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Happy Friday, everyone! With elections fast approaching, we all know how crucial technology and social media are in shaping campaigns. Some platforms have even decided to block all political ads after Election Day—we’ll explain why. Plus, we’ve got a quick rundown of this week’s AI developments and a deep dive into where lithium is coming from to power our battery-hungry devices. Let’s dive in!

• 📰 News and Trends.

• This Week’s State Of AI.

• Wall Street loads up on surprising $2.1tn asset class.*

• Lithium Ambitions.

• Google to Block Election Ads Post-Polls to Prevent Misinformation.

• 🧰 AI Tools (Developer Tools II)

📰 AI News and Trends

• Blumhouse partners with Meta to explore AI in a new short film, following in the footsteps of Lionsgate. This growing trend of movie studios collaborating with AI tech companies is expected to accelerate, shaping the future of filmmaking.

• Perplexity launched 'Spaces', a research hub you can use to invite others, upload files as persistent sources, pick an AI model of your choice, and write custom instructions—now live on the sidebar for all users (Perplexity)

• When you refer to “Lambda”, “ChatGPT”, “Gemini”, or “Claude”, it’s not the model weights that you are referring to. It’s the dataset. (by Jbetker from 2023 but still true)

🌐 Other Tech news

• BYD is winning the global EV race and even if the US keeps them out, they may still come on top (Bloomberg)

• Amazon Tests New Small-Format Grocery Store Next to Whole Foods in Chicago to Expand Product Offerings Beyond Organic Selection (RTP)

• Sam Altman's cryptocurrency venture Worldcoin has rebranded as "World" and unveiled a new generation of its iris-scanning Orb technology. Is this the way we will detect between (TC)

• Netflix Beats Wall Street’s Forecasts in Every Major Metric (Yahoo)

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This Week’s State Of AI.

On the chip front, TSMC posted strong profits thanks to high demand for AI chips, while ASML cut its 2024 forecast due to weaker orders from Intel and Samsung.

Nvidia and AMD are benefiting from robust AI chip demand driven by large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, while Intel and Samsung struggle with weaker demand for non-AI chips. Overall, AI chip demand remains strong, but broader market volatility and overproduction concerns affect traditional chip segments.

OpenAI still wears the AI crown, but not everything is rosy for the ChatGPT creators. The once close partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI is showing signs of strain. While Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI, tensions have emerged over requests for more funding and computing power. OpenAI, facing $5 billion in losses this year, has sought to renegotiate its deal, even securing additional computing resources from Oracle. Meanwhile, Microsoft is hedging its bets by investing in other AI ventures, including hiring talent from OpenAI competitor Inflection. Despite these challenges, both companies continue to collaborate, though their relationship is evolving amidst growing financial and operational pressures.

Meanwhile, Google is reorganizing its teams to accelerate AI development. The Gemini app team is merging with Google DeepMind to enhance efficiency and deployment of AI models, while the Assistant teams are being moved to the Platform and Devices department to focus on AI-powered home initiatives. Additionally, Prabhakar Raghavan, formerly in charge of Search and Ads, will become Google’s Chief Technologist, with Nick Fox stepping into his previous role to lead Search, Ads, Geo, and Commerce products.

Wall Street loads up on surprising $2.1tn asset class.

Major financial institutions like Bank of America, UBS, and JP Morgan are investing heavily in an unexpected $2.1 trillion asset class. It’s not private equity or real estate, but fine art. Why?  

According to data from Citi, fine art is a powerful diversifier with low correlation to traditional markets, and certain segments, like blue-chip contemporary art, have outperformed the S&P 500 by 64% from 1995 to 2023.

Masterworks allows over 900k users to invest in this high-growth asset class. With 23 successful exits, investors have seen impressive annualized net returns, ranging from 17.6% to 21.5%. Act quickly—Masterworks offerings sell out fast.

Diversify your portfolio Today.

Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Investment involves risk.

Lithium Ambitions.

Nigeria's lithium ambitions are gaining momentum with e-commerce startup Sabi facilitating deals to set up processing plants with Italy’s Snowball Holdings and the US-based “Transition Resources." These plants will process up to 1,000 tons of lithium daily, primarily for export to the US. This supports Nigeria's goal to add value to its critical minerals domestically, boosting export revenue and aligning with Africa's broader push to benefit more from the global clean energy transition.

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Google to Block Election Ads Post-Polls to Prevent Misinformation.

Google will block all election ads across its platforms starting November 5, after polls close, to prevent misinformation about voting and premature victory claims. This policy, first introduced in 2020, aims to reduce confusion as votes are counted post-Election Day. The ad pause will apply to U.S. election-related ads on platforms like Google Ads, YouTube, and Google’s Ad Exchange. The pause will lift in the weeks following the election.

🧰 AI Tools

Developer Tools II

• LMQL - LMQL is a query language for large language models.

• LlamaIndex - A data framework for building LLM applications over external data.

• Phoenix - Open-source tool for ML observability that runs in your notebook environment, by Arize. Monitor and fine-tune LLM, CV, and tabular models.

• Prediction Guard - Seamlessly integrate private, controlled, and compliant Large Language Models (LLM) functionality.

• Portkey - Full-stack LLMOps platform to monitor, manage, and improve LLM-based apps.