How Nissan Uses AI To Design Cars More Quickly

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Today, we bring you an interesting roundup of recent artificial intelligence news. From Nissan's impressive use of AI to streamline car design, to Apple's unveiling of a range of exciting AI-powered features at the 2023 WWDC, AI's transformative power is more evident than ever. Even contemporary artist Takashi Murakami weighs in on the matter, balancing his excitement for AI's potential with a healthy dose of caution.

We have an AI-created sermon delivered in Germany raising interesting questions about technology's role in religion, and updates on cutting-edge AI tools like FinGPT, a novel tool for financial sector and Mind2Web, the first dataset for web agents. Finally, there's noteworthy investment news, including Gensyn AI's impressive Series A funding round and Contextual AI’s emergence from stealth mode to revolutionize enterprise language models.

We’re slicing:

• 🚗 How Nissan Uses AI To Design Cars More Quickly

• 📱 The best AI features Apple announced at WWDC 2023

• 🌸 Takashi Murakami loves and fears AI

• ⛪️ Can a chatbot preach a good sermon? Hundreds attend church service generated by ChatGPT to find out

🚗 How Nissan Uses AI To Design Cars More Quickly

Nissan, a Japanese automaker, is utilizing AI in its Yokohama Lab, an AI research and development division, to expedite the design process of cars. The lab focuses on how AI can address the challenges faced by engineers and designers, with a particular emphasis on improving aerodynamics. After recognizing the difficulties in swiftly responding to design changes and their impact on aerodynamics, Aerodynamics Engineer Kei Akasaka initiated a collaborative project with the lab to develop a prediction model using AI deep learning. However, the team found that more data was needed for the task. They experimented and trained the model with paired information, such as fluid dynamics equations, physical laws, and the shape of the car, leading to improvements in accuracy. Nissan is also using AI to enhance car safety by creating an inspection scanner capable of assessing the condition of car parts with 99.995% accuracy. The AI scans an image, compares it to the system's stored input data, and offers solutions.

📱 The best AI features Apple announced at WWDC 2023

At WWDC 2023, Apple introduced a series of AI-powered features for its devices, including computers, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, AirPods, and the new Apple Vision Pro headset, all relying on on-device processing power and AI, in line with Apple's commitment to user privacy and security. Notable features include the "Persona" for the Vision Pro, a headset that uses AI to create a digital twin of the user; an improved autocorrect for iOS 17, leveraging a transformer model to enhance word prediction capabilities; "Live Voicemail" that transcribes voicemails in real-time; an enhanced dictation feature that utilizes a new speech recognition model for increased accuracy; a "FaceTime presenter mode" for Apple TV that allows users to display their screen while being visible in the call; and a Journal app for iPhone that auto-generates digital journal entries from a user's photos, workouts, and other activities.

🌸 Takashi Murakami loves and fears AI

Takashi Murakami, a neo-pop art icon and early adopter of cryptocurrency and NFTs, voices concern about the potential impact of AI on artists. Famous for his technicolour paintings merging traditional Japanese art with modern anime and manga, he has partnered with leading fashion brands and musicians, with his pieces offering critique on the art-commerce intersection. Murakami's unconventional approach, though celebrated globally, often garners criticism from Japan’s art purists. At a recent exhibition in Paris, he likened the impending AI revolution to the 1980s advent of the Apple II computer, predicting a seismic generational shift that will highly value unique, AI-unreplicable ideas while challenging conventional artists. Despite this fear, Murakami continues to embrace tech, incorporating NFT-style pixelated portraits in his recent work and treating cryptocurrency as an exciting, emergent domain. His art—merging traditional and digital modes—is an extension of his disruptive philosophy, despite occasional resistance from long-term collectors.

⛪️ Can a chatbot preach a good sermon? Hundreds attend church service generated by ChatGPT to find out

On June 9, 2023, hundreds of German Protestants attended an AI-generated church service in Nuremberg, Germany, created by ChatGPT and theologian Jonas Simmerlein from the University of Vienna. The service, part of the convention of Protestants happening every two years in different parts of Germany, was led by different avatars representing the AI, which asked attendees to rise from the pews and praise the Lord, and preached on themes such as leaving the past behind and trust in Jesus Christ. The service drew mixed reactions from the attendees, some of whom found the AI's lack of emotion and soul off-putting, while others were positively surprised by how well it worked. However, there was a general agreement about the lack of emotion and spirituality that typically characterizes human-delivered sermons. While AI offers opportunities for making religious services more accessible and inclusive, concerns were raised about potential dangers of its use in religion.

🛠️ AI tools update

FinGPT: Open-Source Financial LLMs

This paper introduces FinGPT, an open-source large language model (LLM) designed for the finance sector, in response to the privileged data access of proprietary models like BloombergGPT. As an alternative to these models, FinGPT leverages a data-centric approach, offering transparent and accessible resources for researchers and practitioners to develop their own financial LLMs (FinLLMs).

Mind2Web is the first dataset designed for the creation and assessment of generalist web agents

Mind2Web is the first dataset designed for the creation and assessment of generalist web agents, capable of executing complex tasks on any website following language instructions. Unlike existing datasets that use simulated websites or cover a limited scope, Mind2Web includes over 2,000 tasks from 137 real-world websites across 31 domains, offering a broad range of user interaction patterns.

💵 Venture Capital updates

Gensyn AI Secures $43M for Decentralized Machine Learning Led by a16z

Gensyn AI, a UK-based company founded in 2020 by Ben Fielding and Harry Grieve, secured $43 million in Series A funding led by a16z crypto, with participation from CoinFund, Canonical Crypto, Protocol Labs, Eden Block, and other angel investors. The company operates as a decentralized machine learning compute protocol that connects machine learning capable compute hardware like GPUs and CPUs worldwide, making them accessible to engineers, researchers, and academics.

Contextual AI Emerges From Stealth to Build the Next Generation of Language Models, for the Enterprise

Contextual AI, founded by former Hugging Face and Meta AI researchers Douwe Kiela and Amanpreet Singh, has raised $20 million in seed funding to develop next-generation large language models (LLMs) for enterprise use. The company aims to address common issues with current LLMs, such as the tendency to generate false information, lack of transparency in output attributions, regulatory compliance risks, inflexibility in customization, and concerns over data privacy. The solution proposed by Contextual AI leverages a proprietary extension of the Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) method, providing a safer, more customizable, and more efficient language model that respects data privacy.

🫡 Meme of the day

⭐️ Midjourney prompt of the day

Before you go, you need to check out this Game of Thrones AI-Generated anime with a bit of 80s flair.