Weekly AI Booms｜Musk's xAI going debut, Nvidia Invests in Recursion, Bard got a huge upgrade and more

This week, the AI war is heating up! Elon Musk announced the debut of a new AI company, xAI, with the goal to “understand the true nature of the universe.” Additionally, Nvidia jumped to a record high after an interesting $50 million investment in biotech firm Recursion Pharmaceuticals. Let's delve into some of the most significant stories this week.

Elon Musk Says xAI Will Use Twitter Data and Work With Tesla

Elon Musk on Friday said his new artificial intelligence company, xAI, will use public tweets from $Twitter(TWTR)$ to train its AI models and work with Tesla on AI software.

The billionaire, who owns Twitter and runs Tesla , said during a Twitter Spaces audio chat that a relationship between his companies would have "mutual benefit" and could accelerate Tesla's work in self-driving capabilities.

Nvidia Invests $50 Million in Recursion to Train AI Models for Drug Discovery

Nvidia invested $50 million to speed up training of biotech firm Recursion's artificial intelligence models for drug discovery, which the chip designer can then potentially license out, the companies said on Wednesday.

Recursion will train AI models on Nvidia's cloud platform using its own biological and chemical datasets exceeding 23,000 terabytes.

Google's Bard AI Chatbot Adds More Languages to Take on ChatGPT

Google is betting a new version of its artificial-intelligence chatbot will say hallo, olá and bonjour to broader adoption, part of its effort to keep up in the high-stakes race to commercialize generative AI, the technology behind ChatGPT.

The Alphabet unit plans Thursday to add several new features to Bard, its generative-AI chatbot, including the ability to converse in 43 additional languages, from Arabic to Vietnamese. The company will also make Bard available across much of Europe and in Brazil, territories that are home to hundreds of millions of people.

Amazon Touts Its Low-Cost Cloud Computing in Generative AI Race

A key way that Amazon's cloud division aims to set itself apart from rivals perceived to have a leg up on artificial intelligence is by competing on price, an executive said on Tuesday.

The AI models behind a viral chatbot like ChatGPT require immense computing power to train and operate, the kinds of costs Amazon Web Services (AWS) is good at lowering, said Dilip Kumar, vice president overseeing its applications group.

TSMC Sales Ride AI Demand Boost to Beat Estimates

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. reported better-than-expected sales on a boom in artificial intelligence applications demanding more of the industry-leading firm’s chipmaking capacity.

Second-quarter sales totaled NT$480.8 billion ($15.3 billion) according to Bloomberg’s calculations, compared to an average analyst estimate of NT$476.2 billion. Revenue in June came in at NT$156.4 billion.

Shopify to Launch AI Assistant for Merchants

Canadian ecommerce firm Shopify said on Wednesday it would soon launch an artificial intelligence assistant for merchants on its platform, the latest technology company to roll out such a feature.

The assistant called "Sidekick" would be embedded as a button on Shopify and answer merchant queries, including details about sales trends, CEO Tobi Lutke illustrated in a video posted on Twitter.

Salesforce to Raise Prices Across Product Offerings

Salesforce on Tuesday said that in August it will raise list prices an average of 9% across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Industries and Tableau.

The company noted that the last list price increase was seven years ago, and since then it has provided 22 new releases, thousands of new features — including recent generative AI innovations — and invested over $20B in research and development.

IBM Mulls Using Its Own AI Chip in New Cloud Service to Lower Costs

International Business Machines $(IBM)$ is considering the use of artificial intelligence chips that it designed in-house to lower the costs of operating a cloud computing service it made widely available this week, an executive said Tuesday.

In an interview with Reuters at a semiconductor conference in San Francisco, Mukesh Khare, general manager of IBM Semiconductors, said the company is contemplating using a chip called the Artificial Intelligence Unit as part of its new "watsonx" cloud service.

AI Stock Performances for The Week: