Happy leap year day everyone, very excited to bring you a special once-in-a-4 year edition of ThursdAI ? (Today is also Dune 2 day (am going to see the movie right after I write these here words) and well.. to some folks, this is the bull market ₿ days as well. So congrats to all who weathered the bear market!)This week we had another great show, with many updates, and a deep dive, and again, I was able to cover most of the news AND bring you a little bit of a deep dive into a very interesting concept called Matryoshka Representation Learning (aka ? embeddings) and two of the authors on paper to chat with me on the pod! TL;DR of all topics covered: * AI Art & Diffusion & 3D* Playground releases a new diffusion foundational model Playground V2.5 (DEMO)* Alibaba teasing EMO - incredible animating faces (example)* Ideogram 1.0 announced - SOTA text generation (Annoucement)* Open Source LLMs * Gemma update - hard to finetune, not better than 7B mistral* LLama 3 will release in June 2024, not anytime soon* Starcoder 2 + stack V2 (Announcement)* Berkeley Function-Calling leaderboard Leaderboard (Announcement)* Argilla released OpenHermesPreferences the largest open dataset for RLHF & DPO (Announcement)* STORM from Stanford to write long documents (Thread)* Big CO LLMs + APIs* Mistral releases Mistral Large & Le Chat (Announcement, Le Chat)* Microsoft + Mistral strike a deal (Blog)* Google teases GENIE - model makes images into interactive games (announcement)* OpenAI allowing fine-tune on GPT 3.5* Wordpress & Tumbler preparing to sell user data to OpenAI & Midjourney* Other* Mojo releases their MAX inference engine, compatible with PyTorch, Tensorflow & ONNX models (Announcement)* Interview with MRL (Matryoshka Representation Learning) authors (in audio only)AI Art & Diffusion Ideogram 1.0 launches - superb text generation! Ideogram, founded by ex google Imagen folks, which we reported on before, finally announces 1.0, and focuses on superb image generation. It's really great, and I generated a few owls already (don't ask, hooot) and I don't think I will stop. This is superb for meme creation, answering in multimedia, and is fast as well, I'm very pleased! They also announced a round investment from A16Z to go with their 1.0 release, definitely give them a tryPlayground V2.5 Suhail Doshi and Playground release a new foundational image model called Playground v2.5 and it looks awesome, very realistic and honestly looks like it beats MJ and DALL-E on many simple prompts.They also announced that this model received higher user preference scores based on 1K prompts (which we didn't get to see) but they have released this model into the wild, you can download it and play with a free demo provided by modal folksAnother SORA moment? Alibaba teases EMO ? (website)Ok this one has to be talked about, Alibaba released quite a few preview videos + paper about something called EMO, a way to animate a talking/singing Avatars from just 1 image. It broke my brain, and I couldn't stop staring at it. Honestly, it's quite quite something. This model animates not only the mouth, eyes are blinking, there are emotions, hairs move, even earrings, and the most impressive, the whole Larynx muscle structure seem to be animated as well! Just look at this video, and then look at it again. The Github repo was created but no code released and I really hope we get this code at some point, because animating videos with this fidelity + something like SORA can mean so many possible creations! I wrote this tweet only two weeks ago, and I'm already feeling that it's outdated and we're farther along on the curve to there with EMO, what a great release! And just because it's so mind-blowing, here are a few more EMO videos for you to enjoy: Open Source LLMs Starcoder 2 + The Stack V2Folks at hugging face and BigCode have released a beast on us, StarCoder 2 ⭐️ The most complete open Code-LLM ? StarCoder 2 is the next iteration for StarCoder and comes in 3 sizes, trained