Howdy! It’s Barsee again.

Happy Tuesday, AI family, and welcome back to AI Valley.

In today’s edition:

• ⏳ Google's NotebookLM 's rival built in mere hours

• 🚘️ Alibaba and Nvidia unite to create advanced autonomous cars

• 🤖 Google unveils new Gemini 1.5 models

• 🤖 Plus trending AI tools, guides, and resources

Ready, set, go…

TOGETHER WITH FLOW

Flow is a Mac dictation app that writes 3x faster than typing, perfect for AI prompts, with auto-edits and 100+ languages.

Try Wispr Flow today and experience smarter, faster communication.

GOOGLE

⏳ Google's NotebookLM 's rival built in mere hours

Gabriel Chua, a data scientist at Singapore’s GovTech, just developed "Open NotebookLM," an open-source alternative to Google’s NotebookLM, in just one afternoon using publicly available AI models.

How does it function?

• The tool transforms PDFs into personalized podcasts using Meta’s Llama 3.1 405B language model, hosted on Fireworks AI, along with MeloTTS for voice synthesis.

• It has a simple interface, built with Gradio, and is hosted on Hugging Face Spaces, making it easy for non-technical users to access.

How good is it comparatively?

• Open NotebookLM can handle PDFs up to 100K characters, while Google’s NotebookLM supports up to 500K.

• Unlike Google's NotebookLM, it processes only text, excluding images and tables.

• Google’s NotebookLM also offers advanced features like fact-checking and study guide generation, supported by its vast resources and proprietary AI models—capabilities that Open NotebookLM currently lacks.

Why does it matter?

Despite its limitations, the speed at which Open NotebookLM was developed and released is really impressive. It highlights the growing capabilities of open-source AI tools, allowing small developers to replicate complex AI applications in just hours.

AUTONOMOUS CARS

🚘️ Alibaba and Nvidia unite to create advanced autonomous cars

Alibaba and Nvidia are collaborating on an AI initiative to advance autonomous driving technology for Chinese automakers. Alibaba Cloud is integrating its proprietary Qwen portfolio of LLMs into Nvidia's Drive AGX Orin platform, which major Chinese electric vehicle makers use.

With Qwen’s advanced capabilities in handling complex inquiries and processing visual intelligence, the new autonomous driving solution will also offer intelligent recommendations, ranging from information about nearby landmarks to proactively suggesting car headlights be turned on during certain conditions.

Why does it matter?

For the first time, two AI powerhouses are collaborating on autonomous driving, providing a massive boost to the car industry's advancement. Nvidia has also decided to use Alibaba’s Qwen LLMs, which is a win-win situation for the open-source community. 

GOOGLE

🤖 Google unveils new Gemini 1.5 models

Google recently introduced two new Gemini 1.5 models, including the 1.5 pro-002 and 1.5 flash-002, with improved performance, faster outputs, and reduced pricing.

What’s special about the Pro model?

• The Gemini-1.5-Pro-002 is designed to handle large, complex datasets and supports up to 2 million tokens for long-context processing, whether working with large documents, hours-long videos, or even multimodal tasks.

• Google also cut the Pro model's input token price by 64% and output token price by 52%, making it much more affordable for developers.

How do they perform?

The new models show improvements across multiple benchmarks, with a 20% gain in math-related tasks and up to 7% in Python code generation and visual understanding.

QUICK HITS

1. OpenAI and Anthropic revenue breakdown. (link)

2. SoftBank plans to invest $500 million in OpenAI's latest funding round. (link)

3. PearlAI, a YC-backed startup, was criticized for forking another AI code editor. (link)

4. Gemini Live is now available for all users, no subscription is needed. (link)

5. Japanese bicycle parts maker Shimano plans to launch an AI-assisted gearshifting system for cyclists next year. (link)

6. A software architect found a way to bypass OpenAI's guidelines and tricked the Advanced Voice Mode chatbot into singing with him in a duet of The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby." (link)

7. A new CAPTCHA scam is tricking people into installing malware. (link)

8. Epic Games sues Google and Samsung over alleged app store collusion. (link)

USEFUL AI LINKS

Trending Tools

• Flow > A Mac dictation app that writes 3x faster than typing, perfect for AI prompts, with auto-edits and 100+ languages. (link) *

• UPDF > Lets you edit, manage, chat about, and even convert PDFs into mind maps. (link)

• PodSnap > Get summaries of your favorite podcasts directly to your inbox as they go live. (link)

• Buildpad > Gives a clear process for building your product, using AI and special tools to offer actionable next steps. (link)

• Video SDK 3.0 > Build and integrate real-time multimodal AI characters. (link)

Cool Findings / Resources

• No, LLMs still can’t reason like humans. This simple test reveals why. (link)

• 21 startups transforming education with AI. (link)

DAILY DOSE OF CONTENTS

1/ AI future with no phones, mind-controlled ovens, and virtual $1 TVs predicts Meta’s top VR boss, ‘Boz’.

2/ Incredible Drone Display is World’s B’s Biggest Ever—Guinness World Records.

THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY

That’s all for today’s issue, folks.

💡 Help me get better and suggest new ideas at [email protected] or @heyBarsee

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