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:

• Instagram Is Rolling Out AI-Driven Age Verification

• ByteDance Bets on AI with Custom GPUs by 2026

• NVIDIA and G42 Team Up for Climate Innovation

• Meta and Spotify Criticize the EU for Overregulating AI

• And more AI news….

Top Developments

Instagram

Instagram Is Rolling Out AI-Driven Age Verification

The Gist: Instagram is rolling out AI-driven age verification to better protect young users from misrepresentation, steering clear of harsher government regulations that might force more invasive checks.

Key Details:

• Meta’s technology aims to accurately identify users' ages, focusing on those who misreport being older or younger than they are.

• A partnership with Yoti lets users verify their age through video selfies while safeguarding their privacy.

• If successful, this AI approach could prevent the need for strict federal laws mandating government ID checks for users under 16.

• The new system is expected to launch in early 2025, as Meta works to refine the accuracy of its models and sidestep governmental interventions.

ByteDance

ByteDance Bets on AI with Custom GPUs by 2026

The Gist: ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is developing its own AI GPUs to cut dependence on Nvidia, aiming for mass production by 2026. This strategic move comes amid rising costs and shortages of Nvidia's products.

Key Details:

• ByteDance is working on two AI GPUs: one for training and one for inference, both being produced by TSMC.

• The company has invested over $2 billion in Nvidia GPUs but faces high costs and delivery delays.

• Despite facing U.S. export restrictions, ByteDance's GPUs could offer a cheaper alternative to Nvidia's current offerings.

• A significant challenge will be creating a compatible software platform, as they currently rely on Nvidia’s existing software tools.

Nvidia/G42

NVIDIA and G42 Team Up for Climate Innovation

The Gist: NVIDIA and G42 are working together to launch the Earth-2 platform, which uses AI and vast amounts of data to improve climate predictions and promote sustainability. This partnership aims to create innovative solutions that tackle environmental challenges head-on.

Key Details:

• The initiative will utilize over 100 petabytes of data for real-world climate solutions.

• The Earth-2 Climate Tech Lab in Abu Dhabi is a key hub for this collaboration.

• Enhanced weather prediction tools and data visualization will help organizations meet their sustainability goals.

• Both companies emphasize their commitment to using AI for significant global challenges.

Quick Gist

SambaNova set a new record for inference on Meta’s Llama 3.1 405B model, achieving 132 output tokens per second with its SN40L custom AI chip, highlighting its advantages over competitors Cerebras and Groq (Read More).

Tech firms, including Meta and Spotify, criticized the EU for overregulating AI, warning that it stifles innovation and makes the region uncompetitive, leading companies to delay releasing advanced AI products like Meta's Llama model due to regulatory uncertainties (Read More).

Apple accelerated the rollout of a software update for Siri, integrating new AI features to automate tasks ahead of the iPhone 16 launch (Read More).

SLB has expanded its partnership with NVIDIA to accelerate the development of generative AI solutions tailored for the energy sector, focusing on subsurface exploration and data management (Read More).

Alibaba launched over 100 open-source AI models known as Qwen 2.5 to enhance competitiveness against rivals and boost its cloud services (Read More).

Apple has released the iOS 18.1 beta to public testers, featuring upcoming Apple Intelligence tools like Writing Tools and Clean Up in Photos, with further updates expected in subsequent versions (Read More).

Meta has launched Llama 3, its latest large language model (LLM), which outperforms competitors like Google’s Gemini Pro 1.5 and Claude 3 Sonnet, and will soon be available on cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, with future plans for multilingual and multimodal capabilities. (Read More).

THAT’S IT FOR TODAY!