that person’s voice. Impressively, VALLE-X can produce high-quality translations without examples of a person speaking in different languages.

  • Chat by Copy.ai is an AI-powered chatbot that helps you be more productive. The web-based chatbot can gather public data from websites, create personalized content, and summarize YouTube videos into key points with ease. It can also search the web, cite its sources, and help you get things done by providing real-time responses from up-to-date data sources.

  • Magic Brush AI is a Figma plugin that allows users to create beautiful images with ease. Its AI-powered tools include a background remover for images, enabling designers to add a touch of magic to their designs. With MagicBrush AI, users can generate and edit images using text in various styles, all within the Figma platform.

👀 More Reading

🌎 Fresh Content

1. Matt Wolfe made a great video covering some of the amazing innovations that came out recently in the AI space including PaLM-E, an embodied multimodal language model created by Google that can perform a variety of complex tasks, and Prismer, a visual language model developed by Nvidia that can interpret the elements of an image and answer questions about it. (YouTube)

2. Kris Kashtanova has been making some amazing creations with Midjourney as well as customizable prompts to yield similar results! (Twitter)

3. WSJ’s The Journal podcast spoke with artist Greg Rutkowski and WSJ tech columnist Christopher Mims about many of the problems that artists have been experiencing with the emergence of AI art. (The Journal Podcast)

When AI Comes for Your Art - The Journal. - WSJ Podcasts

AI-art generators let users create fantastical images with just a few text prompts. But some artists see a problem: They say AI is ripping them off. Artist Greg Rutkowski and WSJ tech columnist Christopher Mims explain what's at stake for the art world. Further Reading: - AI Tech Enables Industrial-Scale Intellectual-Property Theft, Say Critics - Ask an AI Art Generator for Any Image. The Results Are Amazing—and Terrifying. Further Listening: - The Company Behind ChatGPT

https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/when-ai-comes-for-your-art/6873601d-dc2f-496b-ac14-2c0829e7b068

🧠 Resources

Check out this great post by Sahbi Chaieb to start exploring the world of prompt engineering and become an AI whisperer! Discover the significance of prompt engineering and learn practical examples of how to utilize this technology. This post also provides several resources and tools to help you get started on your prompt engineering journey. Unleash your creativity and problem-solving skills and unlock the potential of generative AI systems!

 📅 Upcoming Events

  1. Don’t miss the 18th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI) (March 13-16, 2023 / Stockholm, Sweden + Virtual). Researchers from across the world present their best work to HRI to exchange ideas about theory, technology, data, and science furthering the state-of-the-art in the field. The conference theme for HRI 2023 is “HRI for all” and will focus on key HRI theories, methods, designs, studies, and technical advances that aim to understand and promote inclusion and diversity in HRI.

  2. The 3rd Annual European Chatbot & Conversational AI Summit (March 15-16, 2023 / In-Person at Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh, Scotland + Virtual) is a two days conference and exhibition designed to host industry executives, and adopters of Conversational AI, Chatbots, Virtual assistant, voice technology and Conversation design. The summit will reflect the latest tendencies and recent application changes in the Conversational AI space in the European market.

  3. Microsoft will be hosting a virtual event titled "The Future of Work: Reinventing Productivity with AI" (March 16, 2023 / Virtual). The event will be hosted by CEO Satya Nadella and CVP Jared Spataro, and will focus on how AI will revolutionize the way people and organizations work. While Microsoft has not disclosed any specific announcements, it is speculated that the event will primarily focus on Office.

  4. Data Innovation Summit ANZ (March 16, 2023 / Crown Conference Centre, Melbourne, Australia) is the largest and the most influential annual Data and AI event represented across several regions, bringing together the most innovative minds, enterprise practitioners, technology providers, start-up innovators and academics, working with Data Science, Big Data, ML, AI, Data Management, Data Engineering, IoT and Analytics, in one place to discuss ways to accelerate AI-driven Transformation throughout companies, industries and public organizations.

 💼 Jobs

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