🥟 Chao-Down #292 Apple in talks to license Google Gemini model for IPhone, Elon Musk open sources Grok AI, Midjourney blocks generating AI images of Biden and Trump as election nears

Apple just had a pretty big, but quiet weekend in AI, and it all has to do with their strategy around foundation models.

First off, sources report that Apple is currently negotiating with Google to bring the smaller Gemini models to the IPhone. This comes at a time when CEO Tim Cook has doubled down on generative AI for the company.

It’s interesting though that Cook is exploring the partnership route. Maybe the company wants to hedge its bets by offering choice? It does feel very un-Apple-like to offer something that doesn’t originate from the Apple ecosystem. Probably more likely, Apple will take the licensed copy of the Gemini model and then make some derivative model fine-tuned on their own data.

The other under-the-radar Apple announcement that seemed to drop from nowhere was Apple researchers releasing a lengthy open-source report on their own multimodal foundation model called the MM1. The paper is filled with insights on the challenges and solutions in training a homegrown AI model and it represents Apple’s first public release of their own work in LLMs.

All these developments show that the Cupertino-based company is fully entering the GenAI-era. It’s about time. 

-Alex, your resident Chaos Coordinator.

What happened in AI? 📰

Apple in Talks to License Google Gemini for iPhone, iOS 18 Generative AI Tools (Bloomberg)

Musk's Grok AI goes open source (VentureBeat)

Apple reveals MM1 AI model and it could power the new Siri 2.0 (Toms Guide)

Mercedes joins Tesla and Amazon in testing humanoid robots (qz.com)

AI image-generator Midjourney blocks images of Biden and Trump as election looms (PBS NewsHour)

Surveys show Americans don’t trust AI to give medical advice. Here's why that matters (Fast Company)

Always be Learnin’ 📕 📖

The “10x engineer:" 50 years ago and now (The Pragmatic Engineer)

The State of Competitive Machine Learning | ML Contests

Pokémon GO: Architecture of the #1 AR Game in the World (fullstackexpress.io)

Projects to Keep an Eye On 🛠

lavague-ai/LaVague: Automate automation with Large Action Model framework (Github)

Skyvern-AI/skyvern: Automate browser-based workflows with LLMs and Computer Vision (Github)

AnswerDotAI/rerankers - A lightweight unified API for various reranking models (Github)

The Latest in AI Research 💡

Simple and Scalable Strategies to Continually Pre-train Large Language Models (arxiv)

MM1: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Multimodal LLM Pre-training (arxiv)

Large language models surpass human experts in predicting neuroscience results (arxiv)

The World Outside of AI 🌎

Automakers Are Sharing Consumers’ Driving Behavior With Insurance Companies (The New York Times)

Google Is Trying to Reduce Its Food Waste Without Irritating Employees (Bloomberg)

Inflation seems stubborn, but people keep spending. What's going on? (NBC News)

Why Is Row 13 Missing on So Many Airplanes? (Mental Floss)

How to Use Speed Analogies to Boost Sports Performance (Bloomberg)

Ozempic Is a Brain Drug (The Atlantic)

One Last Bite 😋