ONE BIG READ

Google comes out swinging

The AI arms race is not slowing down anytime soon. It feels like almost every few weeks we get some new mind-blowing model that leaves the last one in the dust. Just the past few months alone we’ve gotten new models from Meta, OpenAI, Mistral, and Anthropic, all vying for AI supremacy.

Now Google has come out swinging with Gemma 2, the sequel to its flagship model of the same name. It comes with not one but two flavors of AI goodness — Gemma 9B and Gemma 27B.

Gemma 9B is the more lightweight option with 9 billion parameters while the 27B option has, you guessed it, 27 billion parameters. Google has pitched these new models heavily towards developers that want to incorporate AI into their apps or smart devices. One of the big selling points versus say OpenAI’s offerings is that Gemma is open-source, meaning developers can contribute to the direction of the models and even change it to suit their own needs.

According to benchmarks, Gemma 2 massively improves on its predecessor’s offering in maths based questions, creative writing, cognitive reasoning, and more. Despite being smaller than Meta’s Llama models, it does give it a run for its money.

The new models are accessible on the Google AI studio, Kaggle, HuggingFace, and more.

PRODUCT HIGHLIGHT

Intercom’s latest AI launch aims to free up more time to focus on the important stuff

Intercom, the company behind the support widget that pops up on sites all over the web, hopped on the shipping train and announced two new features designed to help you and your team save time and serve your users more efficiently. Let’s dive in. 

A new Copilot: Arguably, the biggest announcement comes from Intercom opening their Copilot, Fin AI, to the general public after a few months of closed beta. Fin AI is the company’s flagship AI tool. It exists to act as an AI assistant for every support agent you might have. 

When a user asks a question, Fin will pull relevant information from different sources and format it into a potential answer. From there, you can choose to accept that as an answer and send it on to the user. The goal is to free up employee time to better focus on things that matter the most, like forging a deeper relationship with users. 

Knowledge Hub: If you’re going to employ an AI agent for support queries, you will need somewhere to pull information from. In Intercom’s world, that place is the Knowledge Hub. Unlike other AI assistants, Fin’s information is curated by your team rather than the internet, which can lead to hallucinations.

With the knowledge hub, you can centralize, manage, control, and optimize all the information that powers AI, agents, and self-serve support in one place.

AI IN THE HEADLINES

• Anthropic is launching a new fund to create better AI benchmarks.

•  Apple is looking at ways to incorporate its new Apple Intelligence AI into the Vision Pro.

•  OpenAI shared a new demo showcasing GPT-4o voice mode teaching languages.

• Meta is testing user-created AI chatbots on Instagram.

• Zuckerberg has hit out at closed-source AI competitors.