Elon’s Grok 2 shocks the AI world

Welcome, AI enthusiasts.

Elon Musk’s xAI has officially proved itself as a significant competitor within the AI race after launching the new edition of its Grok-2 chatbot.

In only over a 12 months, the AI startup has created a state-of-the-art model that outperforms versions of GPT-4 and Claude. Let’s get into it…

In today’s AI rundown:

• Grok 2 reaches state-of-the-art status

• Apple’s iPad is getting a robotic arm

• Creating sound effects with text

• Google’s Imagen 3 tops Midjourney, DALL-E

• 5 recent AI tools & 4 recent AI jobs

• More AI & tech news

Read time: 4 minutes

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

XAI

🏆 Grok-2 reaches state-of-the-art status

The Rundown: xAI’s newest AI model, Grok-2, is now available in beta for users on the X platform — achieving state-of-the-art status and outperforming versions of Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT-4.

The small print:

• Along with Grok-2, Grok-2 mini can also be now available to users on the X platform in beta with an enterprise API release planned for later this month.

• Each Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini show significant improvements in reasoning with retrieved content, tool use capabilities, and performance across all academic benchmarks.

• Grok-2 can now create and publish images directly on the X platform, powered by Black Forest Lab’s Flux 1 AI model.

• Grok-2 surpasses OpenAI’s latest GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet in some categories, making it among the finest models currently available to the general public if based purely on benchmarks.

Why it matters: Grok-1 debuted as a distinct segment, no-filter chatbot, but Grok-2’s newly achieved state-of-the-art status has catapulted xAI right into a legitimate competitor within the AI race. The startup is trying to have a shiny future with its recent Supercluster, Elon’s ability to draw talent, and vast amounts of real-time training data available on X.

TOGETHER WITH PODCASTLE

🎙️ Easily create audio & video content with AI

The Rundown: Podcastle is your go-to platform for effortlessly producing studio-quality audio and video content, making skilled content creation accessible to everyone.

With Podcastle, you may:

• Record and edit content in a simple-to-use studio and editing suite.

• Enhance your video and audio quality with a single click.

• Create content quickly and at scale with AI Voices and Voice Cloning.

Try it out without cost, or schedule a customized demo with our team of experts.

APPLE

🤖 Apple’s iPad is getting a robotic arm

The Rundown: Apple is reportedly ramping up development on a high-end tabletop smart home device with a robotic arm, an iPad-like display, and Siri voice command to operate its AI features.

The small print:

• The project, codenamed J595, reportedly involves a team of several hundred people and will launch as early as 2026 or 2027.

• The device combines an iPad-like display with a skinny robotic arm that may tilt, spin 360 degrees, and move the screen around.

• It is anticipated to run a modified version of iPadOS making it a well-recognized smart home command center, videoconferencing tool, and remote-controlled home security device.

• Apple is targeting a price point of around $1,000 for the product.

Why it matters: Apple is doubling down on its commitment to artificial intelligence by ramping up the event of an odd recent Siri-powered, countertop robotic arm. With Apple Intelligence launching later this 12 months, the tech giant seemingly has big plans for implementing AI into its hardware.

AI TRAINING

🔊 Creating sound effects with text

The Rundown: ElevenLabs now offers a text-to-sound feature that permits users to generate sound effects by writing an easy description of the noise they need.

Step-by-Step:

1. Visit ElevenLabs and log in or create an account. You’ll be able to do that feature without cost.

2. Select “Sound Effects” from the left sidebar.

3. Describe your required sound effect within the text box.

4. Adjust settings for duration and prompt influence.

5. Click “Generate Sound Effects” to create your sounds.

Get more AI tutorials →

PRESENTED BY ANGEL AI

📲 AI browser that’s protected for teenagers

The Rundown: Angel AI offers a secure, AI-powered browser designed to supply children with protected, age-appropriate web experiences.

Angel AI provides children with:

• Content tailored to your child’s interests and stage of development

• Protected video streaming without ads, inappropriate content, and autoplay

• The power to ask questions and receive age-customized answers

Be the primary to realize access by joining Angel’s waitlist today.

GOOGLE

🧪 Google’s Imagen 3 tops Midjourney, DALL-E

The Rundown: Google DeepMind recently published the paper for it’s recent state-of-the-art AI image generation model, Imagen 3, flexing that it beat DALL-E 3, Midjourney v6, and Stable Diffusion 3 in human performance evaluations.

The small print:

• The human evaluations asked participants to rank their preferred models for overall quality and adherence to detailed prompts.

• Imagen 3 excelled particularly in generating high-quality, realistic images that closely match long and sophisticated text descriptions.

• Despite its capability to accurately generate photorealistic images, it struggles with certain tasks requiring numerical reasoning, understanding scale, and depicting actions.

• Imagen 3 is out there to try via ImageFX and Vertex AI.

Why it matters: Google struggled to seek out its footing early within the AI text-to-image category, but with its latest Imagen 3 release, it’s beating the highest tools within the space. It’s one other win for Google after also beating OpenAI within the race to widespread rollouts of advanced voice AI just yesterday.

NEW TOOLS & JOBS

Trending AI Tools

• 💁 Conva AI – Effortlessly create, integrate, and monitor AI assistants inside applications

• 🎙️ Elevenstudios by ElevenLabs – Fully managed video and podcast dubbing

• 📊 Profundo – Handle data collection, evaluation, and reporting with an AI research assistant

• 🎨 FLUX Image Generator – Free FLUX text and image generation

• 🗣️ Wondercraft AI – Easily create hyper-realistic audio ads or podcasts

Browse more AI tools →

Recent AI Job Opportunities

• 🧠 OpenAI – Product Manager, Model Customization

• 👁️ Meta – AI Research Engineer, VLLM (vision large language models)

• 📊 Databricks – Sr Manager, Presales (Data & AI)

• 🧪 Tempus – Molecular Lab Supervisor

Browse more AI jobs →

QUICK HITS

Free eBook: The AI Proficiency Report from Section. 7% of the workforce is getting all the advantages of AI. Download the report to see what they do in another way.*

Anthropic launched prompt caching for Claude, reducing costs for developers by 90% and latency by 85% for longer prompts.

OpenAI’s recent ChatGPT-4o model update tested under the codename “anonymous-chatbot” and reclaimed the highest spot on LMSYS Arena.

MIT CSAIL released its first-ever AI Risk Repository, a comprehensive database of over 700 AI risks from 43 existing frameworks.

A Powell Tribune resigned after admitting to using AI to generate fake quotes in multiple published articles.

SAG-AFTRA video game performers strike against major gaming firms over AI protections in contract negotiations.

Radical Ventures raised nearly $800 million to speculate within the AI space with backing from Fei-Fei Li, Geoffrey Hinton, Canada pensions.

*Sponsored listing

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