Author HubMatthias Bastian

Online journalist Matthias is the co-founder and publisher of THE DECODER. He believes that artificial intelligence will fundamentally change the relationship between humans and computers.
AI in practice

OpenAI's Operator and Computer-Using Agent bring autonomous AI agents closer to reality

AI research

Deepseek's $5.6M Chinese LLM wonder shakes up the AI elite

AI research

Apple AI researchers question OpenAI's claims about o1's reasoning capabilities

Ad
AI in practice
Short

AI music generator Suno AI has raised a $125 million investment. Suno plans to use the funding to accelerate product development and grow its team. According to Suno, 10 million people have generated music with Suno within eight months of its launch, many of them for the first time. Investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Matrix and Founder Collective. Suno also works with advisors like 3LAU, Aaron Levie, former Tesla AI head Andrej Karpathy and Guillermo Rauch. The goal is to create a future where "anyone can make music" by using technology to make people more creative, it says. Like many AI companies, Suno is accused of training its AI model on works by human artists without permission. Sony Music and others are taking action against this, and lawsuits are pending or underway.

AI in practice
Short

Humane, the startup that launched the AI assistant AI Pin, is looking for a buyer, Bloomberg reports. The company is working with a financial advisor and hopes to sell for between $750 million and $1 billion. Despite millions of dollars in investment, Humane's AI Pin was widely panned by critics after its release and tanked. Critics cited irrelevant responses, short battery life, lack of control, and low overall value compared to a smartphone—all at a price of $700 plus a $24 monthly fee. It's unclear who would buy the company behind this device at that price, given the criticism. The most interesting option would likely be a deal to acquire the AI talent and engineers they employ. The brand name is already damaged after the first product.

Ad
Ad
AI in practice
Short

Amazon is planning a major upgrade to its Alexa voice assistant with generative AI later this year to keep pace with chatbots like those from OpenAI and Google, according to CNBC sources. The new version of Alexa will come with a monthly fee not included in the Prime subscription. Under founder Jeff Bezos, Alexa was considered an internal pet project, but lost priority with CEO Andy Jassy. Now, the Alexa team faces pressure to keep the voice assistant relevant. Amazon hopes to capitalize on Alexa's large installed device base. Challenges include the cost of generative AI and competition for AI talent. For the Alexa upgrade, Amazon wants to use its own large language model called Titan. Amazon is also said to be working on a cutting-edge language model codenamed Olympus, but there's been no word of it recently. Bezos is concerned that Amazon is falling behind in AI. Although he has stepped down as CEO, he remains very involved in Amazon's AI strategy, CNBC reports.

Ad
Ad
AI in practice
Short

Did Microsoft choose this slide wisely? Kevin Scott, Microsoft's CTO, just showed a graph at Microsoft's Build developer conference that was probably meant to illustrate the potential (?) exponential growth of AI. Taken at face value, the graph implies that an OpenAI AI model many times more capable than GPT-4 will be released this year. If the graph was created without thinking about future AI models, it begs the question of why Microsoft a) doesn't know better and b) wants to fuel AI hype only to disappoint people later. Soon after, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took the stage and repeated what he's been saying for months: that AI models will get "smarter" with more training. Altman did not provide any specific information about GPT-5.

Image: Microsoft (screenshot on YouTube)
Ad
Ad
Google News

Bank details

IBAN: DE87 1203 0000 1086 0070 75
Account holder: DEEP CONTENT GbR
Purpose: Support THE DECODER
AI and society

'Inscrutable Wizards': How Chinese AI startup Deepseek is making Silicon Valley look slow

AI in practice

OpenAI's Operator and Computer-Using Agent bring autonomous AI agents closer to reality

AI in practice

Anthropic CEO expects major AI breakthrough, plans to launch "virtual collaborators"

Google News