Bible Verses of the Day

8 Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, nor of me his prisoner, but share in suffering for the gospel by the power of God, 9 who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, 10 and which now has been manifested through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, [2 Timothy 1:8-10, ESV]

What's in this week's issue?

• 🤔 What does ‘open source AI’ mean, anyway?

• 🎒 How 2 high school teens raised a $500K seed round for their API startup (yes, it’s AI)

• ⛅️ Easy Cloud News

• 📰 AI News

• 🧰 AI Tools

The struggle between open source and proprietary software is well understood. But the tensions permeating software circles for decades have shuffled into the artificial intelligence space, in part because no one can agree on what “open source” really means in the context of AI.

The New York Times recently published a gushing appraisal of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, noting how his “open source AI” embrace had made him popular once more in Silicon Valley. By most estimations, however, Meta’s Llama-branded large language models aren’t really open source, which highlights the crux of the debate.

It’s this challenge that the Open Source Initiative (OSI) is trying to address, led by executive director Stefano Maffulli, through conferences, workshops, panels, webinars, reports and more.

While most teens their age would be living it up in their last summer before college or the adult jobs that await them, Christopher Fitzgerald and Van Landschoot are hunkered down in a VC office in Denver, Colorado.

They’re spending the summer working on their startup APIGen after they raised a $500,000 pre-seed investment from Varana Capital. The money was raised while they were still in high school after a prototype for their idea garnered a lot of interest among the large Boulder community of AI enthusiasts.

APIGen is working on a platform that will build custom APIs from natural language prompts. It will be able to, for instance, allow an e-commerce business to simply ask for an API that connects its web front end to its database, and the platform will deliver it.

Easy Cloud News

• 🌤️ Easy Cloud Solutions: Understanding Botnets: How They Fuel Cybercrime and Control Zombie Computers (link)

• ⛪️ Easy Cloud AI: Unlock the Benefits of Accurate Sermon Transcription for Ministries (link)

Listen or read the following transcript as Joel R. Beeke discusses enduring spiritual trials and temptations through faith in Christ, drawing from the biblical metaphor of “Satan’s sifting.” Beeke emphasizes the believer’s reliance on Christ’s strength and prayer to overcome these spiritual challenges, fostering resilience and faithfulness in difficult times.

The following unedited transcript is provided by Beluga AI.

AI News

• 🌎️ Accenture hits $2 billion in generative AI sales, expands global AI workforce (link)

• 🔓️ Hacker claims to have 30 million customer records from Australian ticket seller giant TEG (link)

• 🤑 Tesla makes Musk best-paid CEO of all time and Fisker bites the dust (link)

• 🥇 Anthropic claims its latest model is best-in-class (link)

• 🧑‍⚖️ Claude AI ‘is fully capable of acting as a Supreme Court Justice’ (link)

AI Tools

• 🌀 Spiral: Automate 80% of repeat writing, thinking, and creative tasks (link)

• 🦸 Demodesk: AI superpowers for sales meetings (link)

• 🎦 Descript: If you can edit text, you can make videos (link)

• 🌕️ Moonbeam: Never write from scratch again (link)

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