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  • 🤖 Meta and Spotify Lobby EU on AI Regulations

🤖 Meta and Spotify Lobby EU on AI Regulations

Plus: Midjourney website for all and Microsoft's new AI models

August 29, 2024

Hello AI Enthusiast,

This week, Meta and Spotify are pushing back against EU AI regulations, while Midjourney made AI image generation more accessible. Meanwhile, Microsoft is refining its approach with specialized open-source AI models. Let's unpack what's happening.

Before diving into the main news, note that the waitlist for our 8th GenAI Project Bootcamp closes on August 31st. This hands-on course, starting September 16th, teaches you to use AI by designing and prototyping a digital product. Joining the waitlist offers a chance for discounted access. If you're interested in automating your processes with AI, definitely consider signing up.

The Big Picture 🔊

Meta and Spotify Urge EU to Ease AI Regulations

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek are advocating for relaxed AI regulations in the EU to ease open-source AI development. They argue that current restrictions slow down innovation and AI adoption in Europe, affecting both user experiences and the broader creative ecosystem.

Gioele Mottarlini
Gioele MottarliniCOO and Image Addict

Meta and Spotify are trying to pressure regulators by claiming that companies and individuals will miss out on advancements and lose their competitive edge. By doing so, they hope to spark consumer pressure on the EU to ease regulations. These big tech companies now have significant influence and have learned how to navigate politics.

Although EU regulations are intended to be beneficial for the users, their lack of clarity creates many grey areas, making it harder for big tech to avoid sanctions.

Midjourney launches website with free images

Midjourney has opened its website to all users, offering 25 free image generations to new users. This move comes as the company faces increasing competition and legal challenges, while aiming to expand its user base beyond its previous Discord-centric platform.

Gianluca Belloni
Gianluca BelloniCMO and Marketing Nomad

In recent months, we’ve seen many new image generation models, and Midjourney likely felt the pressure. In response, it decided to make its product widely available, moving beyond a platform tailored for niche creative professionals.

Wide adoption seems to be the new mantra.

Midjourney's new website is here. Your thoughts?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Microsoft releases three new open-source models

Microsoft has released three new models in its Phi-3.5 series, including a lightweight instruction model, a multimodal vision model, and a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model. These models deliver near state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks and are available under an open-source MIT license.

Andrea Mattiello
Andrea MattielloCM and Outdoor Fanatic

Microsoft’s models focus on more niche tasks to make them more reliable and useful for specific cases, which we find to be a smart move.

However, what we don’t appreciate are the usual comparison tables that, frankly, are becoming increasingly pointless as each company highlights only what they want to show.

Bits and Bobs 🗞️

  • Perplexity AI will start running ads in the fourth quarter as its app gains popularity with over 2 million downloads.

  • Anthropic has made Claude’s system prompts publicly accessible and will publish any changes to them in the changelog.

  • Luma AI has launched Dream Machine 1.5, featuring higher-quality text-to-video, smarter prompt understanding, and faster video generation.

  • OpenAI is partnering with Condé Nast to integrate content from top brands like Vogue and The New Yorker into ChatGPT and SearchGPT.

  • Authors have filed a class-action lawsuit in California against Anthropic, accusing it of using their copyrighted books to train Claude.

  • Google has enhanced its Gemini writing tools in Gmail, allowing Google One AI Premium and Workspace users to polish their drafts.

  • Artifacts are now available to all Claude users on Free, Pro, and Team plans.

From Our Channels 🤳

a16z released their latest Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps list, ranking the top 50 AI-first web products and top 50 mobile apps based on user engagement. Gianluca has highlighted on LinkedIn his key takeaways, which reveal a lot about the current situation and how the landscape is evolving.

LOLgorithms 😂

Remember last week when we talked about Grok 2 and all the crazy images that have been generated using it? Well, this guy has his opinion on the timing of the release.

That's a wrap on our newsletter! Here’s a quick recap before you go:

Catch you next week! 👋