Howdy! It’s Barsee again.

Happy Thursday, AI family, and welcome back to AI Valley 🐶

In today’s edition:

• 🤖 Meta’s new secret AI crawler

• ✨ Microsoft unveils new AI models

• ⚔️ Ideogram 2.0 has arrived to challenge Flux and Midjourney

• 🔍️ Plus trending AI tools and resources

Ready, set, go…

PARTNER 💫

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MAIN SCOOP

Meta’s new secret AI crawler 🤖 🔍

Meta has quietly introduced a new web crawler called the Meta External Agent, which is being used to gather AI training data by scraping the internet.

How was It discovered?

• Tracking firms like Dark Visitors, which monitor web scraping and bot activity, first identified the new crawler.

• The Internet Archive also found a version history on Meta's developer website, showing that the company updated the site to disclose the crawler’s existence in late July, without making a public announcement.

How are websites responding?

While about 25% of the world's most popular websites block OpenAI's GPTBot, only 2% currently block Meta's new bot, according to data from Dark Visitors.

Microsoft unveils new AI models 🤖✨

Microsoft released the family of Phi-3.5 models on Tuesday, as the successor of the Phi-3 models introduced in April.

Here are the models:

• Phi-3.5 Mini: Outperforms Llama 3.1 8B in multilingual tasks.

• Phi-3.5 MoE: Excels over Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash in reasoning capabilities.

• Phi-3.5 Vision: Stands toe-to-toe with GPT-4o in handling multi-frame visual tasks.

What makes them unique?

• Each model features an impressive 128,000 token context length, making them adept at managing lengthy documents and intricate conversations.

• The model has 4.2 billion parameters and it includes an image encoder that allows it to process information within an image.

Ideogram 2.0 has arrived to challenge Flux and Midjourney 🖼️ ⚔️

Ideogram, known for its ability to generate AI images from longer texts, has just released its advanced text-to-image model v2.0 for free to all users.

What's new?

• Color Palette Selection: You can now choose your color palette, allowing for more control over the final image.

• Enhanced Text Rendering: The updated model improves text accuracy, making it perfect for greeting cards, t-shirt designs, posters, and illustrations with longer text.

• Search Functionality: All public Ideogram images are now searchable, allowing you to browse over 1 billion images for inspiration

• Improved Image Coherence: You can expect more anatomically accurate human figures, aligned eyes, and better-rendered hands.

Here are some examples of its improved capabilities in action.

USEFUL AI LINKS

Trending Tools

• Swiperino > Just tell this tool a little about yourself, hit start and it will message you when it gets a date for you. *

• Lambda > Hundreds of 8x NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU instances are now available at just $2.99/GPU/hr. *

• Kerlig > Use AI in Slack, Figma, Gmail, Outlook, LinkedIn, Code, and more on macOS.

• Heatseeker > Uses simulated experiments to test product concepts and marketing messages before you launch.

• Aicado > Create your own custom chatbot with private chat history and embed it on any site.

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AI TRAINING

How to convert text into custom landing pages with Figma Plugin

Here's the step-by-step process:

1. Sign up or log in to Figma.com

2. Open up a design file and access the Figma plug-ins section.

3. Search for Musho and select it.

4. Choose your desired output format (landing page, social media, or experimental mode), enter a prompt, and run the plug-in.

5. Musho will generate a custom landing page for you.

6. You can further customize the content and share the webpage with others.

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THE LATEST IN

Tech

• WhatsApp is working on implementing support for usernames as an alternative to sharing phone numbers.

• Mcdonald's Instagram account posts a crypto rug pull after being hacked. The hacker made $700k already.

• Chick-Fil-A is moving into the entertainment space with plans to launch a slate of TV shows for its own streaming platform.

AI

• Midjourney now allows all users to access their website and generate 25 images for free.

• Meta’s Self-Taught Evaluator enables LLMs to create their own training data.

• Anthropic’s Claude surpasses $1M in mobile app revenue.

• Dropbox acquires Reclaim AI, a platform that offers smart scheduling solutions.

• OpenAI launches fine-tuning for GPT-4o, allowing developers to customize a version of the model with their datasets.

DAILY DOSE OF CONTENTS

1/ Anthropic just released two new resources for learning prompt engineering.

2/ The man behind the viral AI startup.

3/ An 8-year-old builds an app in 45 minutes with the assistance of AI.

4/ How Hackers Use AI Cheats

THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY

Thanks for reading. Until next time!

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

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💚 Written and edited by Barsee, Jet, and Akash Thapa.