Elon Musk's xAI announces Grok-1.5 Vision, with multimodal capability

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Bible Verses of the Day

1 I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. [Romans 12:1-2, ESV]

What's in this week's issue?

  • 👀 Elon Musk's xAI announces Grok-1.5 Vision, with multimodal capability

  • 🍷 Napa-based AI for vineyards closes $3 million in funding

  • ⛅️ Easy Cloud News

  • 📰 AI News

  • 🧰 AI Tools

Generated by Midjourney

Grok-1.5V is xAI’s first-generation multimodal model that aims to connect the digital and physical worlds. “Grok outperforms its peers in our new RealWorldQA benchmark that measures real-world spatial understanding,” the company said in a blog post.

Additionally, Grok-1.5V can “process a wide variety of visual information, including documents, diagrams, charts, screenshots, and photographs.”

For example, some of the exciting things it can do include writing code from a diagram, calculating calories, making bedtime stories based on drawings, helping you understand a meme, and more. xAI claims that Grok-1.5V performs better than its rival LLMs, including GPT-4V, Claude 3Sonnet, Claude 3 Opus, and Gemini Pro, in the RealWorldQA benchmark.

Generated by Midjourney

Scout, a Napa County-based farm management software company driven by AI that empowers growers to optimize quality, yield, and financial results, closed a deal for $3 million in seed funding from various investors.

The company captures photos of vineyards at the ground level and uses artificial intelligence to analyze the photos and provide actionable data on the crops.

“It’s like giving superhuman powers to farmers,” Scout CEO Kia Behnia said. “They now essentially have X-ray vision. Our company is all about providing data and insights to help farmers farm better and smarter.”

Easy Cloud News

  • 🌤️ Easy Cloud Solutions: Maryland Enacts Two Key Privacy Bills Amid Tech Industry Opposition (link)

  • ⛪️ Easy Cloud AI: Revolutionize Your Church’s Sermons with Beluga: The Ultimate Transcription Service (link)

Listen or read the following transcript as Ed Welch speaks about an ADHD Diagnosis from James 1.

The following unedited transcript is provided by Beluga AI.

AI News

  • 🦸 Introducing Limitless, a personalized AI powered by what you’ve seen, said, or heard (link)

  • 🏦 Big banks are in a race to get AI right (link)

  • 🎶 A Stanford professor explains the future of AI and music (link)

  • 🧠 CMU Joins $110M U.S.-Japan Partnership To Accelerate AI Innovation (link)

  • 🖥️ A crossroads for computing and AI at MIT (link)

AI Tools

  • 📝 Saner: AI note taking app that helps you note quickly, recall easily, and develop new insights (link)

  • 🎨 PicassoPix: Access a wide range of AI image generation and manipulation tools (link)

  • ✏️ Magic Eraser: Remove unwanted objects, people, text in seconds (link)

  • 💻️ Cleric: Triage and diagnose production issues in the background (link)