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Ambassadors from the EU's 27 member states have unanimously approved the world's first comprehensive set of rules for artificial intelligence, confirming a political agreement reached in December. The law regulates AI based on its potential for harm. Despite reservations from France, Germany and Italy, who called for less stringent rules for high-performance AI models such as Open AI's GPT-4, the final version of the law includes transparency requirements for all models and additional obligations for high-risk models. The internal market and civil liberties committees will adopt the AI legislation on February 13, followed by a plenary vote on April 10 and 11.

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Amazon has introduced Rufus, a "new generative AI-powered conversational shopping experience." Rufus is designed to serve as a shopping assistant and, according to Amazon, has been trained with the Amazon product catalog and information from around the web. It is intended to answer customer questions about products, product requests and comparisons, make recommendations based on those customer conversations, and make product searches easier. Rufus is being launched today in beta to a small group of customers in the Amazon mobile app and will be rolled out to other U.S. customers in the coming weeks. Amazon recently introduced its first chatbot, which answers questions about products based on product reviews and descriptions.

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Ioannis Antonoglou, a former AI researcher at Google DeepMind, has departed the company to launch an AI agent startup with two former colleagues, Sherjil Ozair and Misha Laskin, The Information reports. The trio has begun fundraising for their venture, which could potentially compete with startups like Adept and Imbue in the AI agent field. AI agents use technology similar to conversational AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, to perform complex tasks like booking flights or researching business competitors. According to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, this is a direction Google is also exploring with its Bard chatbot. For Google Deepmind, it's another high-profile AI departure. Recently, three researchers left the company to start a generative AI lab for images and music. Other AI startups led by Google alumni include Character AI, Mistral, Sakana AI, and Reka AI.

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Nomic AI has released an open-source embedding model called Nomic Embed that outperforms OpenAI's Ada-002 and text-embedding-3-small models on both short and long-context tasks. The model is fully reproducible, auditable, and supports a context length of 8192. Nomic Embed outperformed its competitors on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) and the LoCo Benchmark, but fell short on the Jina Long Context Benchmark. Model weights and full training data are published for "complete model auditability". Nomic Embed is also available via the Nomic Atlas Embedding API with one million free tokens for production workloads and via the Nomic Atlas Enterprise offering for enterprises.

Image: Nomic AI
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