Microsoft consumes Inflection and AI Demos from Suno, Cohere, Deepseek VL and more! | E1918

Sunny joins Jason (00:00:00)

• Microsoft announced the acquisition of Inflection, a company specializing in natural language processing.
• Jason congratulates the Inflection team but expresses concern for the investors.
• Jason praises Satya Nadella's aggressive business strategy, comparing him to a ruthless competitor who might even steal your girlfriend.
• Microsoft showcased various AI demos during an event.
• Suno demonstrated a text-to-image AI that generates images based on text descriptions.
• Cohere displayed an AI-powered chatbot that can generate human-like responses to text prompts.
• Deepseek VL presented an AI tool that analyzes and summarizes scientific research papers.

Big news as Microsoft eliminates competitor Inflection AI by gutting their team. (00:01:29)

• Microsoft has acquired the team from Inflection AI, a competitor in the AI space.
• Inflection AI was building a chatbot and a foundational model, similar to OpenAI's offerings.
• Microsoft's acquisition of Inflection AI's team eliminates a potential competitor for their Windows operating system and co-pilot.
• Microsoft has created a wholly-owned subsidiary called Microsoft AI, led by Mustafa, a co-founder of DeepMind and former co-founder of Inflection AI.
• Importance of AI for large enterprises: AI is crucial for businesses, and Microsoft, being a major player, is willing to take significant steps to secure AI resources.
• Need for defensible AI: Microsoft aims to build AI technology that provides a competitive advantage and can be defended against competitors.
• Financial requirements: Building AI infrastructure requires substantial funding, making it challenging for standalone companies to succeed without significant financial backing.

Is this a new way to not have regulatory scrutiny like in M&A? (00:06:23)

• Microsoft's acquisition of Inflection and AI demos from various companies may be a strategy to avoid regulatory scrutiny faced by big tech companies like Apple and Amazon.
• Mustafa, who was previously on the podcast, will report to Saia and focus on the development of Copilot.

Apple has been busy acquiring AI companies! (00:08:14)

• Apple has quietly acquired 23 AI companies in the past year.
• Apple's pursuit of AI innovation has been evident through strategic acquisitions and staff hires from AI startups.
• By 2023, Apple had purchased up to 32 AI startups, the highest number among tech giants in overall AI startup acquisition.

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• Apple has a history of acquiring companies, including 32 in 2020.
• Notable acquisitions include Voysis (digital voice assistance), Wave 1 (video compression), Drive.ai (self-driving cars), and AI Music.
• Apple often makes "tuck-in" acquisitions, where small teams with valuable technology are acquired without a public-facing product.
• Examples of such acquisitions include Swell (podcast player) and Locationary (mapping technology).
• Apple is planning to acquire the German startup Brighter to improve its new headset, the Apple Vision Pro H.
• The video showcases impressive AI demos from various companies.
• One demo features an AI-generated video of someone singing to a woman on a dance floor.

Sunny demos the new model from Suno v3. (00:13:28)

• Suno introduces a new model, B3, with improved capabilities.
• The model generates a rock song in the style of Dire Straits, capturing the essence of the genre.
• The song showcases the model's understanding of electric guitar, progressive rock, and soulful melodies.

Surprising punk song from Suno with interesting lyrics. (00:15:58)

• Suno generates a punk rock song about breaking the law and getting caught by the police.
• The song demonstrates the model's ability to create fast-paced, gritty punk music with lyrics that match the theme.
• The lyrics include a rebellious sentiment, such as "F the police" and "giving the finger to law enforcement."

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• Squarespace has launched a new AI product called Blueprint AI.
• Blueprint AI is a guided design system for building new websites.
• Squarespace is an all-in-one platform with powerful tools to design, launch, and grow a business online.
• Blueprint AI provides over a billion design combinations to create a unique and bespoke website.
• Blueprint AI helps create a unique online presence that reflects the brand and vision.
• Squarespace offers a free trial and a 10% discount on the first website or domain purchase with the code TWIST.

Implications of Suno bringing everyone access to produce their own songs. (00:19:24)

• Microsoft acquired Inflection, an AI startup specializing in natural language processing.
• Impressive AI demos were showcased, including music generation, lyrics writing, and voice simulation.
• Suno, a music generation platform, allows users to create and own songs through its Pro and Premiere subscription plans.
• The AI models were trained on copyrighted music, enabling users to generate songs that resemble popular artists or genres.
• The quality of the generated music is comparable to mainstream songs, challenging traditional songwriting methods and potentially revolutionizing the music industry.
• OpenAI is facing lawsuits over the use of copyrighted material in its chatbot, ChatGPT.
• Suno's AI model generates convincing human vocals by learning from recordings of speech and music.
• The founder of Suno believes that an AI-generated song will make it to the top 100 charts within a thousand attempts.

Sunny demos Coral by Cohere. (00:25:24)

• Coral is a new model from Cohere focused on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
• RAG involves using a model to retrieve information from external sources and incorporate it into the generated text.
• In the demo, Coral retrieves information about the global market for solar panels from the web and generates a summary with citations.
• This approach allows the model to provide up-to-date and accurate information by leveraging external sources.
• Unlike models that regurgitate information from their training data without attribution, Coral provides citations for the information it retrieves, promoting transparency and fairness.
• Microsoft acquired Inflection, a startup that helps businesses manage their data.
• Inflection's technology will be integrated into Microsoft's Azure cloud platform.
• Suno: A text-to-speech AI that can generate realistic human-like voices.
• Cohere: A large language model that can generate text, code, and images.
• Deepseek VL: A visual search engine that can find images based on their content.
• Other AI demos:
  • An AI that can generate music.
  • An AI that can create art.
  • An AI that can write poetry.

Diving deeper into fair use regarding the data and content scraped from the internet. (00:30:08)

• Data and facts cannot be copyrighted, but scraping data behind a paywall or violating terms of service may lead to legal claims, as highlighted in the LinkedIn vs. hiQ Labs case.
• Republishing entire articles without permission is generally illegal, even with proper citation.
• Microsoft acquired Inflection, an AI startup specializing in natural language processing, and impressive AI demos were showcased by Suno, Cohere, Deepseek VL, and others.
• Concerns were raised regarding fair use and legal issues when AI services extract and present information from external sources without proper attribution or consent, emphasizing the need for ethical guidelines and standards like robots.txt and language model.txt.
• YouTube's monetization system can be unfair to creators, especially those who don't care about making money and just want to share their content, leading to copyright claims and strikes against creators.
• A new AI model can be used to create content, but it is important to cite the sources of the information used to avoid plagiarism.
• The key issue with language models like ChatGPT is the potential for providing inaccurate information without proper referencing, while Command R was praised for its Q&A style approach and providing references for its responses.

Sunny demos Deepseek VL. (00:45:57)

• DeepSee, a Chinese company, has developed a 7 billion parameter multimodal model that can reason over images and provide detailed descriptions. The model is open-source and available on HuggingFace.
• Microsoft acquired Inflection, an AI-powered customer service platform.
• AI demos from various companies, including Suno, Cohere, Deepseek VL, and others, showcased the potential of large language models and their applications in various fields.
• The discussion highlighted the cost-effectiveness of using multiple smaller models instead of a single expensive model and emphasized the importance of grounding AI models in real-world data and the internet.
• Viewers were encouraged to follow startups.com and Jason Kakanis on Twitter and TikTok for more updates.