Matthias Bastian
Matthias is the co-founder and publisher of THE DECODER, exploring how AI is fundamentally changing the relationship between humans and computers.
Read full article about: White Castle ups the fast-food game with AI-enabled drive-thrus
White Castle plans to roll out AI-enabled drive-thrus at more than 100 locations by 2024, using speech recognition technology from SoundHound with the goal of processing orders in just over a minute. The fast-food chain has been testing the AI drive-thru, which allows customers to converse with the AI voice assistant, but also retains the option to speak with a human employee. Rival Wendy's plans to test AI-powered drive-thrus in partnership with Google.
Read full article about: Did Elon Musk outbid OpenAI in the great AI.com domain showdown?
Elon Musk's X.ai may have purchased or leased the AI.com domain, which was previously linked to OpenAI's ChatGPT. It's now linked to xAI, Musk's nascent AI organization with the goal of "understanding the true nature of the universe," which has yet to show anything substantial.
It's unclear why the switch happened; whether it was a bidding war or a change of heart remains unknown. The most likely scenario seems to be that the domain owner sold the redirect first to OpenAI and now to xAI. It doesn't seem to have been sold to OpenAI in the first place, because it's rather unlikely that OpenAI would sell the domain to Elon Musk's company, given the history of Musk and OpenAI.
Read full article about: Alibaba's cloud computing unit debuts two open-source AI language models
Alibaba's cloud computing unit has released two open-source AI models, Qwen-7B and Qwen-7B-Chat, marking the first time a major Chinese tech company has open-sourced its large language models. Aimed at helping small and medium-sized enterprises leverage AI, the models' code, weights, and documentation will be freely available to the global research community and commercial institutions. However, companies with more than 100 million monthly active users will need a license from Alibaba to use the models.
Alibaba launched its closed-source GPT-4 competitor Tongyi Qianwen in April and its DALL-E and Midjourney competitor Tongyi Wanxiang in July.
Read full article about: DeepL launches Europe's Largest NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD for advanced AI translation
Germany-based DeepL has installed an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD to expand its LLM capabilities. Located in a Swedish data center, it is the "first commercial deployment of this scale in Europe," according to the company. Benchmarking showed a performance of 21.85 PFlop/s, which would rank it 26th in the world and eighth in Europe. The NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, consisting of 68 NVIDIA DGX H100 systems, will help DeepL to train large language models faster and develop new AI communication tools for the global market.