AI News Roundup: Mistral’s Open Source AI Models Heading to AWS

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Mistral’s AI models heading to AWS

Amazon’s cloud division, AWS, announced that open source AI models from Mistral AI is heading to its Amazon Bedrock platform. No date was given for its arrival.

Mistral 7B and Mixtral 8x7B − seven and 46.7 billion parameters in size respectively − will be coming soon to Bedrock. Mistral AI joins other AI model developers on the AWS platform: AI21, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Stability AI and Amazon itself.

Mistral 7B supports English text-generation and coding tasks. For its size, the model has low latency, low memory requirement and high throughput, according to AWS. Mixtral 8x7B uses a sparse Mixture-of-Experts method for text summarization, question and answering, text classification, text completion and code generation.

The move comes as AWS seeks to counter cloud rival Microsoft Azure, which partnered with OpenAI to offer the latter’s AI models on its platform.

Adobe unveils AI assistant

Productivity software giant Adobe announced a new generative AI assistant in Acrobat and Reader that can summarize PDF files. Users can also ask the chatbot questions and its answers can be formatted for sharing in emails, reports and presentations.

The service is in beta and will charge an add-on fee when it is rolled out. Until then, Acrobat Standard and Pro plan subscribers can try the beta version in English for no additional charge, with Reader customers able to access in coming weeks. A private beta is available for enterprise customers. Adobe is also offering the assistant in other languages.

Adobe said the chatbot’s answers will have citations so the user can check the accuracy of the answers. The company said client data is not stored or used for training.

In the future, the chatbot will be able to read across several documents of different types and sources to find information. The assistant also will be able to help users write and copy edit their work, along with customizing for the desired voice and tone.

There is no mention of PDF size restrictions or which foundation models Adobe chose to use.

ChatGPT and Claude chatbots can already summarize PDFs for free.

Jasper buys Clipdrop from Stability AI

Jasper has bought Clipdrop, the image generation app from Stability AI. The purchase price was not disclosed.

Jasper’s business customers can access Clipdrop’s image generation abilities via the Jasper API immediately, with plans to add the functionality to Jasper’s copilot solution later.

Jasper CEO Timothy Young said in a press release that the addition of Clipdrop will enable enterprises to “go beyond simple AI prompts to achieve more personalized marketing, better-informed automation, and improved optimization across their entire strategy."

Individuals can still buy a subscription to Clipdrop as a standalone product via Clipdrop.co.

Clipdrop’s team joined Jasper immediately and will continue to operate from their headquarters in Paris.

Clipdrop was founded in July 2020 and uses open source models to power its image generation abilities. Stability AI acquired Clipdrop in March 2023 for an undisclosed amount.

Jasper was among the companies reportedly interested in buying Stability AI amid its struggles with cash flow.

FTX gets OK to sell Anthropic shares

Failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX can sell its shares in Claude developer Anthropic, a U.S. judge has ruled.

Bankruptcy Judge John Dorsey greenlit FTX’s proposed sale of its 7.8% stake.

Reuters reports that FTX expects to make a profit on the shares for which it paid $500 million in 2021. FTX attorney Andy Dietderich said, “We are selling everything and putting the money in the bank.”

Anthropic’s December 2023 valuation of $18 billion would value FTX’s stake at around $1.4 billion.

However, some customers reportedly opposed the sale on the grounds that FTX used embezzled funds to purchase the shares − arguing that as a result, FTX did not own any Anthropic shares.

The opposition was dropped following an agreement that cash from any sale would be used to repay debts. FTX needs to repay customers and creditors following its November 2022 bankruptcy filing.

Open letter calls for cooperation on existential threats

A group of politicians, actors and AI luminaries have signed an open letter calling on world leaders to do more to address existential threats from AI.

The likes of Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and singer Peter Gabriel signed the letter. Among the AI luminaries who signed were Turing awardees Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton.

The letter wants “long-view leadership” to tackle risks from AI, as well as the climate crisis, pandemics and nuclear weapons.

Signatories want international cooperation ahead of September's U.N. Summit for the Future, which they said is “an opportunity for world leaders to begin to address these urgent global concerns.”

“We need world leaders who understand the existential threats we face and the urgent need to address them. This can only be done through decisive cooperation between nations. We need to revitalize multilateralism for the sake of our common future,” Ki-moon said in a press release.

Also attached to the letter was the Future of Life Institute, which previously penned a letter calling for a six-month pause in advanced AI development.