🥟 Chao-Down #247 DeepMind spinoff aims to halve drug discovery times with Big Pharma partnerships, Chinese companies repurpose Nvidia gaming chips for AI, OpenAI officially launches the GPT Store

We knew this day would come, but Alexa is finally getting more serious about generative AI.

At CES this year, Alexa highlighted 3 developers that are building generative AI experiences for the voice assistant: AI chatbot platform Character.AI, AI music company Splash and Voice AI game developer Volley.

Character.AI’s experience allows Alexa users to have real-time conversations with different personas, from fictional characters to historical figures.

Splash’s Alexa Skill lets users create songs using their voice. People just need to say “Alexa, open Splash Music” and they can pick a music genre to rap or sing along to.

And Volley created a generative AI-powered “20 Questions” game, allowing users to ask questions to guess some subject or topic, providing hints and explaining “yes or no questions” if the human opponent gets stuck.

All this comes at a time when the big tech companies are still laying off people even within their digital assistant teams (i.e. Google just laid off hundreds in Assistant, hardware, engineering teams and Amazon recently fired people from its Alexa teams).

What will be the future of these products?

-Alex, your resident Chaos Coordinator.

What happened in AI? 📰

Introducing the GPT Store (openai.com)

Amazon’s Alexa gets new generative AI-powered experiences (TechCrunch)

DeepMind spin-off aims to halve drug discovery times following Big Pharma deals (ft.com)

Chinese companies resort to repurposing Nvidia gaming chips for AI (ft.com)

CES 2024: Tech companies transforming kitchens with AI, robots (AP News)

Intel: ‘We are bringing the AI PC to the car’ (The Verge)

Always be Learnin’ 📕 📖

How to Build Superintelligent AI (AI Thought)

A case for AI alignment being difficult — LessWrong

The Ultimate Guide for Making the Best Career Choices in Tech (Medium)

Projects to Keep an Eye On 🛠

cumulo-autumn/StreamDiffusion: StreamDiffusion: A Pipeline-Level Solution for Real-Time Interactive Generation (Github)

mnotgod96/AppAgent: AppAgent: Multimodal Agents as Smartphone Users, an LLM-based multimodal agent framework designed to operate smartphone apps. (Github)

MarkFzp/act-plus-plus: Imitation Learning algorithms with Co-training for Mobile ALOHA: ACT, Diffusion Policy, VINN (github.com)

The Latest in AI Research 💡

The Earth is Flat because...: Investigating LLMs' Belief towards Misinformation via Persuasive Conversation (llms-believe-the-earth-is-flat.github.io)

Images altered to trick machine vision can influence humans too (Google DeepMind)

HD-Painter: High-Resolution and Prompt-Faithful Text-Guided Image Inpainting with Diffusion Models (arxiv)

The World Outside of AI 🌎

SEC Approves Bitcoin ETFs (For Real, This Time) (gizmodo.com)

The Plagiarism War Has Begun (The Atlantic)

How online misinformation exploits ‘information voids’ — and what to do about it (Nature)

Why does everyone hate Hinge? (Vox)

Scientists Destroy Illusion That Coin Toss Flips Are 50–50 (Scientific American)

How 'safe bathrooms' against opioid overdose deaths came to be (statnews.com)

One Last Bite 😋