Twice a week, Data Points brings you the latest AI news, tools, models, and research in brief. In today’s edition, you can find:
- AWS’s new co-code app developer
- How Alibaba is using AI to expand abroad
- A chatbot grounded in climate reporting
- ChatGPT leads traffic for top AI sites
But first:
Big tech backs off from OpenAI’s board
Microsoft and Apple have decided not to join OpenAI’s board of directors. The tech giants had planned to take advisory roles to oversee their investments and partnerships with the AI company. This move comes as government regulators examine whether partnerships between big tech firms and AI startups are reducing competition in the rapidly growing AI industry. (The Washington Post)
Groq introduces fast LLM chatbot on its website
Groq quietly launched a new version of its website allowing users to interact with large language models at high speeds. The system processes queries at around 1,256 tokens per second and supports various models, including multiple versions of Meta’s Llama3 and Google’s Gemma. Groq’s language processing unit (LPU) operates linearly, making it more efficient than GPUs for AI inference tasks; Groq’s team believes it could transform how developers and enterprises approach AI deployment. (VentureBeat)
Amazon introduces AI tool for rapid enterprise app development
Amazon Web Services previewed AWS App Studio, a generative AI service that enables users to create enterprise-grade applications using natural language prompts. The service allows technical professionals without software development skills to build custom applications quickly, connecting to various data sources and offering a point-and-click interface for modifications. AWS App Studio aims to address the challenges of internal process management and the scarcity of development resources by providing a secure, scalable solution that meets enterprise security requirements. (Amazon)
Alibaba integrates AI into overseas e-commerce expansion
Alibaba is using artificial intelligence to boost its international efforts as the company faces slowing growth in China. Alibaba’s AI models help small sellers in China and elsewhere overcome language barriers, create marketing materials, and handle customer service tasks using the company’s overseas platforms. While Alibaba’s international e-commerce division is growing rapidly, it still faces stiff competition from rivals like Temu and questions about AI’s short-term impact on profitability. (The Wall Street Journal)
The Washington Post launches AI-powered climate Q&A tool
Climate Answers uses large language models (currently provided by OpenAI) to search and synthesize relevant information from published articles since 2016, aiming to provide concise replies to user questions about climate issues. This chatbot is designed to complement rather than replace traditional journalism, with safeguards in place to minimize errors and hallucinations. Washington Post CTO Vineet Khosla says the chatbot is still an experiment, but in time, could scale to extend to every subject the newspaper covers. (The Washington Post)
ChatGPT nearly doubles year-over-year traffic with 2.9 billion visits in June
The chatbot’s growth extends to its mobile application, with daily active users in the U.S. rising by 13% to 3.2 million. Google’s Gemini saw a 16.6% drop in visitors in June compared to May, while Anthropic’s Claude and Character.AI lag far behind with about 400 million and 309 million monthly visits, respectively. OpenAI’s changes in the last year, including the switch to a dedicated website for ChatGPT and the introduction of the free GPT-4o model, likely contributed to this surge in traffic. (The Decoder)
Still want to know more about what matters in AI right now?
Read this week’s issue of The Batch for in-depth analysis of news and research.
This week, Andrew Ng wrote about how current attempts to regulate AI models in California could put developers at risk:
“These provisions don’t ensure that AI is safe. They create regulatory uncertainty, and more opportunities for vested interests wishing to stifle open-source to lobby for shifts in the requirements that raise the cost of compliance. This would lock out many teams that don’t have a revenue stream — specifically, many open-source contributors — that would let them pay for lobbyists, auditors, and lawyers to help ensure they comply with these ambiguous and unreasonable requirements.”
Read Andrew’s full letter here.
Other top AI news and research stories we covered in depth included: Claude’s introduction of Artifacts, Amazon hires agentic talent from Adept, cloud computing companies rethink their climate goals, and GaLore, a new optimizer that saves memory during pretraining.