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The AI war between Google and OpenAI has never been more heated

Over the past month, we've seen a rapid cadence of notable AI-related announcements and releases from both Google and OpenAI, and it's been making the AI community's head spin. It has also poured fuel on the fire of the OpenAI-Google rivalry, an accelerating game of one-upmanship taking place unusually close to the Christmas holiday.

"How are people surviving with the firehose of AI updates that are coming out," wrote one user on X last Friday, which is still a hotbed of AI-related conversation. "in the last <24 hours we got gemini flash 2.0 and chatGPT with screenshare, deep research, pika 2, sora, chatGPT projects, anthropic clio, wtf it never ends."

Rumors travel quickly in the AI world, and people in the AI industry had been expecting OpenAI to ship some major products in December. Once OpenAI announced "12 days of OpenAI" earlier this month, Google jumped into gear and seemingly decided to try to one-up its rival on several counts. So far, the strategy appears to be working, but it's coming at the cost of the rest of the world being able to absorb the implications of the new releases.

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Salesforce plans to hire 2,000 people to sell its AI products

Cloud software giant Salesforce is looking to hire thousands of new salespeople to sell its AI tools to customers. The company plans to hire 2,000 new sales representatives, according to CNBC, which cited remarks from CEO Marc Benioff at a company event Tuesday. This doubles the hiring plans that Benioff shared with Bloomberg last month. […]

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Google goes β€œagentic” with Gemini 2.0’s ambitious AI agent features

On Wednesday, Google unveiled Gemini 2.0, the next generation of its AI-model family, starting with an experimental release called Gemini 2.0 Flash. The model family can generate text, images, and speech while processing multiple types of input including text, images, audio, and video. It's similar to multimodal AI models like GPT-4o, which powers OpenAI's ChatGPT.

"Gemini 2.0 Flash builds on the success of 1.5 Flash, our most popular model yet for developers, with enhanced performance at similarly fast response times," said Google in a statement. "Notably, 2.0 Flash even outperforms 1.5 Pro on key benchmarks, at twice the speed."

Gemini 2.0 Flashβ€”which is the smallest model of the 2.0 family in terms of parameter countβ€”launches today through Google's developer platforms like Gemini API, AI Studio, and Vertex AI. However, its image generation and text-to-speech features remain limited to early access partners until January 2025. Google plans to integrate the tech into products like Android Studio, Chrome DevTools, and Firebase.

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Google unveils Project Mariner: AI agents to use the web for you

Google unveiled its first-ever AI agent that can take actions on the web on Wednesday, a research prototype from the company’s DeepMind division called Project Mariner. The Gemini-powered agent takes control of your Chrome browser, moves the cursor on your screen, clicks buttons, and fills out forms, allowing it to use and navigate websites much […]

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Amazon forms an AI agent-focused lab led by Adept’s co-founder

Amazon says that it’s establishing a new R&D lab in San Francisco, the Amazon AGI SF Lab, to focus on building β€œfoundational” capabilities for AI agents. The Amazon AGI SF Lab will be led by David Luan, the co-founder of AI startup Adept, and will seek to build agents that can β€œtake actions in the […]

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