Bible Verses of the Day

8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. [Philippians 2:8-11, ESV]

What's in this week's issue?

• 💸 Amazon says it’ll spend $230 million on generative AI startups

• 🇪🇺 Meta delays AI launch in Europe as it faces complaints over data protection

• ⛅️ Easy Cloud News

• 📰 AI News

• 🧰 AI Tools

Amazon says that it will commit up to $230 million to startups building generative AI-powered applications.

The investment, roughly $80 million of which will fund Amazon’s second AWS Generative AI Accelerator program, aims to position AWS as an attractive cloud infrastructure choice for startups developing generative AI models to power their products, apps and services.

Much of the new tranche — including the entire portion set aside for the accelerator program — comes in the form of compute credits for AWS infrastructure, meaning that it can’t be transferred to other cloud service providers like Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

To sweeten the pot, Amazon is pledging that startups in this year’s Generative AI Accelerator cohort will gain access to experts and tech from Nvidia, the program’s presenting partner. They will also be invited to join the Nvidia Inception program, which provides companies opportunities to connect with potential investors and additional consulting resources.

Meta has postponed the launch of its AI models in Europe following guidance from Ireland’s privacy regulators to delay its plans to use data from Facebook and Instagram users, according to the U.S. social media company’s announcement on Friday.

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) requested that the tech giant delay training its large language model on behalf of the European data protection authorities. Meta said on its site that it was “disappointed” by the decision.

“This is a step backwards for European innovation, competition in AI development and further delays bringing the benefits of AI to people in Europe,” the company said.

The decision to delay its AI model launch in Europe was due to objections and a plea from the advocacy group NOYB (“none of your business”) last week to data protection authorities in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Spain to intervene against the company.

Easy Cloud News

• 🌤️ Easy Cloud Solutions: Loft Labs: Unleashing the Power of Virtualization on Kubernetes Clusters (link)

• ⛪️ Easy Cloud AI: Spread the Word: Beluga’s Sermon Transcription Service for Effective Outreach (link)

Listen or read the following transcript as Kent Hughes examines Genesis 2:18–25, discussing the biblical foundation of marriage. He emphasizes the complementary roles of man and woman, the significance of the marital bond, and how marriage reflects God’s design and purposes.

The following unedited transcript is provided by Beluga AI.

AI News

• 🍎 Apple's artificial intelligence is firmly rooted in reality (link)

• 👋 Flexible piezoelectric sensors are essential to monitor the motions of both humans and humanoid robots (link)

• 🎲 AI in casino games: A whole new world waiting to be dealt (link)

• 😟 Helen Toner, former OpenAI board member, worries ‘not super functional’ Congress will flub AI policy (link)

• 🤖 MIT News: Researchers use large language models to help robots navigate (link)

AI Tools

• ⚡️ Figstack: Understand and document code lightning fast (link)

• 🧑‍💼 Textio: Meet the new performance review (link)

• 🧠 2ndBrain: Say goodbye to writer’s block and hello to creative freedom (link)

• 💻️ AIxCoder: Develop efficiently and enjoy programming fun (link)

• 🐋 Beluga: Christian sermon and lecture transcripts, translations and more (link)