AI news and funding updates from the last 24 hours(9th Jan 2025):

🏻 AI News, Developments, and Trends:

✅ Microsoft's new 14B-parameter Phi-4 model, now available on Hugging Face, outperforms much larger models like Llama 3.3 70B and GPT-4o Mini in benchmarks, showcasing its efficiency and reasoning capabilities. With a focus on curated high-quality data and support for ten Indian languages, Microsoft is betting big on India, including a $3 billion Azure expansion and AI training for 10 million people by 2030.

✅ Elon Musk's xAI launched a beta iOS app for its chatbot Grok, expanding access beyond X users and offering features like Q&A, text rewriting, and image generation. Musk and other experts agree the AI industry has exhausted real-world training data, driving a shift toward synthetic data for cost-efficient development and self-learning. Grok plans to introduce an "Unhinged Mode" for edgy, offensive responses, reflecting Musk's vision of unfiltered AI. However, Grok has faced criticism for leaning left on political topics, which Musk attributes to biased training data. Companies like Microsoft and Meta are also leveraging synthetic data to innovate AI systems.

✅ Google Deep Research, launched for Gemini subscribers, is an AI-powered tool designed for complex research tasks with customizable prompts and step-by-step research plans. It analyzes over 50 websites simultaneously, compiles findings with citations, and allows users to edit and export reports to Google Docs for further interaction. Ideal for market research and competitor analysis, it offers a free trial but is expected to cost $20/month with Gemini Advanced in 2025.

✅ In 2025, companies continue to struggle with practical AI applications, as highlighted at CES with gimmicky products like AI-powered spice dispensers and air fryers. CES also featured bizarre tech, including a robotic cat coffee cooler, a $1,350 smart espresso machine, and a heating/cooling gaming chair. Other oddities included a bird-detecting smart birdbath, a massive gaming console, and a $1,500 "In Case of Death" iPad bundle. These products reflect the gap between AI's potential and its often-hyped, impractical implementations.

✅ Halliday’s smart glasses, launching in March 2025, project a 3.5-inch display directly into your line of sight using a tiny module called DigiWindow, offering features like real-time language translation, phone notifications, and navigation. Sleek and camera-free, these $489 glasses prioritize functionality and style, but fitting issues and concerns about projecting light into the eye may give some users pause.

✅ François Chollet is co-founding the ARC Prize Foundation to develop benchmarks, like ARC-AGI, that test AI for "human-level" intelligence by solving novel problems. The nonprofit aims to advance progress toward artificial general intelligence (AGI) and plans to launch updated benchmarks, competitions, and partnerships with organizations like OpenAI to refine AI evaluations.

✅ San Francisco startup Based Hardware unveiled Omi, a $89 AI wearable designed to boost productivity, at CES 2025. The device, which can be worn as a necklace or taped to the head with a "brain interface," uses GPT-4o to answer questions, summarize conversations, and create to-do lists, while running on an open-source platform to address privacy concerns and support developer-built apps.

✅ Stanford engineers Tran Le and Sohit Gatiganti founded Grove AI to streamline clinical trial enrollment using generative AI. Their voice-based AI agent, Grace, pre-screens patients, schedules visits, and has already interacted with 70,000 patients, attracting $4.9 million in seed funding to further reduce bureaucratic hurdles and build advanced patient data management tools.