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Welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
This week, the TechCrunch crew (including yours truly) is at TC’s annual Disrupt conference in San Francisco. We’ve got a packed lineup of speakers from the AI industry, academia, and policy, so in lieu of my usual op-ed I thought I’d preview some of the great content headed your way.
Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda
Apple Intelligence launches: Through a free software update, iPhone, iPad, and Mac users can access the first set of Apple’s AI-powered Apple Intelligence capabilities.
Bret Taylor’s startup raises new money: Sierra, the AI startup co-founded by OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor, has raised $175 million in a funding round that values the startup at $4.5 billion.
Google expands AI Overviews: Google Search’s AI Overviews, which display a snapshot of information at the top of the results page, are beginning to roll out in more than 100 countries and territories.
Generative AI and e-waste: The immense and quickly advancing computing requirements of AI models could lead to the industry discarding the e-waste equivalent of more than 10 billion iPhones per year by 2030, researchers project.
Open source, now defined: The Open Source Initiative, a long-running institution aiming to define and “steward” all things open source, this week released version 1.0 of its definition of open source AI.
Meta releases its own podcast generator:Meta has released an “open” implementation of the viral generate-a-podcast feature in Google’s NotebookLM.
Hallucinated transcriptions: OpenAI’s Whisper transcription tool has hallucination issues, researchers say. Whisper has reportedly introduced everything from racial commentary to imagined treatments into transcripts.
Research paper of the week
Google says it taught a model to convert photos of handwriting into “digital ink.”
The model, InkSight, was trained to recognize written words on a page and output strokes that roughly resemble handwriting. The goal, the Google researchers behind the project say, was to “capture the stroke-level trajectory details of handwriting” so that a user can store the resulting strokes in the note-taking app of their choice.
InkSight isn’t perfect. Google notes that it makes errors. But the company also claims that the model performs well across a range of scenarios, including challenging lighting conditions.
Let’s hope it’s not used to forge any signatures.
Model of the week
Cohere for AI, the nonprofit research lab run by AI startup Cohere, has released a new family of text-generating models called Aya Expanse. The models can write and understand text in 23 different languages, and Cohere claims they outperform models, including Meta’s Llama 3.1 70B, on certain benchmarks.
Cohere’s “data arbitrage” technique played a crucial role in training Aya Expanse. Drawing inspiration from how humans learn by seeking out different teachers for unique skills, Cohere selected highly capable multilingual “teacher” models to create synthetic training data for Aya Expanse.
Although synthetic data comes with its own set of challenges, including potential degradation in model quality and diversity, Cohere claims that data arbitrage effectively addresses these issues. The veracity of this claim will soon be put to the test.
Grab bag
OpenAI has made its Advanced Voice Mode feature, known for its realistic-sounding voice in ChatGPT, freely available in the ChatGPT mobile app for users in the EU, Switzerland, Iceland, and Norway, in addition to Liechtenstein. Previously, users in these regions had to subscribe to ChatGPT Plus to access Advanced Voice Mode.
A recent article in The New York Times examined the pros and cons of Advanced Voice Mode, noting its tendency to rely on stereotypes and tropes in communication. The feature has gained popularity on TikTok for its ability to mimic voices and accents with eerie accuracy. However, some experts caution against developing emotional dependence on a system lacking true intelligence or empathy.
