😺 An update on Bard

PLUS: 3 revolutionary AI startups no one's talking about

Welcome, humans.

Generative AI helped cure the worst feeling in the world—no, it’s not stubbing your toe or hitting your funny bone. It’s that feeling when an elusive word is on the tip of your tongue but just won’t come out. Words like “serendipity” or “epiphany”!

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

You can now double-check the answers that Bard outputs.
AI tech made up 14/200 of TIME’s Top Inventions for 2023.
Perplexity is eyeing a valuation of $500M.
The EU’s AI Act still hasn’t passed.

Bard Lets You Double-Check its Facts.

It’s no secret that we’ve been bear-ish on Google’s ChatGPT alternatives.

First came Bard, which we found aggressively mid … then SGE had us yawning … and finally we got Bard v2 connected to Google Workspace and nearly threw our laptops out the window.

Nevertheless...

A lot of people are still using Bard — 45% of readers at The Information use it, more than those using Claude, Github Copilot, or Midjourney.

One reason is that Bard’s knowledge is up-to-date. ChatGPT-3.5’s knowledge stops in January 2022, and ChatGPT-4’s web browsing plugin is slow and wordy.

This makes Bard a solid option for:

Up-to-the-minute news updates (e.g., "What's the latest on Ukraine?").
Current market insights (e.g., "Show me the latest U.S. market share stats for electric vehicles in 2023").

Most importantly, Bard can now fact-check its answers via Google Search. Green lines match what Google says while orange lines are at odds with what Google says.

Which got us thinking…

If Bard knows which parts of its output are questionable, can’t it just go back and regenerate the output to only include verified info? hire us @Goog.

Either way, this might actually be a reason for people to use Bard if they’re nervous about ChatGPT making sh*t up. That is, assuming Google is a know-it-all…

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Some Of AI’s Top Startups Are Ones You’ve Never Heard Of.

TIME dropped its “Best Inventions Of 2023” list yesterday, which featured 3D-printed sneakers and robots that make Sweetgreen salads (a personal fav).

Among the list are 14 AI inventions. We’ve got your usual suspects: GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Stable Audio, Runway Gen-2, and Adobe Generative Fill.

But there were a bunch of cool ones that caught our eye:

Alitheron: Snap a pic of a physical object to verify its authenticity.
TrailGuard AI: monitors endangered species and spots poachers.
AlertCalifornia: uses AI to detect wildfires before they spread.

Why it matters: It’s easy to get caught up in our ChatGPT chitchat (guilty), but AI has real-world potential far beyond chat and image generation — we covered some of these possibilities here!

Around the Horn.

lol, same

YouTube Music is letting users create their own playlist cover art with AI.
Google Photos will let you customize video highlights from your camera roll.
The EU’s AI Act still hasn’t passed as lawmakers are stuck in legislative limbo.
Midjourney is launching a new website soon; Here’s a sneak peek!

Wednesday Wirings.

Perplexity, an AI search engine, is raising at a $500M valuation.
Zhipu, a Chinese OpenAI rival, raised $340M this year.
Luzia, a chatbot for WhatsApp & Telegram, raised $10M.
Bluebirds, which discovers leads for outbound sales teams, raised $5M.
Brilliant Labs, a builder of AI-powered AR glasses, raised $3M.

We curated the top 27 tools you need for work in our “Top Tools For Business”!

1s and 0s.

Coming in hot with another new section! You know how the best software keeps getting updates? Same philosophy here — we're always in beta, forever fine-tuning.

$3.2B: the amount Microsoft is pumping into expanding its cloud/AI infrastructure in Australia.
$59.65B: Google’s advertising revenue in Q3, up 9.5% YoY despite ChatGPT.
$249M: the contract Scale AI snagged to provide defense AI tech to the DoD.
90%: percentage of The Information’s readers that use AI, with the most popular tools being ChatGPT, Bard, and DALL-E.