AI News – June 16
Google and scale AI end their relationship Dia integrates AI directly into the browser Astra upscales your videos to 4K and 1X creates a real world digital twin to train its robots. Here’s today’s AI news. Last week, Meta closed a deal with Scale AI with a $14 billion investment in the AI Training Data Company.
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And as part of the deal, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang joined the Meta team. Alex is now set to head up Meta’s superintelligence department. And Scale AI will be looking for a new CEO. Now, in a move that many predicted, all of Scale’s biggest clients are starting to look elsewhere, including Google, xAI and Microsoft.
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It’s rumoured that Google alone was spending in excess of $200 million a year on Scale AI services. I guess scale will be burning through that 14 billion faster than they thought. The browser company who make the Arc browser has been working on an AI integrated browser for quite a while.
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And now it’s launched the Dia browser into beta. Dia is designed to embed AI functionalities directly into the browsing experience, aiming to simplify user interactions by eliminating the need for separate AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity. This relatively simple principle makes a lot of sense.
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Most users spend a significant amount of their online time in a browser, so having the AI tightly integrated is likely to maximise its use. We’re expecting this to be the evolution of browsers with the likes of Neon from Opera and and Comet from Perplexity, all looking to be the first. To really nail this user experience.
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Topaz Labs are launching Astra that they claim is the first ever creative upscaler for video. With Astra, you can upscale video clips to 4K resolution and you get a range of controls that allow you to set how much creativity the model is allowed when enhancing your footage. You can even use Astra to create slow motion videos from your clips where the missing frames will be interpolated to produce a smooth result.
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And finally, 1X the robotics company have announced the 1X World Model. The 1XWM is a ‘digital twin’ simulated environment that allows thousands of training actions to be tried out in a virtual scenario before they ever have to be performed in the real world. This can reduce the training time from months to minutes.
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Digital twins are going to be a huge factor in the progress that we see in Robotics in 2025.