Author HubMatthias Bastian

Matthias is the co-founder and publisher of THE DECODER, exploring how AI is fundamentally changing the relationship between humans and computers.
AI in practice

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince sees trouble ahead for the open web

AI research

Wait a minute! Researchers say AI's "chains of thought" are not signs of human-like reasoning

AI in practice
Update

US Copyright Office says fair use does not cover AI trained on "vast troves of copyrighted works

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AI and society
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Meta will not sign the EU Commission's Code of Practice for General Purpose AI, citing legal uncertainty and stricter requirements than the planned EU AI law. Joel Kaplan, Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer, said the code could slow down AI progress in Europe and affect European companies.

"Europe is heading down the wrong path on AI."

Joel Kaplan

OpenAI, by contrast, said last week it will sign the code, viewing it as a workable way to meet EU rules and grow its presence in the region. Google and Anthropic have not stated their positions.

Some European AI companies, including Mistral, recently asked the EU to delay the AI Act for two years, but the Commission declined.

AI in practice
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Perplexity's valuation has jumped to $18 billion, up from $14 billion just two months ago, according to the Financial Times. New investors paid the higher price after its latest funding round. The company’s annual revenue grew from $35 million in August 2023 to $150 million.

Investors include Nvidia, SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, venture firms New Enterprise Associates and IVP, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta’s Yann LeCun. Perplexity offers an AI search engine and a paid browser called "Comet," which can handle tasks like shopping, summarizing social media, and sending emails. Apple is reportedly interested in acquiring the company.

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AI in practice
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Google’s text embedding model "gemini-embedding-001" is now generally available via the Gemini API and Vertex AI. It costs $0.15 per one million input tokens.

The model supports over 100 languages, handles inputs of up to 2048 tokens, and uses Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL) to reduce output size, which helps cut memory use and computing costs. Google says the model performs better than its earlier models and external alternatives in several tasks. Since its experimental launch in March, Google states the model has held a top position on the MTEB Multilingual Leaderboard.

Image: Google
AI in practice
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SpaceX, Elon Musk's aerospace company, is investing $2 billion in Elon Musk's AI lab, xAI. The funding is part of a larger $5 billion round, according to The Wall Street Journal. xAI's chatbot Grok is already used for customer support in SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service.

Musk stated on X that "it would be great" if Tesla also invested in xAI, but this requires approval from Tesla's board and shareholders. In March, Musk announced the merger of xAI with his social media company X. The merger allows the companies to share data, AI models, computing power, and staff.

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AI in practice

OpenAI launches new ChatGPT agent that automates complex tasks for Pro, Plus, and Team

AI in practice
Update

Kimi-K2 is the next open-weight AI milestone from China after Deepseek

AI research

New Energy-Based Transformer architecture aims to bring better "System 2 thinking" to AI models

Google News