🥟 Chao-Down #177 Meta releases AI chatbots with their own personas, Amazon to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, A new update to ChatGPT lets it now see, hear and speak

Will your next best friend be an AI? Facebook thinks it might be.

Seen as primarily a way to attract the younger generation to its platforms, Meta is set to release AI chatbots with personalities as early as this Wednesday at the Facebook Connect conference. These bots would feature distinct voices and are meant to drive engagement with users while some may do basic productivity and coding tasks.

The company is also working on a product that would allow celebrities and creators to use their own AI chatbots to interact with fans and followers.

Imbuing personas into AI applications is a key part of making the technology a more embodied and personal experience and hence it’s one of the core pillars of the product I’m working on, the Semantic Kernel.

-Alex, your resident Chaos Coordinator.

What happened in AI? 📰

Amazon to invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic (TechCrunch)

Meta to Push for Younger Users With New AI Chatbot Characters (WSJ)

ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak (OpenAI)

AI Could Make Side Hustles a $1.4T Industry, Morgan Stanley Says (businessinsider.com)

Former Meta AI VP debuts Sizzle, an AI-powered learning app and chatbot (TechCrunch)

AI data training companies like Scale AI are hiring poets (Rest of World)

Always be Learnin’ 📕 📖

Commercializing AI in Healthcare: The Jobs to be Done (Andreessen Horowitz)

Generative AI’s Act Two (Sequoia Capital)

An (Opinionated) Checklist to Choose a Vector Database (Pinecone)

Projects to Keep an Eye On 🛠

Anyscale Endpoints offers the best open-source large language models (LLMs) as fully managed API endpoints (Anyscale)

PabloLec/RecoverPy: Interactively find and recover deleted or overwritten files from your terminal (Github)

The Latest in AI Research 💡

Connecting Large Language Models with Evolutionary Algorithms Yields Powerful Prompt Optimizers (arxiv)

The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey (arxiv)

SyntheWorld: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for Land Cover Mapping and Building Change Detection (arxiv)

The World Outside of AI 🌎

UAW strike: Biden will travel to Michigan to ‘join the picket line’ (CNBC)

Hollywood writers and studios reach tentative deal to end strike after nearly 150 days (CNBC)

Twitter is Still Throttling Competitors’ Links—Check for Yourself (The Markup)

Biden administration to ban medical debt from Americans' credit scores (CBS News)

Can TikTok conquer the American shopper with its new store? (qz.com)

One Last Bite 😋

If you’re attending The AI Conference this week, drop by my session to learn about the Semantic Kernel and how it helps developers build AI apps with personas!