Welcome to Get The Gist, where every weekday we share an easy-to-read summary of the latest and greatest developments in AI—news, innovations, and trends—all delivered in under 5 minutes! ⏱

In today’s edition:

• Elon Musk’s Grok AI Now Available on X for Free

• Meta Launches Llama 3.3

• xAI’s Aurora Image Generator Debuts Briefly

• Google Docs Uses Gemini AI to Create Formatted Documents

• And more AI news….

Top Developments

Grok

Elon Musk’s Grok AI Now Available on X for Free

The Gist: Grok AI, the chatbot from Elon Musk’s xAI, is now accessible to free-tier users on X (formerly Twitter) for text and image generation. Usage limits apply, with enhanced features and a standalone app in development.

Key Details:

• Free-tier users can make 10 text prompts every two hours and generate three images per session.

• Grok AI includes image-upload features and uses the FLUX model, with the new “Aurora” beta offering photorealistic results.

• Planned upgrades include document understanding for PDFs and Word files and a standalone Grok AI app.

• Access Grok AI via X’s mobile app or web platform, with chat history and image galleries available.

Meta

Meta Launches Llama 3.3

The Gist: Meta has launched Llama 3.3, a powerful yet smaller and more cost-efficient open-source AI model, outperforming larger predecessors while reducing GPU and energy costs. It’s designed for multilingual tasks and comes with advanced deployment tools.

Key Details:

• Llama 3.3 delivers top-tier AI performance with 70 billion parameters, rivaling larger models at a fraction of the computational cost.

• Optimized for cost-effective usage, it reduces GPU memory requirements up to 24 times, potentially saving $600,000 in upfront GPU costs.

• Pretrained on 15 trillion tokens and fine-tuned on 25 million examples, it excels in multilingual reasoning and long-form content generation with a 128k-token context window.

• Available for download on platforms like Hugging Face and GitHub, it includes tools for responsible deployment, with a focus on sustainability and safety.

xAI

xAI’s Aurora Image Generator Debuts Briefly

The Gist: xAI launched Aurora, a photorealistic image generator, within the Grok AI platform, only to pull it within hours. The brief release showcased its capabilities and raised speculation about its return.

Key Details:

• Aurora excels at creating photorealistic images of people and animals, rivaling top generators like Recraft and Mystic.

• It appeared on Grok’s interface without notice but was soon replaced by the previous Flux-based image generation system.

• The model’s removal is thought to address safeguards for generating realistic images of real individuals.

• Elon Musk confirmed Aurora is in beta and expected to improve before a potential re-release.

Quick Gist

Google Photos has launched a "yearly recap" feature powered by AI, which compiles users' top photos and generates personalized captions and insights based on their photographic habits (Read More).

OpenAI is reportedly considering removing a provision that restricts Microsoft from accessing its future artificial general intelligence (AGI), signaling a potential shift in their partnership as OpenAI transitions to a public benefit corporation (Read More).

Microsoft has introduced Copilot Vision for Pro subscribers, enabling its AI assistant to analyze web content in real time to support more informed decision-making (Read More).

Anthropic's Haiku 3.5 model, known for its reasoning and code generation, is set for public release following its initial availability via API on AWS Bedrock and Google’s Vertex AI (Read More).

Meta reported that its AI assistant is approaching 600 million monthly users, boosted by the release of the cost-efficient Llama 3.3 model, which matches its predecessor's performance at a lower cost (Read More).

NVIDIA unveiled NVILA, a family of open visual language models offering improved training efficiency and performance compared to existing models, though it is not yet available on Hugging Face (Read More).

Google released its new AI model, Gemini-exp-1206, which topped the Chatbot Arena LLM Leaderboard and is available for free on Google AI Studio and the Gemini API (Read More).

Google Docs now uses the Gemini AI model to create formatted documents directly from Workspace files, streamlining productivity tasks (Read More).

THAT’S IT FOR TODAY!