Amazon's Generative AI Assistant Q

Today’s top AI Highlights:

1. Scale AI’s new report reveals insights on building, applying, and evaluating generative AI

2. Amazon releases generative AI assistant for businesses, developers, and to build AI agents

3. Nvidia’s new LLM agent that automates simulation-reality tasks for robotic learning

4. Get summaries of trending posts on X, powered by Grok

& so much more!

Read time: 3 mins

Latest Developments 🌍

OpenAI’s GPT Models are Organizations’ Favourite 🧑‍💻

With generative AI becoming increasingly integrated into various industries, understanding its current state and future trajectory is crucial for businesses and individuals to evaluate the future course of action and opportunities. Scale AI’s 2024 AI Readiness Report, based on a survey of 1,800 ML professionals, offers invaluable insights into this rapidly evolving area, opportunities, and challenges in building, applying, and evaluating these powerful models.

Key Highlights:

1. Model Usage: Closed-source model usage has significantly increased, with 86% of organizations utilizing them compared to 37% in 2023. Open-source model adoption also saw a rise, from 41% to 66%.

2. Model Preferences: OpenAI’s GPT-4 leads in popularity (58%), followed by GPT-3.5 (44%) and Google Gemini (39%). Open-source models like Falcon, Mixtral, and DBRX also gain traction due to their efficiency and flexibility.

1. AI Adoption Stages: 22% of organizations have one model in production, 27% have multiple models deployed, while 49% are still in the early stages of evaluating use cases or developing their first model.

2. Model Customization: While 65% of organizations currently use models out-of-the-box, many are exploring customization through fine-tuning (43%) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) (38%) for improved performance.

3. Domain-Specific Data & Human Expertise: The next leap in AI capabilities will require domain-specific, human-generated datasets to capture nuances and edge cases.

4. Investment Trends: In 3 years, organizations plan to increase investments in both commercial closed and open-source models.

1. Barriers to Adoption: Infrastructure limitations (61%), budget constraints (54%), and data privacy concerns (52%) remain key challenges hindering wider AI adoption.

2. New Model Architectures: Sparse expert models like Mixtral and DBRX are gaining prominence for their high performance with fewer parameters and less compute demands.

Business Opportunities:

1. Managed Data Labeling Services: With the growing emphasis on high-quality, domain-specific data, there’s a rising need for specialized data labeling services that can cater to the unique requirements of different industries and AI applications.

2. Computational Resources: The industry is shifting towards GPUs and TPUs for AI workloads, demanding new programming models, tooling, and optimization techniques.

3. AI Development Tools: The demand for AI development tools like GitHub continues to grow. New businesses can focus on niche areas within software development, catering to specific programming languages or domains.

4. Customizing AI Models: Businesses providing tools for fine-tuning, RAG, and prompt engineering will be in high demand as organizations seek to customize and optimize foundation models for specific use cases.

Amazon Makes it GenAI Assistant Generally Available 🤖

Amazon had released its generative AI assistant for businesses, Amazon Q, in November 2023. Amazon Q can chat, solve problems, generate content, give insights, and take action by connecting to a company’s information repositories, code, data, and enterprise systems. It was rolled out to select enterprises for testing. Amazon has announced that it is now generally available for businesses and developers (yes, Amazon CodeWhisperer is now Amazon Q for Developers), along with more new features.

Key Highlights:

1. What is Amazon Q: It is powered by Amazon Bedrock. While it hasn’t been revealed which LLM powers Amazon Q, the company says that the model that it is based on has been augmented with high-quality AWS content to get more complete, actionable, and referenced answers.

2. Amazon Q for Developer: Helps with generating code, testing and debugging applications, and also transforming code to newer versions (like from Java 8 to Java 17). It can also be used to explain code snippets and suggest optimizations.

3. Amazon Q for Business: This helps businesses to make data-driven decisions. It can provide information based on company data, extract key points from documents and data sources, create reports and presentations, and automate tasks based on data and instructions.

1. Amazon Q in QuickSight: Q integrates with Amazon QuickSight, the cloud-based business intelligence service. This helps in building BI dashboards, creating visualizations, and analyzing data using natural language.

2. Amazon Q Apps: It’s just like building Custom GPTs. It lets employees build AI-powered apps from the company’s data, without any prior coding experience. Simply describe the type of app you want and it will quickly generate an app for the task.

Technical Research 👇

From Simulated Robot Training to Reality with LLMs 🎮

Teaching robots new skills by first training them in a simulated environment and then transferring those skills to the real world has always been tricky. This process usually requires a lot of manual effort to design and fine-tune reward functions and the physics of the simulation. Researchers at Nvidia have introduced “DrEureka,” a system that uses LLMs to automate and speed up this skill transfer process. All that is needed is the physics simulation of the task you want the robot to learn, and it takes care of the rest.

Key Highlights:

1. Learning by doing: DrEureka observes the robot's actions in the virtual environment and uses that information to create a more realistic and challenging simulation, preparing the robot for the real world.

2. Diverse training scenarios: It generates a variety of training scenarios with different conditions and challenges to ensure the robot is well-prepared for any situation.

3. Safety as a top priority: When setting up rewards for the robot, DrEureka considers safety guidelines, ensuring that the robot learns to act safely and responsibly in real-world environments.

4. Adaptable to various tasks: Its capabilities extend beyond specific skills. It can be applied to various robotic tasks, such as walking, manipulating objects, and more.

Tools of the Trade ⚒️

1. Stories on X: Get summaries of the trending posts on X in your For You tab in Explore, and quickly brush up with what’s trending on the platform and discover more content, without reading those long threads. Powered by xAI’s Grok, it is now available to all X premium subscribers.

1. Tune Studio: Build and deploy generative AI apps based on Llama 3 models. This tool lets you experiment with Llama 3 in a sandbox, save interactions as datasets, and fine-tune the model on advanced hardware. The platform also supports deploying Llama 3 applications via public APIs for optimized performance and cost efficiency.

2. Gatekeep: Learn faster and better with AI-generated videos. This tool uses text-to-video AI that transforms your questions or topics of any kind into engaging educational explainer videos, enhancing the learning experience and quality.

1. Career Copilot: A Chrome extension to optimize your job search and enhance your LinkedIn profile. It provides AI-generated cover letters, LinkedIn profile analysis and rewriting, and a job application tracker. The extension also offers free features like profile scoring, personalized checklists, and expert tips to improve your LinkedIn presence and job search efficiency.

Hot Takes 🔥

1. LLMs are NOT going to suddenly become sentient one fine day! However you can deliberately work on the problem of AI sentience and solve it! AI girlfriend apps have the biggest incentive to do so and are likely working on this problem today! ~Bindu Reddy

2. using technology to create abundance--intelligence, energy, longevity, whatever--will not solve all problems and will not magically make everyone happy. but it is an unequivocally great thing to do, and expands our option space. to me, it feels like a moral imperative. ~Sam Altman

Meme of the Day 🤡

Even AI needs to be convinced 🫣

That’s all for today! See you tomorrow with more such AI-filled content.

Real-time AI Updates 🚨

⚡️ Follow me on Twitter @Saboo_Shubham for lightning-fast AI updates and never miss what’s trending!

PS: I curate this AI newsletter every day for FREE, your support is what keeps me going. If you find value in what you read, share it with your friends by clicking the share button below!