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Happy Thursday! Lost in translation or curious about your surroundings? Just ask your glasses—they’ve got answers. Welcome to the future of smart eyewear!

🧑‍💻 WEEKLY PROMPT

🍕 QUICK BITES

Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses just received a groundbreaking upgrade with ‘Live AI’, enabling wearers to engage in continuous conversations with Meta AI—no wakeword ‘Hey Meta’ required. The glasses can analyze what’s happening in real-time video through their front-facing camera, answering questions about surroundings instantly. Adding another layer of convenience, live translation converts speech between English, French, Spanish, or Italian, with audio playback and a transcript on your phone. With these features, Meta sets a new standard in wearable tech, leaping ahead in the smart glasses competition (see Meta’s announcement).

Google Labs introduces Whisk, a revolutionary image generator that blends elements from three sources—images of a subject, scene, and style—into one captivating creation. Powered by Imagen 3, this experimental tool promises a new dimension of photo personalization. Ready to mix your selfie with sci-fi landscapes and anime aesthetics? U.S. users can try it now at labs.google/whisk! (see Google’s announcement)

Honda and Nissan are exploring a potential merger, aiming to unite forces to better compete with electric vehicle (EV) giants like Tesla and BYD. The plan, according to Reuters: form a new holding company to leverage their combined strengths. While Honda's EV ambitions are picking up steam, Nissan is struggling, with earnings plummeting over 90% this year. Could this partnership reshape the future of Japanese automakers in the EV race? (read more)

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Databricks Delays Going Public Over AI Bubble Worries: AI and data-focused startup Databricks, led by CEO Ali Ghodsi, announced $10 billion in funding with $19 billion in investor interest at the Axios AI Summit. Despite the success, Ghodsi confirmed that the IPO will be delayed until at least 2025 due to economic instability and concerns over an AI bubble (watch Summit for more insights).

Salesforce’s AI Hiring Blitz: Salesforce plans to hire 2,000 sales reps to promote its next-gen AI tools launching in February, CNBC reports. With 9,000 referrals already, CEO Marc Benioff says he’s “never been more excited” about generative AI’s potential in enterprise (read more).

No Sora API Yet, But Demand Soars: OpenAI’s video-generation model, Sora, impressed with its cinematic outputs, but don’t expect a developer API anytime soon (see thread). Overwhelming demand led OpenAI to halt and later cautiously resume sign-ups, with CEO Sam Altman acknowledging they “significantly underestimated demand” (see Altman’s post).

A Budget GPU Star is Born: Intel’s $250 Arc B580 “Battlemage” GPU, built for advanced AI and machine learning tasks, is making waves with its 12GB of VRAM and performance benchmarks that surpass Nvidia’s RTX 4060 and AMD’s RX 7600. Touted as the budget GPU of the decade, its glowing reviews and high demand have led to weekly restocks (read more).

Musk’s Grok Gets a Speed Boost: Elon Musk’s xAI has given its Grok 2 chatbot a major upgrade! Now three times faster, with improved accuracy, instruction-following, and multilingual capabilities, it’s rolling out to users on X. Plus, the new “Grok button” promises to deepen your dive into trending topics (see xAI’s announcement).

Telegram Leverages AI to Tackle Harmful Content: In a sweeping crackdown enhanced by advanced AI moderation tools, Telegram removed an astonishing 15.8 million suspect groups and channels in 2024. This unprecedented action follows allegations of poor moderation and the arrest of its founder, Pavel Durov, reflecting the platform's intensified efforts to combat harmful content like fraud and terrorism (see Telegram’s announcement).

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