🥟 Chao-Down #317 Generative AI comes to the gene editing world of CRISPR, Microsoft releases latest Phi-3 small language model, Amazon wants to host companies' custom models on Bedrock

Right on the heels of last week’s Llama 3 announcement from Meta, Microsoft just dropped its own third iteration of its homegrown AI model with a focus on efficiency and reasoning.

Phi-3 stands as the most competitive model for its size, outperforming Mistral, Llama, and even GPT 3.5.

From the paper title itself, you can see that the authors highlight Phi-3’s smallness in being able to run locally on a phone. But more interestingly, if you read the technical report in full, you’ll see that the true novelty of Phi-3 is in its data acquisition strategy.

Choosing to prioritize high quality texts that explicitly use reasoning as opposed to general facts and world knowledge, the authors found that they could get superior performance on certain tasks without bloating the actual footprint of the model.

It’s another welcome addition to the open-source model community. Let’s see what people can build with it.

-Alex, your resident Chaos Coordinator.

What happened in AI? 📰

Los Angeles is using an AI pilot program to try to predict homelessness (CNBC)

Amazon wants to host companies’ custom generative AI models (TechCrunch)

Generative A.I. Arrives in the Gene Editing World of CRISPR (The New York Times)

AI traces mysterious metastatic cancers to their source (Nature)

Adobe is fighting AI election deepfakes. Here's how (qz.com)

TikTok could soon leverage AI to clone your voice (androidpolice.com)

Always be Learnin’ 📕 📖

Developing Rapidly with Generative AI (Discord)

How Can Policymakers Address AI Voice-Cloning Scams? (Center for Data Innovation)

Do software companies actually have good margins? (Substack)

Projects to Keep an Eye On 🛠

Jonathan-Adly/AgentRun: The easiest, and fastest way to run AI-generated Python code safely (Github)

hiyouga/LLaMA-Factory: Unify Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ LLMs (Github)

twentyhq/twenty: Building a modern alternative to Salesforce, powered by the community. (Github)

The Latest in AI Research 💡

BLINK: Multimodal Large Language Models Can See but Not Perceive (arxiv)

Scaling Instructable Agents Across Many Simulated Worlds (arxiv)

Megalodon: Efficient LLM Pretraining and Inference with Unlimited Context Length (arxiv)

The World Outside of AI 🌎

Ozempic Influencers Say TikTok Is Unfairly Cracking Down on Weight-Loss Content (Bloomberg)

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta will offer its virtual reality OS to hardware companies (CNBC)

Study links friendly front yards to happier, more connected neighborhoods (NPR)

America's produce has a ton of pesticides (qz.com)

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

It’s time to retire the term “user” (MIT Technology Review)

One Last Bite 😋