😺 MAI-1 is coming...

Welcome, humans.

Randy Travis, a country singer who lost his voice to a 2013 stroke, debuted a new song titled “Where That Came From” using an AI trained on 42 of his recordings. (Listen on Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube).

Is someone chopping onions? Guess not. Looks like we’re the ones tearing up :)

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

• Microsoft is training a new AI model called MAI-1.
• OpenAI is partnering with Stack Overflow to give ChatGPT users coding answers.
• GitHub Copilot is the preferred coding tool for 55% of programmers.
• X is using Grok to summarize trending news topics on its platform.

On today’s podcast: OpenAI’s New Competitor?, MAI-1 and Synthetic Data, Mustafa Suleyman (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube).

Microsoft is developing a model to rival the GPT-4s out there.

Think of Microsoft as OpenAI’s sugar daddy:

1. Microsoft gives OpenAI all the money in the world (think $10B+).
2. OpenAI creates sexy tech (like GPT-4 & Sora).
3. Microsoft scores early access to that sexy tech for its users.

Yet, over the last six months, Microsoft has been scaling back its reliance on OpenAI. Translation: it’s been flexing its own abdominal muscles.

• In January, Microsoft put together a new AI squad aimed at crafting conversational AI that’s less of a drain on resources (think $$$) than OpenAI’s offerings.
• In April, Microsoft rolled out a leaner model, “Phi-3,” tailored for simple tasks that’s more budget-friendly than robust models like GPT-4.
• Now, Microsoft is training a new, in-house model known as “MAI-1” to compete with top-tier models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

Discover why this is big news, plus hear essential MAI-1 context on today’s episode of The Neuron podcast (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube).

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Speaking of sugar daddies, Stack Overflow was once the go-to Q&A site for programmers—until ChatGPT emerged onto the scene.

• BCE (before ChatGPT era): programmer has coding problem → Google question → pray for the right answer on Stack Overflow.
• CE (ChatGPT era): ChatGPT outright solves coding problems for you.

And this is bad-news-bears for Stack Overflow. Over the last 18 months, its visitor numbers have nosedived, leading to a 28% staff cutback last October.

But, as Kevin Durant showed us with his move to the Warriors: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em!

Yesterday, Stack Overflow announced a new API partnership with OpenAI that’ll integrate Stack Overflow's 25 years of trusted coding solutions right into ChatGPT.

Why it matters: This means that devs using ChatGPT can access more precise answers to technical questions, and devs using Stack Overflow can forget the hunt through countless outdated threads.

Looks like a win-win...on paper, at least.

We don’t know if the dough that OpenAI is wiring Stack Overflow even comes close to making up for the significant traffic they've diverted from the platform.

P.S. Last July, Stack Overflow announced a coding search engine called OverflowAI that delivers instant and cited answers from its archive of 58M+ responses, no digging required.

Around the Horn.

• GitHub Copilot (owned by Microsoft) is the AI coding tool of choice for 55% of developers.
• X announced a new perk for Premium users: “Stories,” a feature that summarizes trending news using Grok.
• r/singularity: What do you hope to be able to do with GPT-5 that you can’t do with GPT-4?
• OpenAI changed ChatGPT’s domain from chat.openai.com to chatgpt.com.

Treats To Try.

1. *Galileo Protect stops AI hallucinations, prompt attacks, and security threats in real time before they harm users. See Galileo Protect live in action at this webinar!
2. Jim Fan’s team at Nvidia introduced an AI agent that can automate training robots (see it in action here).
3. Touch is an AI tool that delivers curated lists of leads for your sales team.
4. Ideogram, an AI image generator that renders written text, launched a Pro Tier that supports 3,000 prompts per month.
5. Eraser lets you generate architecture or database designs just by describing them or pasting in code.

*This is sponsored content. Advertise in The Neuron here.

Tuesday Ticker.

Here are the results from last week’s poll:

• J.N. chose Yes: “Yes, as long as it was made clear this was the case, showed its sources AND it gave me additional jumping off points to read further (think this is why I'm liking the Perplexity experience so far)”
• T. chose It Depends: “As with all AI issues, everything is heavily weighted on the source material. We have seen different news outlets portray the same story with different slants, so AI news summarization would have the same issue, only possibly exacerbating it.”
• A.S. chose No: “News requires absolute accuracy to be trusted, and AI summarization is still doing far too much hallucinating.”

A Cat's Commentary.