Google CEO Sundar Pichai announces $120M fund for global AI education

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1. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announces $120M fund for global AI education

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has announced a $120 million Global AI Opportunity Fund to promote AI education and training globally. He believes AI can help people access information in their own language, accelerate scientific discovery, provide alerts and tracking around climate disasters, and fuel economic progress.

He also acknowledges risks like deep fakes and calls for smart product regulation to mitigate harms and resist national protectionist impulses. Pichai also calls for smart product regulation to avoid widening the AI divide and limit its benefits.

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2. When you call a restaurant, you might be chatting with an AI host

AI voice restaurant hosts are becoming increasingly popular in the US, offering around-the-clock assistance to customers. These hosts can answer questions about a restaurant's dress code, cuisine, seating arrangements, and food allergy policies. They can also assist with making, altering, or canceling a reservation.

Some platforms offer subscription tiers that unlock additional features and some systems can speak multiple languages. In-demand establishments receive between 800 and 1,000 calls per month, with typical callers being last-minute bookers, tourists, visitors, older people, and those doing errands while driving.

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3. LinkedIn is training AI models on your data

LinkedIn has opted accounts into training generative AI models without asking for consent. The social network introduced a new privacy setting and opt-out form before rolling out an updated privacy policy. The updated policy states that data from the platform is being used to train AI models, personalize services, and gain insights.

Users can revoke permission by going to the Data privacy tab in their account settings and turning the toggle to "off" to opt-out. LinkedIn uses privacy enhancing technologies to redact or remove personal data from its training sets and does not train models on users living in the EU, EEA, or Switzerland.

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4. Middle Eastern funds are plowing billions of dollars into hottest AI start-ups

Sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East are increasingly backing AI companies, as oil-rich nations like Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar diversify their economies. In the past year, funding for AI companies by Middle-Eastern sovereigns has increased fivefold, according to data from Pitchbook.

MGX, a new AI fund from the UAE, was among investors seeking a slice of OpenAI's latest fundraise, valued at $150 billion. These funds invest on behalf of their governments, which have been boosted by rising energy prices. The Gulf Cooperation Council's total wealth is expected to rise from $2.7 trillion to $3.5 trillion by 2026.

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5. Microsoft Releases GRIN MoE: A Gradient-Informed Mixture of Experts MoE Model for Efficient and Scalable Deep Learning

Microsoft has introduced the GRIN (GRadient-INformed Mixture of Experts) model to address the computational challenges of deep learning models. The model, which uses a top-2 mixture-of-experts architecture with 16 experts per layer, uses a routing mechanism to activate only the top two experts for each input token.

This method reduces the number of active parameters while maintaining high performance. The GRIN MoE model has demonstrated superior efficiency and scalability across various tasks, with a score of 79.4 in the MMLU benchmark and 83.7 in HellaSwag and HumanEval benchmarks.

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