Intel is investing heavily in Stability AI, a leading developer of open-source AI, providing the startup with an AI supercomputer powered by high-end Xeon processors and more than 4,000 Gaudi2 AI processors. Stability AI, mainly known for its Stable Diffusion image generation software, recently raised nearly $50 million in funding, with Intel playing a significant role. The investment comes after a difficult period for Stability AI, marked by executive departures and internal disagreements. Despite these challenges, the company has refocused on research and development, reported a tenfold increase in revenue over the past year, and anticipates further growth with new product releases. The company recently released generative AI for 3D and text-to-audio, as well as a few LLMs.
Google is in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in AI chatbot startup Character.AI, according to Reuters sources. The investment could be structured as convertible notes and would deepen the existing partnership between the two companies, as Character.AI uses Google's cloud services and tensor processing units to train models. Discussions with Google are ongoing. Founded by former Google employees, Character.AI allows users to chat with virtual versions of celebrities or create their own chatbots and AI assistants. The startup is also in talks to raise equity funding from venture capital investors, potentially valuing the company at more than $5 billion.
Mozilla has launched Fakespot Chat, its first large language model (LLM) AI chatbot, to help users identify fake and misleading product reviews while shopping online. Fakespot, which Mozilla acquired earlier this year, uses AI and machine learning to sort through product reviews and provide users with trustworthy information. The chatbot is available through Fakespot Analyzer or as a browser extension on Amazon.com. Keep in mind that the chatbot can be wrong, so if something seems fishy, you might want to double-check. Interestingly, Amazon itself is doing something similar in that it uses AI to take the gist of all the summaries for a master summary.
Text-to-video startup RunwayML has just announced "Motion Brush," which lets you select specific areas of an image and set them in motion. The feature is coming soon to Runway's Gen-2 model, which just received a significant upgrade in fidelity and consistency. The update also allows the Gen-2 to handle a higher resolution of 2,816 x 1,536 pixels when creating video from an existing image, exceeding today's widespread Full-HD resolution.
