Hello Niuralogists!

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Welcome to this week’s edition, where we dive into the latest advancements in artificial intelligence. We’ll explore how these innovations are shaping various aspects of our lives—from the workplace and business to policies and personal experiences. This issue highlights some fascinating updates, including upgrades for Copilot, OpenAI’s platform, and Liquid AI’s new model, AI usage inside and outside the office, legal concerns around AI, and more.

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For more in-depth coverage, keep reading… 

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Artisan Aims to Revolutionize the Workplace with Fully Autonomous Employees

Artisan is making strides toward creating fully autonomous AI employees and a seamless human-AI collaboration ecosystem. Their AI Sales Agent, Ava, automates 80% of a Business Development Representative’s tasks, offering an all-in-one sales platform. Artisan aims to replace traditional sales tools and eliminate context switching, with plans to introduce AI agents for marketing and customer success. They raised funding via an uncapped SAFE round led by investors like Oliver Jung and Sequoia Scout. Artisan is working toward higher levels of AI autonomy, with Level 2 already allowing AI to operate without human oversight. The company envisions AI agents reaching Level 5 autonomy, performing better than humans in complex roles, marking what they describe as the next Industrial Revolution in the workplace.

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Microsoft Unveils Major Copilot Updates: Voice, Vision, and Personalized AI Assistance

Microsoft recently announced a variety of updates to Copilot. Key improvements include Copilot Voice, which allows users to interact naturally with four different voice options, offering seamless voice-based assistance for tasks like brainstorming and quick queries. Another update, Copilot Vision, helps users interpret and engage with web content in real time, offering suggestions and answers based on the visual and text data from the web. Additionally, Copilot Daily provides personalized summaries of news and weather, simplifying information overload. Features like Think Deeper enable more thoughtful, step-by-step reasoning for complex decisions. These updates are part of Microsoft’s broader effort to make AI more intuitive, personalized, and supportive, positioning Copilot as a tool that adapts to individual needs while safeguarding user privacy​.

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AI Reading Companion Ello Introduces Interactive Story Creation for Kids

Ello, an AI reading companion, has launched “Storytime,” a new feature allowing children to co-create stories by selecting characters, settings, and plots. This interactive experience helps kids develop critical reading skills through phonics-based strategies, adapting to each child's reading level. Ello's mascot, a friendly blue elephant, listens to kids read aloud and assists with pronunciation. Storytime offers two reading modes: one where Ello and the child take turns, and another where Ello reads most of the story for younger children. Ello claims its AI outperforms tools like OpenAI’s Whisper and Google Cloud’s speech API. Ello aims to expand its offerings and provide even more child involvement in future updates​.

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OpenAI Expands AI Capabilities for Developers at DevDay 2024

At OpenAI's DevDay 2024, several key updates were introduced to empower developers. The major announcements included a Realtime API, enabling low-latency, multimodal experiences such as speech-to-speech interactions. Developers can now create apps featuring natural voice conversations. Additionally, Vision Fine-Tuning was launched, allowing developers to fine-tune models using images and text, which is useful for tasks like visual search and medical imaging. OpenAI also introduced Prompt Caching, offering faster processing and cost savings, and a Model Distillation suite for optimizing models with smaller compute footprints. These updates aim to make AI development more accessible, efficient, and scalable.

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Liquid AI Claims New Foundation Model Will Shake Up the Industry

Liquid AI has introduced its first series of Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs), a new generation of generative AI models designed for superior performance and efficiency across various scales. These models—1B, 3B, and 40B active parameters—achieve state-of-the-art results in terms of quality while maintaining a smaller memory footprint and more efficient inference. LFMs are optimized for different hardware platforms, including NVIDIA, AMD, and Apple, and are tailored for various applications like edge deployment, financial services, and biotechnology. The models excel in handling multimodal data, such as text, video, and time series, and offer enhanced capabilities for long-context tasks. Liquid AI is positioning these models to outperform the current dominant architectures while scaling across industries​.