EU Approves World’s First Comprehensive Framework for Crypto Regulation MiCA

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April 21, 2023

The first thorough set of regulations for the cryptocurrency industry have been passed by legislators in the European Parliament. The Markets in Crypto Act, also known as MiCA, was approved by the EU Parliament on Thursday with 517 votes in favor and 38 votes against.

The regulation, which aims to lower risks for customers purchasing cryptocurrency assets, will make providers accountable if they misplace customers’ cryptocurrency assets.

The EU Parliament stated in a statement that the rules will put a variety of responsibilities on cryptocurrency platforms, token issuers, and dealers around transparency, disclosure, authorization, and supervision of transactions.

Additionally, sales of new tokens will be subject to regulation. Platforms will be compelled to advise users of the dangers involved with their operations.

It will be necessary for stablecoins like tether and Circle’s USDC to keep enough reserves on hand to fulfil redemption requests in the case of large-scale withdrawals. Stablecoins that grow too big risk having their daily transaction volume restricted to 200 million euros ($220 million).

If it is determined that cryptocurrency platforms do not adequately safeguard investors, endanger market integrity, or threaten financial stability, the European Securities and Markets Authority, or ESMA, will be given the authority to intervene and ban or restrict those platforms.

MiCA also addresses the environmental issues related to cryptocurrencies, requiring businesses to disclose their energy usage as well as the environmental effects of digital assets.

Alphabet to Merge its AI Research Units Google Brain and DeepMind

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Sahil Pawar

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April 21, 2023

Alphabet to merge Google Brain DeepMind — Image Credits: Deepmind

In an effort to regain lost ground in generative AI versus Microsoft and OpenAI, Alphabet is merging its DeepMind and Google Brain AI research divisions. This puts an end to a protracted internal battle between the Silicon Valley and London-based organizations

After the restructuring, Demis Hassabis, the British CEO of DeepMind, will be in command of a larger team. This team can lay claim to many of the research innovations that have made AI the most significant new technology to hit the market since the advent of the internet.

After spending nine years working in cutting-edge research fields that infrequently had any direct bearing on the operations of the internet corporation, he will also take on a more direct role in creating cutting-edge AI systems that are essential to Google’s future business.

Following the breakthrough success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has presented the biggest challenge to Google’s internet search business since Microsoft mounted an unsuccessful challenge two decades ago, Alphabet has decided to concentrate its most cutting-edge research more directly on AI models with a direct application to Google’s internet business.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, claimed the restructuring was intended to “ensure the bold and responsible development of general AI” and would leave Google with “a unit that will help us build more capable systems more safely and responsibly”.

After more than nine years and the $500 million purchase of the London-based research organization, DeepMind, Google has finally fully assimilated DeepMind into its operations with the AI reorganization. Early on, the founders of DeepMind pushed to maintain their independence from Google’s other research initiatives so they could focus on advancing artificial intelligence.

Russia Assesses International Crypto Settlement Experiment

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Sahil Pawar

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April 21, 2023

Russia Assesses International Crypto Settlement Experiment — Image Credits: Daily Express

Despite its stricter general stance on such assets, the Central Bank of Russia is allegedly working on a means to use cryptocurrencies for cross-border payments.

According to Russian news agency TASS, Elvira Nabiullina, the head of Russia’s central bank, stated the country will establish unique organizations that would be able to mine cryptocurrency and use it to settle payments with international organizations.

According to Central Bank Deputy Chairman Alexei Guznov, organizations connected to the state would be able to use cryptocurrency for such transactions at first. In the future, he suggested, private corporations might be able to do this.

The proposition was part of a draft bill that was then brought to the country’s parliament, and the Russian finance ministry previously stated that cryptocurrency should not be given currency status. In July, Russian President Vladimir Putin approved a bill intended to strengthen the country’s current ban on using cryptocurrencies to pay for products and services.

Despite the prohibitions on cryptocurrencies, Russian government officials stated last year that the nation was in discussions about permitting the use of cryptocurrencies for foreign trade.

These negotiations came after Russia was subject to sanctions following its invasion of Ukraine. In a September interview with Russia-24, Deputy Finance Minister Alexei Moiseev stated that it was essential to legalize cross-border cryptocurrency payments. According to a report from TACC on Monday, the Bank of Russia still opposes the legalization of cryptocurrency exchanges and payments within the country.

Meta Introduces Self-Supervised Vision Transformer Model Dinov2

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Sahil Pawar

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April 20, 2023

Meta Self-Supervised Vision Transformer Model DinoV2 — Image Credits: Meta

Meta AI announced the release of Dinov2 two years after debuting DINO, a self-supervised vision transformer model. In contrast to other models of a similar type, like CLIP, this one performs exceptionally well and doesn’t need modifications.

Meta accomplished this by pretraining on a vast volume of unprocessed text utilizing pretext objectives like non-supervised word vectors or language modeling. The model is free source and has been pre-trained on 142 million photos in an unlabeled, self-supervised manner.

High-performance characteristics offered by DINOv2 can be used as direct inputs for basic linear classifiers. Due to its adaptability, DINOv2 may be used to build multifunctional backbones for a variety of computer vision jobs, according to a blog post from the company.

DinoV2 assists with tasks like depth estimation, image classification, semantic segmentation, and image retrieval without the requirement for expensive labelled data, which will save developers a great deal of time and resources.

According to Meta, the model uses self-supervised learning and produces results that are comparable to or better than those produced by the traditional approaches used in the relevant fields.

Self-supervised learning is the key appeal since it enables DINOv2 to create adaptable, general frameworks for a range of computer vision applications and tasks. Before using the model in various domains, no further fine-tuning is necessary.

Stability AI Announces StableLM, A New Open-source Large Language Model

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Sahil Pawar

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April 20, 2023

Stability AI announces StableLM — Image Credits: Stability AI

A group of open-source large language models (LLMs) referred to as StableLM have been made available by Stability AI, the firm that created the AI-powered Stable Diffusion image generator. In a post published on Wednesday, the business revealed that its models are now accessible for developers to use and modify on GitHub.

StableLM is made to efficiently create text and code, much as ChatGPT’s opponent. The open-source dataset called Pile, which includes data from a variety of sources such as Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, and PubMed, served as its training data.

According to Stability AI, StableLM models presently have parameters ranging from 3 billion and 7 billion, with models having 15 billion to 65 billion parameters coming later.

In addition to building on the open-source language models that Stability AI has already developed in partnership with the nonprofit EleutherAI, StableLM also advances the company’s goal of making AI tools more approachable, as it did with Stable Diffusion.

The optimized conversation model from StableLM is available for testing in a demo on Hugging Face. Although the datasets Stability AI employs should steer the base language models into safer distributions of text, the company issues a warning that “not all biases and toxicity can be mitigated through fine-tuning.”

Snapchat Releases its AI Chatbot ‘My AI’ to Everyone for Free

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Sahil Pawar

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April 20, 2023

Snapchat releases AI chatbot 'My AI' everyone free — Image Credits: TechCrunch

Less than two months after it was initially made available to the app’s over 3 million paying subscribers, Snap is making its “My AI” chatbot available to all 750 million monthly users of Snapchat for free.

Additionally, Snapchat is integrating My AI more and more to its initiatives. By mentioning it in group conversations with the @ sign, it can now be added. Snap will enable users to give their bot a unique Bitmoji avatar to change its name and appearance.

Additionally, My AI will now suggest locations to visit from the map tab of the Snapchat app or AR filters to use in the app’s camera. As an example, during the company’s annual conference today, a photo of tomatoes in a garden prompted the bot to answer with a generated image of gazpacho soup. Snap also hopes to soon enable users to visually message My AI and receive AI generated responses.

While Microsoft and Google race to incorporate generative AI into their search engines, Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snap, views the technology as “an awesome creative tool.” In a recent interview, he gave specific instances of how he used My AI to arrange Miranda Kerr’s birthday itinerary and write bedtime stories for his kids. He claims that My AI is already facilitating more than 2 million chats each day.

Regarding My AI’s possible effects on Snap’s advertising business, which has had significant growth hurdles, Spiegel has been quiet. He acknowledges that using My AI’s interactions for ad targeting may be a chance, but he doesn’t go into further detail, leaving room for future advances to be hinted at.

Meta Opens Access to Its Social VR Space Horizon Worlds for Teens

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Sahil Pawar

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April 19, 2023

Meta opens access Horizon Worlds teens — Image Credits: TechCrunch

According to a Tuesday announcement by Meta, teens in the US and Canada will soon have access to the social VR platform Horizon Worlds. Meta will have certain extra features in place for teen players, defined as those between the ages of 13 and 17, to assist create a safer experience on the platform.

For instance, teen accounts will be private by default, and Meta will not display a teen’s online status unless they want to do so. Teens will also by default have access to the “voice mode” option, which converts unfamiliar voices into quiet, friendly sounds and muddles your own voice.

In the “people you might know” tab, Meta won’t display any adults who the teenager doesn’t know. Additionally, the business claims to have included its VR parental control toolkit to Horizon Worlds.

The network, which has had trouble keeping users, might draw more players as a result of the teens-only expansion. However, the choice has received a lot of backlash. After learning about his intentions via The Wall Street Journal in February, Senators Ed Markey and Richard Blumenthal wrote to Mark Zuckerberg in March and pleaded with him to abandon them.

The senators wrote, “Meta’s plan to target young people with offerings in the metaverse is particularly concerning in light of your consistent failures to protect young users. With a documented track record of failure to protect children and teens, Meta has lost parents’, pediatricians’, policymakers’, and the public’s trust.”

By making Horizon Worlds more approachable to teenagers, Meta is increasing pressure on Horizon Worlds to compete with other metaverse-like platforms like Fortnite and Roblox, which also feature specific safeguards for younger users. Furthermore, Meta should soon make Horizon Worlds available on the web and mobile devices.

Meta Prepares for Another Round of Layoffs Across Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram

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Sahil Pawar

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April 19, 2023

Meta prepares for another round of layoffs — Image Credits: USNews

Meta Platforms has started with another round of layoffs across the board today as it reorganizes teams and pursues founder Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of higher productivity.

Facebook’s parent firm alerted managers in a note acquired by Bloomberg News that job cuts would be announced on Wednesday. It implies that the company’s virtual reality initiatives at Reality Labs, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Quest hardware will all be impacted.

According to Zuckerberg’s announcement in March, the action is a part of a cost-cutting drive that will eventually result in the dismissal of 10,000 jobs at the corporation. In May, there will be yet another round of layoffs.

In November, Meta had laid off 11,000 employees, or around 13% of its staff. Additionally, it prolonged a hiring ban throughout the first quarter. According to Zuckerberg’s remarks, the corporation intends to cut costs and equalize the proportion of technologists and engineers to business and administrative workers.

According to the memo sent to managers, teams will be reorganized and a number of surviving individuals will be reassigned to work for new supervisors. Meta has requested that all North American workers who are able to work remotely to do so on Wednesday so that they can grapple with the news.

A representative for the company declined to comment, citing Zuckerberg’s “year of efficiency” announcement from March, which stated, “We expect to announce restructurings and layoffs in our tech groups in late April, and then our business groups in late May.”

Philips, IMES Create Enhanced Critical Care Data Set for AI in Healthcare

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Sahil Pawar

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April 19, 2023

Philips IMES Critical Care Data Set AI Healthcare — Image Credits: Regulatory Review

In order to advance machine learning and artificial intelligence in healthcare, Royal Philips, a provider of health technology, today announced a collaboration with MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES).

De-identified data from 200,000 critical care patients, including those affected by COVID-19, are included in the revised eICU Collaborative Research Database (eICU-CRD). The creation of solutions that enhance patient care and clinical outcomes will be aided by the larger and more clinically reliable data collection.

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a sharp rise in the number of patients in the eICU and critical care settings as well as particular difficulties in the delivery of care. This led Philips and IMES to expand the initial data set, first made public in 2016.

De-identified and comprehensive clinical data, including vital signs, prescription drug prescriptions, laboratory test results, diagnoses, and severity of disease scores, are contained in the new secure database. Comprehensive information on patient therapies, comorbidities, readmissions, and clinical outcomes is also provided by the dataset.

Researchers from across the world will have access to the data, thanks to researchers at Philips and the Laboratory of Computational Physiology at IMES. This will allow researchers to create cutting-edge algorithms and offer fresh perspectives on critical care.

The Laboratory of Computational Physiology will be the initiative’s academic research center, providing and maintaining access as well as assisting with database education and providing a forum for collaboration. To individuals who have the necessary credentials, have completed human subjects training, and have signed a data usage agreement, the database is available for use in medical research.

Press Hook Launches Free AI-Based Press Release Generator

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Sahil Pawar

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April 19, 2023

Press Hook Launches AI-Based Press Release Generator — Image Credits: Press Hook

A free press release generating tool has been launched by Press Hook, a provider of public relations platforms, enabling businesses to create automatic news releases. Deep learning will be used by the tool, which employs autoregressive language processing models and artificial intelligence to produce content.

Users need only fill out a basic form with the necessary information such as the name of the company or product, a quote, and a few brief descriptors, and the generator will instantly produce a press release. The release consists a news summary, bullet points, and website links.

The GPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer), a language processing AI model created by OpenAI, powers the generator.

Michelle Songy, the founder of Press Hook, said, “We’ve written thousands of press releases over the years, so we know how difficult and time-consuming it can be for the small businesses to write compelling stories that are optimized and media-ready.”

“We created this tool to assist businesses in producing highly readable, engaging material that is formatted and prepared for distribution, allowing them to concentrate on the content of their story instead of being bogged down in the mechanics of telling it,” she added.

Press Hook has developed a platform where businesses can get the tools they need to take control of their media relations, media outlets can proactively find sources, and PR can maximize client visibility all at once by prioritizing affordability and openness.