Welcome, AI enthusiasts.

Everyone in the AI world is talking about Google’s Gemini — but apparently, Mark Zuckerberg isn’t a big horoscope guy.

Meta just charged ahead with its own updates, including a massive amount of new AI features and upgrades across its suite of social platforms. Let’s dig in…

In today’s AI rundown:

• Meta reveals major AI upgrades

• McDonald's uses AI to aid workers

• 9 new AI tools to try

• How to recreate any image with AI

• AI helps decode whale language

• Alibaba video AI relies on scraped TikTok clips

• Meta releases expressive voice translator demo

Read time: 3 minutes

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

META

🚀 Meta reveals major AI upgrades

Image source: Meta

The Rundown: Meta just revealed over 20 new AI-powered features in progress, spanning search, messaging, ads and more — plus upgrades to Meta AI assistant with a standalone image generator, IG Reels discovery, and more.

The details:

• New capabilities on Facebook and Instagram leverage Meta's Emu models to remix group images, edit posts, create marketplace listings, and suggest replies for creators.

• Meta AI gets more helpful responses, search result summaries, Reel recommendations, and more to upgrade users’ in-message experiences.

• Meta also launched its image generator Imagine as a standalone app — with invisible watermarks to increase transparency on AI images.

The relevance: Despite Yesterday being all about Gemini, Meta clearly didn’t get the memo — with a massive drop of features set to infuse AI even more across their social platforms. Zuck and co. continue to ‘just ship it’.

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MCDONALDS

🍔 McDonald's uses AI to aid workers

Image source: Getty Images

The Rundown: McDonald's is leveraging Google's generative AI tools to build digital upgrades — including an ‘Ask Pickles’ chatbot that provides restaurant employees guidance on equipment cleaning and maintenance.

The details:

• The ‘Ask Pickles’ chatbot will train on manuals and data from McDonald's locations to instantly answer worker questions.

• The chatbot is part of a broader tech overhaul using Google Cloud's edge computing to enable data gathering on everything from fryers to supply chains.

• McDonald’s already uses AI for ordering at 100 drive-thus, with plans to expand its usage.

• The massive amount of data from over 50,000 restaurants will be used to train AI models to continue optimizing systems and experiences.

Why it matters: AI thrives on large amounts of data — something that McDonald’s has no shortage of at its army of locations. With a reported over 40% of the company’s sales coming from digital channels, the fast-food giant is wisely doubling down on its tech infrastructure.

QUESTION OF THE DAY

TRENDING TOOLS

🤖 Deepgram- Introducing Aura, a powerful text-to-speech (TTS) API built for real-time conversations. Be the first to try Aura by joining the waitlist (link)*

🚀 Streak AI- The CRM co-pilot for teams in Gmail (link)

💽 TableFlow- Open-source CSV importer, alternative to Flatfile (link)

🦾 Kommunicate GenAI- Easily deploy generative AI bots on any platform (link)

🔍 Stey.ai- Using AI to analyze your user behavior replays (link)

💬 CopilotKit- Build in-app AI chatbots and AI-powered text areas (link)

📝 Never Jobless- Maximize your interview chances with AI-powered LinkedIn messaging (link)

⚡️ Notion AI- Your notes, on steroids. Access the limitless power of AI, right inside Notion (link)

🦾 Browse AI- Train a robot in 2 minutes to extract and monitor data from any website (link)

Browse the most popular tools ever featured with our tool database.

* = This is sponsored content

AI TRAINING

🎨 How to recreate any image with AI

Want to create your own cartoon avatar or an oil painting of a real image? It’s never been easier with the ability to upload images in DALLE-3. Follow the steps below to recreate any image in the style you want:

Analyze the photo: Upload the image and ask ChatGPT to describe it in detail.

Recreate it: Prompt DALL-E to generate a new version based on the previous description. You can ask for various styles or edits in any way you’d like — for the example below, we created an anime version of an uploaded Taylor Swift image.

Upscale resolution: After getting a generation you like, use AI photo enhancers like KREA or Magnific to sharpen details and boost quality.

With the power to upload, remake, remix, and enhance images, DALL-E turns inspirational photos into springboards for entirely new creations. Let your imagination run wild!

QUICK HITS

🐳 AI helps decode whale language

Are we about to be able to communicate with animals? Analysis aided by AI just revealed that sperm whale clicks contain recurrent vowel-like patterns and diphthongs — whale equivalents to human speech sounds. The research showcases AI’s promise in potentially cracking animal language mysteries.

🎥 Alibaba video AI relies on scraped TikTok clips

Alibaba researchers' new "Animate Anyone” AI clones TikTok dances — but is coming under fire for being trained on a dataset scraping popular TikTok creators without consent. The situation adds yet another case to the growing list of copyright and usage complaints surrounding AI training data.

🗣️ Meta releases expressive voice translator demo

Meta just released a demo of its ‘SeamlessExpressive’ model, which enables speech translation across languages while maintaining key elements like vocal style, tone, and expressions. Try it out with your own voice here.

💼 New jobs in the world of AI

Trust and Safety Analyst at Anthropic

Site Reliability Engineer at Hugging Face

Customer Success Manager at OpenAI

Browse all available AI job positions with our job board.

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THAT’S A WRAP

That’s it for today’s news in the world of AI!

If you have anything interesting to share, please reach out to us by sending us a DM on Twitter: @rowancheung & @therundownai

❤️ Rundown review of the day