🥟 Chao-Down #315 Meta's AI chatbot enters the arena with new Llama-3 model, Google consolidates AI teams to ship products faster, Amazon begins selling smart grocery carts to other retailers

The long-awaited drop of Meta’s latest Llama series of models just happened, and what came with it is a new chatbot to rival the likes of ChatGPT.

Meta’s chatbot, simply called Meta AI, will now appear in the search bars of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger as well as having a standalone assistant hosted on Meta.AI.

For now, the chatbot will only be able to answer questions in English and will provide web search results in real-time using Google and Bing.

Underlying the tech is Meta’s latest Llama 3 model which the company is calling “the most capable openly available LLM to date”. Unlike its competitors, Meta freely open-sources LLama 3 allowing developers to build their own AI apps using the model.

According to Meta, both the Llama 3 8B and 70B parameter model beat similarly sized models like Google’s Gemma and Anthropic’s Claude 3 in certain benchmarks (with a notable absence of comparing to OpenAI’s GPT4).

For the open-source AI community, Llama 3 is a welcome edition. I know what I’ll be playing with this weekend.

-Alex, your resident Chaos Coordinator.

What happened in AI? 📰

Meta releases new AI assistant powered by Llama 3 model (The Verge)

Google Consolidates Teams With Aim to Create AI Products Faster (Bloomberg)

AI Matches Experts in Spotting Radiology Errors (US News)

Amazon starts selling smart grocery carts to other retailers (CNBC)

'Miss AI' Will Be the World's First AI Beauty Pageant: All the Details (People)

AI could make better beer. Here’s how. (MIT Technology Review)

Always be Learnin’ 📕 📖

7 Golden Rules for Generative AI Apps: A Playbook from Early Winners (Menlo Ventures)

GPT is the Heroku of AI (Ken Kantzer's Blog)

Hype Deflation & Inflation - by Kyle Harrison (Substack)

Projects to Keep an Eye On 🛠

jafioti/luminal: Deep learning at the speed of light. (Github)

hatchet-dev/hatchet: A distributed, fault-tolerant task queue (Github)

pytorch/torchtune: A Native-PyTorch Library for LLM Fine-tuning (Github)

The Latest in AI Research 💡

LINGO-2: Driving with Natural Language (Wayve)

Rho-1: Not All Tokens Are What You Need (arxiv)

Best Practices and Lessons Learned on Synthetic Data for Language Models (arxiv)

The World Outside of AI 🌎

Baby boomers are hitting "peak 65." Two-thirds don't have nearly enough saved for retirement. (CBS News)

Inside Amazon’s Secret Operation to Gather Intel on Rivals (WSJ)

Food is medicine: clinical trials show the health benefits of dietary interventions (Nature Medicine)

The Dead Internet theory: Is TikTok suddenly making it come true? (Fast Company)

Smoking Bans and ‘Smoke-Free’ Vapes: The Debate Over Tobacco’s Future - (Bloomberg)

Burnout culture: Working late shifts can lead to depression, poor health (NPR)

One Last Bite 😋