📿 AI 'Friend' pendant goes viral

⚔️ Google slashes Gemini 1.5 Flash prices, igniting LLM price war

• On August 12, 2024, Google will slash the prices of its Gemini 1.5 Flash model by 80%, making it significantly more affordable than OpenAI's GPT-4o mini.

• The new costs will be $0.075 per million input tokens and $0.3 per million output tokens, nearly cutting in half the prices offered by OpenAI's competing model.

• The aggressive price cut is expected to pose challenges for smaller AI startups, while Google also expands Gemini 1.5 Flash's capabilities to over 100 languages and offers general availability of provisioned throughput to ensure scalability and cost predictability.

💥 Has the AI bubble burst?

• Wall Street wonders if artificial intelligence will ever make money

• Despite massive investments in AI, there's growing doubt about when these will translate into significant profits. Investors are anxious for clear returns on these expenditures​

• Companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta continue to pour money into AI, hoping for future gains, even though immediate returns are uncertain

🤖 Former Tesla AI chief unveils first "AI-native" school

• Andrej Karpathy, the former AI head at Tesla and researcher at OpenAI, launched Eureka Labs, a startup focused on using AI assistants in education.

• Eureka Labs plans to develop AI teaching assistants to support human educators, aiming to enable "anyone to learn anything," according to Karpathy's announcements on social media.minimizing hallucinations and improving reasoning capabilities.

• The startup's initial product, an undergraduate-level AI course called LLM101n, will teach students to build their own AI, with details available on a GitHub repository suggesting a focus on creating AI storytellers.

🚨 Intel to lay off 15,000 employees and stop ‘non-essential work’

• Intel plans to lay off over 15,000 employees, representing more than 15 percent of its workforce, as part of a $10 billion cost savings plan for 2025.

• The company aims to drastically cut research, development, and marketing spending by billions each year through 2026 and reduce capital expenditures by more than 20 percent this year.

• Intel reported a $1.6 billion loss for Q2 2024 and plans to eliminate non-essential work and overlapping responsibilities to align with a new operating model.

📿 AI 'Friend' pendant goes viral

• The "Friend" AI necklace, created by Avi Schiffmann, is designed to provide personal companionship through support and encouragement, connecting to an iPhone via Bluetooth.

• Unlike other AI wearables that failed, Friend listens to interactions around the wearer and sends supportive messages, storing all data locally on the device.

• Schiffmann described the device as an expression of loneliness and emphasized its role as a supportive and validating companion, useful for brainstorming and discussing relationships.