Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Stevie Wonder and more musicians demand protection against AI

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1. Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Stevie Wonder and more musicians demand protection against AI

A group of over 200 high-profile musicians, including Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Stevie Wonder, and Frank Sinatra, have signed an open letter demanding protection against the predatory use of AI that mimics human artists' likenesses, voices, and sound.

The Artist Rights Alliance advocacy group issued the letter, which calls for technology companies to not develop AI tools that undermine or replace human songwriters and artists. The letter is part of an industry-wide pushback against generative AI, as it presents ethical and legal issues surrounding copyright infringement and labor rights.

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2. Read AI raises $21M to bring connected intelligence to meetings, email, and messaging

Read AI has raised $21 million in a Series A financing round led by Goodwater Capital and Madrona Venture Group. The funds will be used to accelerate Read AI's mission of building the future of work, where every interaction is enhanced by artificial intelligence.

The company has introduced a new offering that brings its "connected intelligence" to email and messaging platforms, allowing users to interact with each other and provide personalized briefings tailored to their needs and priorities. Read AI's AI-powered topic reports condense large volumes of emails and message threads into concise summaries.

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3. Yahoo is buying Artifact, the AI news app from the Instagram co-founders

Yahoo is acquiring Artifact, an AI news app from Instagram co-founders Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom. The acquisition comes a year after Artifact's launch and three months after Systrom and Krieger announced its death. Yahoo has hundreds of millions of readers but could use a dose of tech-forward cool to separate it from other news aggregators.

The acquisition comes after Artifact's founders decided that the market opportunity isn't big enough to warrant continued investment in this way. Yahoo offers Artifact eyeballs, which are used to recommend news to users.

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4. Apple claims its ReALM is better than GPT-4

Apple researchers have released a preprint paper on its ReALM language model, claiming it can "substantially outperform" OpenAI's GPT-4 in specific benchmarks. ReALM is designed to understand and handle different contexts, allowing users to point to something on the screen or running in the background and query the language model about it.

This ability is crucial for chatbots, as it allows them to create a hands-free screen experience. The researchers aim to use ReALM to understand and identify three types of entities: onscreen entities, conversational entities, and background entities.

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5. OctoAI wants to make private AI model deployments easier with OctoStack

OctoAI has launched OctoStack, an end-to-end solution for deploying generative AI models in a company's private cloud. The platform, which is based on the Apache TVM machine learning compiler framework, aims to make private AI model deployments easier for GenAI-native companies and traditional enterprises.

OctoAI has over 25,000 developers and hundreds of paying customers, with many GenAI-native companies using the platform in production. The platform supports a wider range of hardware, including AMD GPUs and AWS's Inferentia accelerator, making optimization challenges more challenging.

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