Though Nvidia may dominate AI hardware as its poster child, few may have seen its foray into audio models coming - especially one like Fugatto, capable of generating entirely new sounds. Other key highlights include:
- Zoom rebrands itself from a video meeting company to an AI-first platform
- Amazon doubles its investment into Anthropic from $4 billion to $8 billion, becomes its primary model training partner
- UK minister Pat McFadden urges NATO to work close together to stay ahead of Russia in AI amidst increasing cyberattacks
Join us at AI Tangle as we untangle this week's happenings in AI!
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Nvidia, perhaps to the surprise of many, recently unveiled a cutting-edge generative AI model called Fugatto to transform and synthesize audio in new ways. Leveraging extensive training datasets and advanced processing techniques, Fugatto allows users to modify traits like emotion, tone, and ambiance or even combine sounds to create unique sound bites "never heard before." Though not publicly available yet, with applications ranging from music production to dynamic gaming scores, Fugatto could become a versatile tool for audio artists and developers across industries.
How does it work on a technical level?
Fugatto, detailed in a blog post that included a video demo, introduced a new approach to audio synthesis, handling individual traits like "emotion" or "instrumental qualities" as adjustable continuums. Nvidia's "ComposableART" system allows the model to blend and customize audio traits beyond what it learned during training, generating sounds as varied as "a laughing violin" or "a banjo in gentle rainfall." A research paper on Fugatto states that the model was trained on 20 million annotated audio samples over 50,000 hours, combined with techniques to link audio characteristics with text descriptions. Still, despite its potential, Nvidia emphasizes that Fugatto should be merely used as a creative tool that compliments human creativity, not as one that replaces it.
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Known for being the "holy grail" of meeting video software during the pandemic years ago, Zoom Video Communications Inc. is rebranding by dropping the "video" from its name and becoming an AI-first platform. As stated by company CEO Eric Yuan in a blog post, Zoom is now an "AI-first work platform for human connection” that delivers “modern, hybrid work solutions." To remain competitive with Big Tech, the company has rolled out a variety of tools, from a more comprehensive communications program to a suite of MS Office-style production apps.
In more news related to Anthropic, it recently secured an additional $4 billion investment from Amazon, bringing Amazon's total to $8 billion, as part of a deal for the AI startup to primarily train its AI models using Amazon's AWS infrastructure and Trainium chips. Although it has been said that Anthropic may favor Nvidia's chips, it agreed to Amazon's terms likely due to financial pressures, especially as the company is on track to burn through $2.7 billion in 2024. The collaboration has drawn regulatory scrutiny, but both the US FTC and UK regulators have given the green light to Amazon's previous investments.
As the Russia-Ukraine war continues, Britain and its allies find themselves under ever-increasing Russian cyberattacks intent on thwarting their aid to Ukraine, and British cabinet minister Pat McFadden has made it clear it does not plan to relent. McFadden urged NATO to strengthen cybersecurity and announced a new £8.22 million AI Security Research Laboratory to develop better defense tools. He warned of Russia's potential weaponization of AI and called for collaboration between nations, businesses, and institutions to tighten defenses against an "aggressive and reckless" Russian cyber threat.
In an effort to better connect AI chatbots to the data they use regularly, Anthropic recently debuted its Model Context Protocol (MCP), a (now) open-source standard designed to connect AI assistants with various data sources. MCP enables developers to create two-way connections between data and AI-powered applications, streamlining integrations and improving AI responses. Companies like Block and Apollo have adopted MCP, and tools like Slack and GitHub are already supported. While MCP shows promise, its success depends on adoption, especially among competitors like OpenAI.
Cradle, a biotech company specializing in protein design using AI, has raised $73 million to expand its lab facilities and headcount, the round led by IVP. Founded in 2022 by CEO Stef van Grieken during a wave where companies became increasingly interested in AI's use in biotech, Cradle uses AI to optimize protein sequences for improved qualities, such as heat resistance among others, helping biotech and pharma companies reduce experimental costs and time.
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AI's Presence in a Gen Z's Work Life is Like No Other (2-min read)
It's no news that the younger generations have been much more keen to learn and adopt technologies into their lives faster than present-day older generations, and a recent survey shows that Gen Z does not see AI as an exception to that.
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