Microsoft is adding AI-powered text editing to Notepad, the stripped-down text editor originally introduced in 1983. The feature, called Rewrite, is rolling out in preview to Windows Insiders and will let you use AI to “rephrase sentences, adjust tone, and modify the length of your content,” according to the Windows Insider Blog.
If you’re a Windows Insider with early access to the feature, you can try it by highlighting the text you want to adjust in Notepad, right-clicking it, and choosing Rewrite. Notepad will then display a dialogue box where you can decide how they want to change their text — for example, if it needs to be longer or shorter. Rewrite will then offer three rewritten versions that you can replace your work with.
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Amazon mulls new multi-billion dollar investment in Anthropic
Amazon.com is in talks for its second multi-billion dollar investment in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, the Information reported on Thursday, citing a person familiar with the matter.
The cloud services giant announced an investment of $4 billion in the OpenAI rival in September last year, saying its customers would gain early access to Anthropic's technology.
Amazon has asked Anthropic, which uses Amazon's cloud services to train its AI model, to use a large number of servers powered by chips developed by the cloud computing major, the report said.
It added that the AI startup prefers to use Amazon servers powered by Nvidia-designed AI chips.
Anthropic is turning out to be a fantastic company and everyone (who has money) wants a piece of it.
Claude AI to process secret government data through new Palantir deal
Anthropic has announced a partnership with Palantir and Amazon Web Services to bring its Claude AI models to unspecified US intelligence and defense agencies. Claude, a family of AI language models similar to those that power ChatGPT, will work within Palantir's platform using AWS hosting to process and analyze data. But some critics have called out the deal as contradictory to Anthropic's widely-publicized "AI safety" aims.
The partnership makes Claude available within Palantir's Impact Level 6 environment (IL6), a defense-accredited system that handles data critical to national security up to the "secret" classification level. This move follows a broader trend of AI companies seeking defense contracts, with Meta offering its Llama models to defense partners and OpenAI pursuing closer ties with the Defense Department.
In a press release, the companies outlined three main tasks for Claude in defense and intelligence settings: performing operations on large volumes of complex data at high speeds, identifying patterns and trends within that data, and streamlining document review and preparation.
While the partnership announcement suggests broad potential for AI-powered intelligence analysis, it states that human officials will retain their decision-making authority in these operations. As a reference point for the technology's capabilities, Palantir reported that one (unnamed) American insurance company used 78 AI agents powered by their platform and Claude to reduce an underwriting process from two weeks to three hours.
They’re starting out with “Don’t do evil”, but we’ve seen instances where that does not last:
It's worth noting that Anthropic's terms of service do outline specific rules and limitations for government use. These terms permit activities like foreign intelligence analysis and identifying covert influence campaigns, while prohibiting uses such as disinformation, weapons development, censorship, and domestic surveillance. Government agencies that maintain regular communication with Anthropic about their use of Claude may receive broader permissions to use the AI models.
Even if Claude is never used to target a human or as part of a weapons system, other issues remain. While its Claude models are highly regarded in the AI community, they (like all LLMs) have the tendency to confabulate, potentially generating incorrect information in a way that is difficult to detect.
Mistral AI takes on OpenAI with new moderation API, tackling harmful content in 11 languages
French artificial intelligence startup Mistral AI launched a new content moderation API on Thursday, marking its latest move to compete with OpenAI and other AI leaders while addressing growing concerns about AI safety and content filtering.
The new moderation service, powered by a fine-tuned version of Mistral’s Ministral 8B model, is designed to detect potentially harmful content across nine different categories, including sexual content, hate speech, violence, dangerous activities, and personally identifiable information. The API offers both raw text and conversational content analysis capabilities.
“Safety plays a key role in making AI useful,” Mistral’s team said in announcing the release. “At Mistral AI, we believe that system level guardrails are critical to protecting downstream deployments.”
There’s no escaping content moderation on social media. If AI can do it without putting humans through this kind of sheer trauma, it’s a huge +1 for AI!
Waymo's Research on an End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving
At Waymo, we have been at the forefront of AI and ML in autonomous driving for over 15 years, and are continuously contributing to advancing research in the field. Today, we are sharing our latest research paper on an End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving (EMMA).
Powered by Gemini, a multimodal large language model developed by Google, EMMA employs a unified, end-to-end trained model to generate future trajectories for autonomous vehicles directly from sensor data. Trained and fine-tuned specifically for autonomous driving, EMMA leverages Gemini’s extensive world knowledge to better understand complex scenarios on the road.
Our research demonstrates how multimodal models, such as Gemini, can be applied to autonomous driving and explores pros and cons of the pure end-to-end approach. It highlights the benefit of incorporating multimodal world knowledge, even when the model is fine-tuned for autonomous driving tasks that require good spatial understanding and reasoning skills. Notably, EMMA demonstrates positive task transfer across several key autonomous driving tasks: training it jointly on planner trajectory prediction, object detection, and road graph understanding leads to improved performance compared to training individual models for each task. This suggests a promising avenue of future research, where even more core autonomous driving tasks could be combined in a similar, scaled-up setup.
“EMMA is research that demonstrates the power and relevance of multimodal models for autonomous driving,” said Waymo VP and Head of Research Drago Anguelov. “We are excited to continue exploring how multimodal methods and components can contribute towards building an even more generalizable and adaptable driving stack.”
Multimodal models are turning out to be a general form of AI.
