🥟 Chao-Down #286 How AI is being used to combat Alzheimer's, Inflection updates Pi assistant with new foundation model, Google brings Stack Overflow's knowledge base to Gemini

How much does the U.S. trust AI companies? Apparently that number has been decreasing.

According to a new Edelman study, U.S. trust in AI companies has fallen from 50% to 35% over the last five years.

The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals a growing public concern over the management of innovation, particularly in the technology sector. The report highlights a significant trust gap between the tech industry and AI, and overall bipartisan skepticism towards the technology in the U.S.

The study suggests that for AI to gain wider acceptance, there needs to be a focus on better explaining its benefits, ensuring thorough testing, and considering those adversely affected by its implementation.

While innovation continues to happen at a rapid pace, the industry would do well to make sure to build trust among those who matter the most: the users.

-Alex, your resident Chaos Coordinator.

What happened in AI? 📰

How AI Is Being Used to Find New Alzheimer's Risk Factors (TIME)

Inflection-2.5: meet the world's best personal AI (Inflection)

AI is the talk of the town, but businesses are still not ready for it (CNBC)

OpenAI GPT Sorts Resume Names With Racial Bias, Test Shows (Bloomberg)

Google brings Stack Overflow’s knowledge base to Gemini for Google Cloud (TechCrunch)

Meta is making a new AI to power Facebook and Instagram video (qz.com)

Always be Learnin’ 📕 📖

The Fragmentation of Search (Union Square Ventures)

Training great LLMs entirely from ground zero in the wilderness as a startup (Yi Tay)

Don't Mock Machine Learning Models In Unit Tests (eugeneyan.com)

Projects to Keep an Eye On 🛠

time-series-foundation-models/lag-llama: Lag-Llama: Towards Foundation Models for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting (Github)

young-geng/EasyLM: Large language models (LLMs) made easy, EasyLM is a one stop solution for pre-training, finetuning, evaluating and serving LLMs in JAX/Flax. (Github)

QwenLM/Qwen-Agent: Agent framework and applications built upon Qwen1.5, featuring Function Calling, Code Interpreter, RAG, and Chrome extension. (Github)

The Latest in AI Research 💡

Towards General Computer Control: A Multimodal Agent For Red Dead Redemption II As A Case Study (baai-agents.github.io)

Divide-or-Conquer? Which Part Should You Distill Your LLM? (arxiv)

AnyGPT: Unified Multimodal LLM with Discrete Sequence Modeling (arxiv)

The World Outside of AI 🌎

Inside TikTok's money machine (ABC News)

Animal Testing for Vaccines Relies on a Cruel Monkey Supply Chain (bloomberg.com)

Companies Are Juggling More Software Vendors Than Ever. It Isn’t Easy.  (WSJ)

More Screen Time Means Less Parent-Child Talk, Study Finds (The New York Times)

Trendflation makes it impossible to discern between priceless and worthless trends (The Drum)

Book Startup Pitches Authors a Novel Deal: $0 Up Front, Bigger Profits (WSJ)

One Last Bite 😋