🥟 Chao-Down #309 Amazon to stop paying developers to create apps for Alexa, Texas replaces thousands of human exam graders with AI, A new ChatGPT for Music startup from ex-DeepMind researchers

Is Alexa as we know it on its last legs?

The latest from the e-commerce giant highlights how Amazon is moving away from its original vision for a home voice assistant.

At the end of June, Amazon will discontinue incentivizing developers to produce apps for Alexa. The Alexa Developer Rewards Program, which began in 2017, provided free AWS credits and monthly payments to developers who created popular Alexa skills.

People can still monetize their applications from direct in-app purchases, but Amazon’s decision shows a shift in focus especially as generative AI takes center stage.

Will developers still choose to build on Alexa even without this incentive?

-Alex, your resident Chaos Coordinator.

What happened in AI? 📰

Amazon to Stop Paying Developers to Create Apps For Alexa (Bloomberg)

Texas is replacing thousands of human exam graders with AI (The Verge)

Spotify launches new AI playlist tool dubbed 'Spotify's ChatGPT' (qz.com)

AI Music Arms Race: Meet Udio, the OTHER ChatGPT for Music (Rolling Stone)

AI can help to tailor drugs for Africa — but Africans should lead the way (Nature)

Card game developer says it paid an 'AI artist' $90,000 to generate card art because 'no one comes close to the quality he delivers' (PC Gamer)

Always be Learnin’ 📕 📖

Mastering RAG: Advanced Chunking Techniques for LLM Applications - Galileo (rungalileo.io)

Why Large Language Models Like ChatGPT Treat Black- and White-Sounding Names Differently (stanford.edu)

Privacy in an AI Era: How Do We Protect Our Personal Information? (stanford.edu)

Projects to Keep an Eye On 🛠

paul-gauthier/aider: aider is AI pair programming in your terminal (Github)

PawanOsman/ChatGPT: OpenAI API Free Reverse Proxy (Github)

nus-apr/auto-code-rover: A project structure aware autonomous software engineer aiming for autonomous program improvement (Github)

The Latest in AI Research 💡

AutoWebGLM: Bootstrap And Reinforce A Large Language Model-based Web Navigating Agent (arxiv)

Training LLMs over Neurally Compressed Text (arxiv)

ReFT: Representation Finetuning for Language Models (arxiv)

The World Outside of AI 🌎

Decaf Coffee: Why Baristas Say It's Growing in Popularity (Bloomberg)

Small 5G phone towers could increase battery life 50%, research says (qz.com)

Gen Z is full of financial angst despite inheriting a golden labor market (CNN Business)

Credit Card Companies Are About to Invent New Fees for Consumers (Business Insider)

Is the Era of ‘Brozempic’ Upon Us? - Telehealth Start-Ups Are Marketing Weight-Loss Drugs to Men (The New York Times)

Taylor Swift to politics: America's new slot machine is predictions (Axios)

One Last Bite 😋