🤖 Meta LlamaCon

🗞 News of the day

🚀 Humane is Shutting Down the AI Pin

Remember when Humane's AI Pin made its grand entrance in April 2024? The tech world buzzed with excitement, but the hype quickly fizzled. Fast forward, and HP has stepped in, acquiring the Humane platform and team for a cool $116 million.

The AI Pin promised to be the gadget of the future, but users found it, well, not quite functional. So, what's next? HP is shifting gears, integrating Humane's CosmOS into their products, aiming to create a smarter ecosystem for work. And guess what? The folks behind Humane, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, are now leading the new HP IQ division, focusing on AI innovation.

Existing AI Pins will keep ticking until February 28, 2025, but after that, features reliant on cloud access will vanish. So, if you've got one, it's time to download your media and maybe consider those refund options if you're eligible.

This acquisition is HP's leap into AI-driven solutions, a strategic pivot from the missteps of the AI Pin. It's a reminder of how unpredictable the tech world can be—one minute you're the next big thing, and the next, you're undergoing a makeover. As the saying goes in tech, adapt or get left behind!

🔖 Today's Cool Story

🚨 Decensored DeepSeek

Perplexity has open-sourced a decensored version of the DeepSeek-R1 model, R1 1776, to provide unbiased and factual information on sensitive topics.

• Decensoring Initiative: The original DeepSeek-R1 model was limited by its refusal to address sensitive topics, often mirroring Chinese Communist Party (CCP) narratives. Perplexity's mission to deliver accurate answers led to post-training the model to overcome this bias and censorship.

• Post-Training Methodology: The team gathered a dataset of 40,000 prompts on topics censored by the CCP, using multilingual classifiers and ensuring data privacy. They employed Nvidia's NeMo 2.0 framework to train the model, maintaining its reasoning capabilities while removing censorship.

• Evaluation and Performance: Perplexity's post-trained model underwent rigorous testing, including human and AI evaluations, to ensure it remains uncensored and engages with sensitive subjects. The model's reasoning performance matches the original R1, confirming that decensoring did not compromise its analytical skills.

💡 AI Insight

🎯 Fiverr AI

Fiverr introduces AI tools to empower gig workers and enhance their productivity.

• New Initiatives for Freelancers: Fiverr is rolling out generative AI tools designed to aid freelancers in their work. This program allows freelancers to train AI with their previous projects and charge customers for AI-generated content. The goal is to make gig workers indispensable rather than replaceable, as highlighted by CEO Micha Kaufman.

• Impact on the Gig Economy: The introduction of AI tools has intensified competition in the gig market, leading to significant job losses for writers, programmers, and app developers. Studies indicate that the trend of replacing freelancers with AI is rapidly increasing, contributing to economic insecurity among gig workers who often lack benefits and legal protections.

• Personal AI Tools and Incentives: Contractors can create personalized AI models using their work, ensuring ownership of AI-generated content, with pricing set at $25 per month. Fiverr also offers a personal AI assistant costing $29 per month, which can manage routine tasks and provide business insights. Additionally, top-performing freelancers might receive shares in Fiverr, though details on share distribution are yet to be disclosed.

🤖 Today on AI Robotics

🚨 Humanoid Robot Ameca Leaves Public 'gobsmacked'

Ameca, a humanoid robot, amazed attendees at the Cornwall Festival of Tech with its advanced human-like features.

• Robot Debuts Publicly: Engineered Arts introduced Ameca, a sophisticated humanoid robot, to the public for the first time at a tech festival in Cornwall. The event, titled 'Ameca: A Robot's Journey to Creation', drew a crowd of about 250 people eager to witness the robot's unique capabilities.

• Impressive Features: Ameca stood out for its expressive facial gestures, which many attendees found astonishing and lifelike. Will Jackson, CEO of Engineered Arts, emphasized the importance of these expressions in making the robot a powerful platform for artificial intelligence development.

• Mixed Reactions: While some festival-goers were "gobsmacked" by Ameca's capabilities, others found its realistic appearance somewhat unsettling. The robot was deliberately designed to avoid being too human-like, as crossing that line might evoke discomfort in people.