Welcome to the Techmeme Ride Home for Tuesday, June 25th, 2024. I'm Brian McCalla. Today, history is rhyming today as AI Music Startups get the Napster Treatment and Microsoft gets dinged for product bundling. Google wants you to build your own AI celebrities, Amazon wants to go at chatGPT directly and to hellet interesting and hellet big AI raises. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.
The recording industry of America has sued AI Music Services Suno and UDO over alleged mass copyright infringement and claims they are trying to quote hide the full scope of their infringement. Coding the Verge. A group of record labels including the Big Three, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Records are suing two of the top names in generative AI music making, alleging the companies violated their copyright on mass.
The two AI companies Suno and UDO use text prompts to turn out original songs. Both companies have enjoyed a level of success. Suno is available for use in Microsoft Co-Pilot 3A partnership with the tech giant. UDO was used to create BBL Drizzy, one of the more notable examples of AI music going viral. The case against Suno was filed in Boston Federal Court and the UDO case was filed in New York. The labels say artists across genres and eras had their work used without consent.
The lawsuits were brought by the Recording Industry Association of America, the powerful group representing major players in the music industry and a group of labels. The RIAA is seeking damages of up to $150,000 per work along with other fees. In its complaints, RIAA included several examples of outputs generated using Suno and UDO. That sound like songs owned by labels. One song generated by Suno titled Deep Down in Louisiana Close to New Orleans, by the way, that's how it was spelled.
Replicates the lyrics and style of Johnny B. Good by Chuck Berry. Another song called Prancing Queen generated using the prompt 70s pop contains lyrics to Dancing Queen by Abba and sounds remarkably like the band end quote. Someone said online last night that they have thus far refrained from investing in music AI startups because if there's any industry that is organized and litigious, when it comes to technological disruption to its industry, it is the music industry. They've got
like 25 years experience in this, just ask Napster. Speaking of the year 1999 calling and wanting its headlines back, it has happened. In preliminary findings, the EU has charged Microsoft with anti-trust violations over concerns that it gave teams an undo advantage by bundling it with office. Sound familiar to anyone? Quoting the Financial Times. The charges are the biggest that Brussels has filed against Microsoft apart from merger control since the group showed
down with the US and EU over Windows, which began more than 20 years ago. That landmark case also centered on Microsoft's bundling or tying of its various software products. In April, Microsoft issued concessions aimed at trying to overt regulatory action, including widening plans to unbundled teams from other software such as Office Beyond Europe. However, officials did not
think the move went far enough to enable competition in the market. Reacting to the fresh charges Brad Smith, Microsoft president said, having unbundled teams and taken initial interoperability steps, we appreciate the additional clarity provided today and will work to find solutions to
address the commission's remaining concerns. Sebastian Niles, president at Salesforce, which lodged the original complaint against Microsoft's other charges against Microsoft were a quote when for customer choice and an affirmation that Microsoft's practices with teams have harmed competition. The commission, the EU's executive arm said fresh charges did not pre-judge the outcome
of the probe. Microsoft is seeking to settle the case to avoid formal charges that it is breaking the law and a potentially hefty fine of up to 10% of its annual global revenues according to people familiar with the company's thinking. Mark German says, no, Apple is not looking to integrate Meta's Lama into the iPhone, though it's unclear if that is separate from integrating Meta's
various chatbots as I told you about yesterday. Quoting Bloomberg, the two companies aren't in discussions about using Meta's Lama chatbot in an AI partnership and only held brief talks in March said the people who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. The dialogue about a partnership didn't reach any formal stage and Apple has no active plans to integrate Lama. The preliminary talks occurred around the time Apple started hashing out deals to use open AI's
chatbots and alphabets Gemini in its products. Apple decided not to move forward with formal meta discussions in part because it doesn't see that company's privacy practices as stringent enough according to the people. Apple has spent years criticizing Meta's technology and integrating Lama into the iPhone would have been a stark about face. And another follow up story here, Uber has apparently begun locking New York City drivers out of its app during low demand periods
to fight that local rule that requires drivers to be paid for idle time between rides. Quoting Bloomberg, at the heart of the move say the two companies is a six year old pay rule in New York that among other things requires firms like Uber and Lyft to pay drivers for the idle time they rack up between rides. The lockouts which began last month are aimed at limiting how much non-passengers are able to log and be paid for. Drivers say they need to work longer hours to earn the same
amount as before. The lockouts occur unpredictably, making it difficult for drivers to plan work shifts and treat Uber as a full time job. Sometimes these episodes can last over an hour. And Uber spokesperson said that access to the platform is based on rider demand at any given time and place. If demand drops too far below supply, the company will temporarily shut drivers out. Nicholas Tajukti, who drives full time for Uber, said that he has been getting shut out of the app
four or five times a day. I used to work 10 hours and make 300 to 350 dollars to Juki said, now I worked 10 hours and barely made $170. I was so disappointed. I'm paying for my gas and cannot make money. Wesley Dorsenaville, another full time Uber driver, similarly said he used to take home between 300 and 400 dollars per shift but was lately seeing between 170 and a little over 200 dollars.
But back to AI sources say Google has been developing a product to create customizable chatbots which could be modeled on celebrities and plans to launch it as soon as later this year. The search engine giant has been developing a product for creating and conversing with customizable chatbots which could be modeled on celebrities or made by users to people with direct knowledge of the project said the bots would be similar to the online personalities from meta platforms and
startup character AI based on celebrities like football star Tom Brady and TV character Tony soprano Ryan Garmick, a longtime designer at Google known for his work on the Google doodles that appear on the company's search homepage is leading the project as part of the Google labs team which works on experimental AI products like people said around 10 Google employees have been working on it the chatbot will likely appear on the Google labs website if the company makes it accessible to the
public as currently conceived Google's Gemini AI model would power the chatbots users would be able to create their own chatbots by describing its personality and appearance that feature is similar to character AI which also allows users to give the chatbots elaborate backstories and to specify what their voices sound like in audio conversations as part of the effort Google has discussed striking partnerships with influencers to create chatbots based on them one of the people said Google plans
to launch the feature as a standalone product but has also discussed eventually integrating it into YouTube this person said YouTube leaders have said they want to harness generative AI advances to help creators who frequently say they would like more ways to engage with fans and quote
sources tell business insider that amazon is working on an AI chatbot codenamed metis designed to compete directly with chachipt one source says it's tentatively slated for a september launch quote the secret internal project is codenamed metis likely in reference to
the greek goddess of wisdom the new services designed to be accessed from a web browser similar to how other AI assistants work according to people familiar with the project and an internal document obtained by bi metis is powered by an internal amazon AI model called alimps another name inspired
by greek mythology this is a more powerful version of the companies publicly available tighten model the people familiar said at the most basic level metis gives text and image based answers in a smart conversational manner according to the internal document it also is able to share links
to the source of its responses suggest follow up queries and generate images amazon wants metis to use an artificial intelligence technique called retrieval augmented generation or rag the people said this means metis will be able to retrieve information from beyond the original data used to train its underlying alimps model the goal is to generate more up to date responses for example metis should be able to share the latest stock prices well some other chapats that are not rag can't do so
the people familiar with the situation said metis is also expected to work as an AI agent one of the people said AI agents are capable of automating and performing complex tasks based on existing data like making a vacation itinerary metis use cases could include turning on your lights and
booking a flight for you one of the people told bi and quote during design sprints many tools like jira can be restrictive in the way they organize information your ability to see all tasks is restricted by the size of your screen which can make it harder to understand the relationships
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for your first year also on the amazon tip just noting this real quickly so you can mark your calendars amazon plans to hold prime day twenty twenty four on july sixteenth and july seventeenth in twenty four countries including the u.s. the uk in japan india will receive a separate event later in the year finally today a couple of interesting raises in the a i space etched which is building so who in inferencing ship that only runs transformer a i models has raised
a one hundred and twenty million dollar series a bringing its total funding to a hundred and twenty five point three six million dollars to date quoting tech ranch only two years old etched was founded by a pair of harvard drap outs given uberty x octo ml and x x nor ai and chris jue who along with robert watchin and former cypress semiconductor ct o mark ross sought to create a chip that could do one thing run ai models that's not unusual plenty of startups and tech giants have
or are developing chips that exclusively run ai models also known as inferencing chips meta has mtia a amazon has graviton and inferencia and so on but etched chips are unique in that they only run a single type of model transformers the transformer proposed by a team of google researchers back in twenty seventeen has become the dominant generative ai model architecture by far transformers under pin open a eyes video generating models sora
they're at the heart of text generating models like anthropics clawed and google's jenn and i and the power our generators such as the newest version of stable diffusion in twenty twenty two we made a bet that transformers would take over the world who bearty etched c o told tech crunch in an interview we've hit a point in the evolution of a i where specialized ships that can perform better than general purpose GPUs are
inevitable and the technical decision makers of the world know this etched chip called so who is in a sick application specific integrated circuit a chip tailored for a particular application in this case running transformers manufactured using tsmc's four nanometer process so who can deliver
dramatically better inferencing performance than GPUs and other general purpose ai chips while drawing less energy claims uberty so who is an order of magnitude faster and cheaper than even in videos next generation of blackwell gb 200 GPUs when running text image and video transformers uberty
said one so who server replaces 160 h 100 GPUs so who will be a more affordable efficient and environmentally friendly option for business leaders that need specialized chips and quote how does so who achieve this in a few ways but most obvious and intuitive is a streamlined inferencing hardware
and software pipeline because so who doesn't run non transformer models the etched team was able to do away with hardware components not relevant to transformers while trimming the software overhead traditionally used to deploy and run non transformers while etched lacks a direct competitor
at present ai chip startup perceive recently previewed a processor with hardware acceleration for transformers as well groc has also invested heavily in transformers specific optimizations for it's a sick competition aside what if transformers one day fall out of favor uberty says that in
that case etched will do the obvious design a new chip fair enough but that's a pretty drastic fall back considering how long it's taken to bring so who to fruition and quote and finally finally a startup called evolutionary scale has released ai models called ESM3
to create novel proteins to do so it is raised $142 million in seed funding led by who else our friend nat freedman danne gross and lux capital quoting Reuters amazon web services and the venture capital arm of in video also participated in the fundraising calling it a chat gpt moment
for biology lux capital co founder and managing partner josh wolf told Reuters the company has developed the first large language model for creating novel proteins and other biological systems evolutionary scale envisions its ai being utilized for a wide range of applications from
accelerating drug discovery to engineering microbes capable of breaking down plastic in the environment the company's chief scientist Alex Reeves told Reuters using ai to engineer new biological systems is currently an area of intense interest at the same time experts have also
raised alarm bells about generative a i's potential to help create bio weapons through aiding the development of harmful pathogens or toxins evolutionary scales funding will be used to train its next generation of ai models as well as build out a team to partner with the biotech industry
Reeves said the company is releasing models named e sm three the smaller e sm three model is being open sourced for non commercial research and a w sm and video will make the models available commercially including its largest e sm three model the company said the company said it leveraged
e sm three to engineer a novel fluorescent protein that diverged from the evolutionary path of naturally occurring fluorescent proteins which would have taken nature about 500 million years to evolve and quote here's luxus Josh wolf in a tweet storm from this morning quote biology is
the most advanced technology that has ever been created far beyond anything that people have engineered the ribosome is programmable it takes the code of proteins in the form of RNA and builds them up from scratch fabrication at the atomic scale every cell and every organism on earth has
thousands to millions of these molecular factories but even the most sophisticated computational tools created to date barely scratch the surface biology is written in a language we don't yet understand if we could learn to read and write in the code of life it would make biology programmable
trial and error would be replaced by logic and painstaking experiments by simulation e sm three is the first generative model for biology that simultaneously reasons over the sequence structure and function of proteins e sm three is trained across the natural diversity of the earth billions
of proteins from the amazon rainforest to the depths of the oceans extreme environments like hydrothermal vents and the microbes in a handful of soil we believe that e sm three is the most parameters plus data plus compute ever applied to training a biological model trained with over one
times one thousand twenty four flops and ninety billion parameters trained on one of the highest throughput GPU clusters in the world today e sm three is a frontier generative model for biology and quote nothing more for you today talk to you tomorrow