AI Austria monthly: July'24 Update
New GenAI community at AI Austria, AI Tinkerers coming to Vienna, Interview with Ö1, xLSTM explained and more...
How to rekindle European entrepreneurship, where to showcase your AI inventions to like-minded tinkerers? Learn more in the July edition of the Austrian AI newsletter.
🚀 Latest Developments
📻 Ö1 Interview: The AI Act won’t save the European economy
In a radio feature, our chair Clemens Wasner expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of the European AI Act as a growth engine. Wasner questioned the Act’s ability to elevate European AI companies to a leadership role in innovation, despite positive assertions from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
The prime time for Europe to advance significantly in AI was a decade ago, and the current legislative measures, along with new funding mechanisms slated for 2024, are unlikely to bring about the major advancements some expect.
Clemens highlighted the act’s potentially stifling effect on startups, which could deter entrepreneurs from pursuing innovative ventures due to regulatory complexities. He suggested that Europe should return to its strength in setting standards that enable new products and companies to emerge, advocating for a focus on open-source models and standards to foster innovation more effectively than regulations and red tape. This approach, could revive Europe’s once renowned capacity for innovation in the technological domain. » link to the interview
🧠 New Community: GenAI @ AI Austria
We are happy to launch a new community on large language models and GenAI, helmed by Ruben Hetfleisch and Stefan Engl. Join the first event on September 3, 2024, from 18:00 to 20:30 at the Infineon Hub in Vienna. Stay tuned for more updates after summer, in the meantime » checkout the page and reach out if you would like to join!
🤖 AI Tinkerers is Coming to Vienna! 🇦🇹
AI Tinkerers, the global meetup for hands-on builders of LLM-enabled applications active in 20+ cities, is bringing its magic to Vienna.
After delighting AI experts from San Francisco to Berlin, Vienna will host an evening of epic project deep-dives, mingling, and exchanging on state-of-the-art implementations of AI applications. All in a very real format: Only code and demos, no slides. You can expect approximately 12 demos covering a variety of industries and use cases, followed by pizza, drinks and meeting other AI experts.
The event will take place on Wednesday, 24th of July, at 18:00 in the Startup House Austria. It takes place during the ICML conference week, so expect to meet also some top notch international talent. » register here if you’re interested in doing a 7 min demo + code walk-through of your AI project or join as a participant by applying here
🚀 Generative AI Insights with AI Austria in Mödling
AI Austria presented paths to possible use cases of GenAI for companies at an event hosted by Wirtschaftskammer NÖ and TIP on June 25 in Mödling. Matthias Grabner's session highlighted the transformative potential of generative AI, offering detailed insights into its benefits and challenges. Attendees explored practical applications and integration strategies, gaining knowledge to enhance productivity and innovation in their businesses. » Read more here
🎉 We reached 8️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ followers! 🎉
We recently crossed the 8000 follower mark on our LinkedIn page. Thank you for being part of our mission. Your support helps us advance AI in Austria, highlight the Austrian AI ecosystem, connect domain knowledge, promote ethical AI practices, and build a collaborative AI community in Austria - and we've been doing that since 2018.
🔬 xLSTM explained in Detail
Sepp Hochreiter’s startup NX AI created waves within European tech landscape. Check-out this video to get an understanding of the underlying technology xLSTM
✨ Generative AI News ✨
At WWDC 2024, Apple will reportedly integrate major AI features into its iPhone, iPad, and Mac operating systems. These features, branded as “Apple Intelligence,” focus on practical applications for daily use. Some expected features include improved photo editing, greater Siri control over apps, custom emoji generation, quick recaps of notes and messages, and automatic transcription of voice memos. Additionally, iOS 18 will introduce customizable icons and interface updates.
Microsoft’s upcoming “Recall” feature for AI PCs will be opt-in rather than default. This feature captures screen snapshots to allow users to search past computer activity while addressing privacy concerns.
The tech industry opposes California’s SB 1047 bill, which would require AI companies to report safety tests and add a kill switch for advanced models. The bill passed the Senate and awaits a General Assembly vote in August.
NewsBreak, a news aggregator app, published at least 40 false stories, many of which were AI-generated. The app rewrites licensed content from news outlets using AI-powered web scraping.
Meta (formerly Facebook) will test an AI assistant for businesses on WhatsApp. The AI will handle tasks like selling products through chat, answering questions, and creating targeted ads.
🌏 Asia spotlight
A Saudi Arabian fund, Prosperity7, which is part of Aramco's venture capital arm, has become the first foreign investor in China's leading generative AI start-up, Zhipu AI. The investment, part of a $400 million funding round, values Zhipu AI at around $3 billion. Other leading Chinese AI start-ups, such as Moonshot AI, MiniMax, and 01·ai, have so far relied on domestic funding due to US restrictions.
Chinese tech firm Kuaishou introduced KLING, a new text-to-video AI model capable of generating high-quality videos up to 2 minutes long with outputs that appear to rival OpenAI’s still-unreleased Sora.
Alibaba’s open-source Qwen 2-72B model moved into the top spot on Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard, surpassing rivals Mixtral and Llama-3 across a range of benchmarks.
A Chinese startup called Ex-Robots is developing ultra-realistic humanoid robots that can closely mimic human facial expressions and emotions.
A Stanford University AI team apologised after it was revealed its Llama 3-V architecture was nearly identical to Chinese lab ModelBest’s open-source MiniCPM-Llama3-V 2.5 model.
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has launched DeepSeek Coder V2, an open-source mixture of experts (MoE) code language model that surpasses state-of-the-art closed-source models such as GPT-4 Turbo, Claude 3 Opus, and Gemini 1.5 Pro.
📆 Upcoming Events
Jul 04 Care Beyond Skin Hackathon für Teenager
Jul 04 Business Angel Summit 2024
Jul 08 DATA story BOOTCAMP
Jul 21 ICML 2024
Jul 31 WORKSHOP "KI mocht da ZETTELWIRTSCHAFT a END!"
Jul 31 SALZBURG! AI-ZAPFT IS! STAMMTISCH
👉 For more information on upcoming events head over to our community calendar.
🧑💻 Featured Jobs
Once a month we feature selected openings from our job board in this section.
Ads Quality Rater - German (Austria) at Welocalize
Senior Researcher Data Engineering at scch Software Competence Center Hagenberg
Computer Vision Specialist (w/m/d) Vienna Salzburg anywhere at play TRACKS
Technical Co-Founder: Senior Machine Learning/Computer Vision Specialist at Play tracks
CTO/Technical Co-Founder at SciPub+
👉 Check out further listings at our Job Board