Harvard's million-book AI library

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Feeling good about your reading list this year? Consider this: Some AI models have breezed through hundreds of thousands of books. Now, Harvard is launching an initiative to make nearly a million public-domain titles available to startups building LLMs.

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Today’s Insights

• Today in AI: AR glasses, Haiku for all, ‘Santa Mode’ unlocked, and Microsoft’s small model

• Tutorial: How to stream in real-time using Gemini 2.0

• Harvard unveils million-book dataset for LLMs

• Everything else you should know today

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

TECH STOCKS & FUNDING

*Stock data as of market close.

📈 Markets: The latest inflation report pulled the stock market into a downturn on Thursday, primarily due to tech sector weakness. Major tech companies – including Nvidia, Adobe, Tesla, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon – faced significant declines. Apple saw modest gains following news that it’s designing its own chips to power the iPhone’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities.

💰️ Funding: Swiss startup Anybotics finished out a $110M Series B funding round to build quadruped robots that can autonomously monitor hazardous equipment. And Evinced, which uses AI to make software more accessible, raised $55M in a Series C led by Insight Partners.

TODAY IN AI

1. Alphabet teases new AR headsets and glasses: As the dust settles on Wednesday’s Gemini 2 reveal, Alphabet is already back with something else. A decade after its last AR attempt, the search giant announced it’s teaming up with Samsung and other manufacturers to bring Project Astra — the AI assistant that can understand what’s going on in your surroundings — to new AR/XR headsets and smart glasses starting next year.

2. Anthropic opens up access to its smallest, fastest model: Claude 3.5 Haiku is now available to anyone, not just developers, on both phones and desktops. It’s especially good at coding, labeling data, and interpreting graphs. Some AI power users say they’ve already moved on to the shiny new Gemini 2.0 Flash. That said, rumor has it that Haiku’s bigger sibling, Opus 3.5, could be coming any day.

3. OpenAI’s jolly surprise: The latest chatbot to join OpenAI’s roster: Saint Nicholas. Users can chat with Santa about anything from his favorite reindeer to his best holiday-themed joke — mixed, of course, with the occasional “ho ho ho!” More importantly, you can now share your screen or a live video with Advance Voice mode, letting it see everything going on around you (it can even tell you apart from your friends). The feature should be available for most Plus and Pro subscribers within the next few days.

4. Microsoft unveils state-of-the-art small model: The company says its new SLM (small language model) Phi-4 can do a lot with a little, especially when it comes to math and problem-solving. While SLMs might not attract all the headlines, businesses often find them much more practical for day-to-day operations. That’s because they’re highly efficient and can be operated locally on phones and computers. For now, the 14B model will be available to researchers through Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry.

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THE AI ACADEMY

How to get feedback on your work in real-time using Gemini

• Go to Google AI Studio and log in with your account.

• Choose Gemini 2.0 as your model and click on Stream Realtime on the left tab.

• Now you can choose to have an audio conversation with AI, share your screen to show Gemini what you are working on, or share your live video to get real-time feedback.

• For this example, select Share your Screen and click on Share Entire Screen.

• Now open any software that you want to learn and ask Gemini to help you learn the software. You can open your code editor and ask it to assist you write code or fix any bugs.

• If the steps are unclear, feel free to ask Gemini for clarification. You can also request it to guide you through each step at your own pace.

FROM THE FRONTIER

Harvard drops million-book AI dataset

The average person will read something like 700 books in a lifetime. But to AI, that’s like a quick glance at the morning paper. Although LLMs work on an entirely different scale, good training material is hard to come by. It’s often tied up with copyright issues — or just a mess of disorganized data.

So, with help from OpenAI and Microsoft, Harvard came up with a solution: A new public dataset with nearly a million titles — ranging from Shakespeare to Dickens to Dante — basically, turning a chaotic warehouse full of books into a well-organized library. To put it into perspective, Wired reports that’s about five times the printed content used to train Meta’s Llama models.

The initiative could “even the playing field,” giving more startups and research groups the chance to build their own models. Next, Harvard plans to move on to other public-domain content, like news articles collected by the Boston Public Library.

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

🧠 Meta Madness: Meta just released a collection of nine new open source AI research artifacts across their work in developing agents, robustness & safety, and new architectures. Those include an AI model for controlling the movements of a human-like digital agent (Meta Motivo) and a tool that adds watermarks to AI-generated videos (Meta Video Seal).

🧶 World Weaver: Midjourney launched a new world-building platform called Patchwork that lets you collaborate with 100 others on an “infinite canvas” filled with AI-generated characters, stories, and concepts.

🤠 Ride Em’ Cowbot: SwagBot, a robot used to autonomously herd cows, can now determine the health of the soil and livestock with the help of AI. The cows don’t seem to mind: “Once the cattle are used to the robot, they will follow [it] around,” one developer said.

🧑‍🍳 Yes, Chef: MasterClass is rolling out new chatbots based on its famed instructors, letting you do things like ask AI Gordon Ramsey for cooking help. Bill Nye, Mark Cuban, and LeVar Burton are coming soon, too.

💰 War Chest: This week, Elon Musk became the first person with a net worth of more than $400B, making him more valuable than Netflix, Home Depot, and Costco — and twice as rich as Jeff Bezos.

PRODUCTIVITY

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PROMPT OF THE DAY

Friday Funday - Holiday Movie Marathon

Prompt: Pretend you are MovieGPT, an AI model that gives people good movie recommendations. I need you to suggest a family-friendly movie marathon for the [insert type of holiday] holidays. I'll give you a list of my favorite movies. Use this to refine your recommendations. These are my favorite movies to start. [insert list of favorite family-friendly movies]

_{Source: Reddit user u/chromosmetaker}

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