Today in AI: Are Elon Musk's AI dreams viable? Google's Bard gets a Gemini update, new feature brings Gemini Nano to Pixel 8 Pro phones

Elon Musk’s AI dreams are going in circles

Musk’s brand value can only hold out for so long, and he may find himself tempted to partner with a big player like Google or Nvidia. Then he will not only have come full circle, but gone back on one of his biggest pledges for AI. That would hardly be shocking.

• When Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in late 2015, he pledged to fund the non-profit lab with $1 billion of his own money; he had safety in mind and hoped to counter Google’s stranglehold on AI research. Those $1 billion never fully materialised,and Musk left OpenAI on bad terms.


• It’s been less than a year since Musk signed an open letter calling on developers to take a six-month pause from training AI models. Instead of halting himself, Musk founded xAI, a research lab that competes with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind to build systems that could surpass human intelligence, known as artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Google's AI chatbot Bard gets its biggest upgrade with Gemini launch

Google will introduce Bard Advanced early next year that will offer users access to its most advanced models and capabilities starting with Gemini Ultra.

• Sissie Hsiao, vice-president of Google Assistant and Bard, said that Gemini is being rolled out to Bard in two phases: Bard will be powered by a specifically tuned version of Gemini Pro, making the chatbot more capable of understanding and summarising, reasoning, coding, and planning.


• Gemini Pro will support text-based prompts in Bard at present with multimodal support in the coming months. It will initially be available in English across more than 170 countries and territories with plans to add support for more languages and geographies such as Europe in the near future.

Google's new feature drop brings Gemini Nano to Pixel 8 Pro; more AI updates promised

Nano is a highly efficient model, trained for specific on-device tasks.

• Google has added the recently introduced Gemini AI, directly into the company's new Pixel 8 Pro phone. The Gemini AI is available in three sizes — Ultra, Pro and Nano. The Nano version has been added to the Pixel 8 Pro.


• It will use Google's Tensor G3 chip for two features — Summarize in the Recorder app and Smart Reply on Gboard, Google's Android keyboard.