During this week’s Unpacked event, Samsung introduced Galaxy AI, a suite of artificial intelligence tools designed for the new Galaxy S series smartphones — the Galaxy S24, Galaxy S24+, and Galaxy S24 Ultra. “AI amplifies nearly every experience on the Galaxy S24 series,” including real-time text and call translations, a powerful suite of creative tools in the ProVisual Engine and a new kind of “gestural search that lets users circle, highlight, scribble on or tap anything onscreen” to see related search results. The AI enhancements are largely enabled by a multiyear deal with Google and Qualcomm. Samsung also debuted a wearable accessory, the Galaxy Ring. Continue reading Unpacked: Samsung Intros Galaxy AI with Next Gen S Phones

Microsoft is releasing Phi-2, a text-to-text small language model (SLM) that outperforms some LLMs, yet is light enough to run on a mobile device or laptop, according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The 2.7 billion-parameter SLM beat Meta Platforms’ Llama 2 and Mistral 7B from France (each with 7 billion parameters) says Microsoft, emphasizing its complex reasoning and language comprehension are exceptional for a model with less than 13 billion parameters. For now, Microsoft is making it available “for research purposes only” under a custom license. Continue reading Microsoft Says Phi-2 Can Outperform Large Language Models

Google personalized AI assistant NotebookLM is an experimental product that has been in early access since July. Now the company is integrating its new Gemini Pro LLM with NotebookLM and making it available to U.S. residents 18 and older. NotebookLM is engineered “to help you do your best thinking,” Google says, with documents uploaded to the service making it “an instant expert in the information you need,” allowing it to answer questions about your data. Unlike generic chatbots, NotebookLM draws responses from the documents you feed it, meaning it will be hyper-focused — a lite version of a custom trained model. Continue reading Google’s NotebookLM is a Personalized Lite Language Model

Google is closing the year by heralding 2024 as the “Gemini era,” with the introduction of its “most capable and general AI model yet,” Gemini 1.0. This new foundation model is optimized for three different use-case sizes: Ultra, Pro and Nano. As a result, Google is releasing a new, Gemini-powered version of its Bard chatbot, available to English speakers in the U.S. and 170 global regions. Google touts Gemini as built from the ground up for multimodality, reasoning across text, images, video, audio and code. However, Bard will not as yet incorporate Gemini’s ability to analyze sound and images. Continue reading Google Announces the Launch of Gemini, Its Largest AI Model