🤴AMD Fights for Nvidia’s AI Crown

Today we will discuss:

• Sponsored: Alumnium—The only open-source AI test automation library for both web and mobile

• Brium joins AMD’s AI arsenal—Brium’s tools could make it easier to use AMD chips for AI

• Don’t miss this week’s Workflow Wednesday—work smarter with AI using SheetsResume to generate a polished resume in minutes, plus write sharper messages with Grammarly AI in Gmail and Slack, and clean up stale GitHub branches automatically with GPT and Make.com; now available at only $20/month! 

• The AI agent wars begin—Perplexity’s CEO urges open access and warns against Big Tech lock in

• In other AI news—Sundar Pichai downplays AI job loss fears and highlights Alphabet’s growth plans, Hugging Face unveils a robotics model that runs on a MacBook, ChatGPT adds meeting recordings and cloud tool integrations, and Amazon commits $10B to new AI-focused data centers in North Carolina

• Saved the best for last—9 must-try AI tools

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AMD’s new acquisition targets Nvidia’s stronghold in AI hardware

Key Points 

• AMD’s acquisition of Brium could help make AI software compatible with more hardware, not just Nvidia’s GPUs.

• Brium builds tools to make AI inference run across various chips easing developer reliance on Nvidia specific systems.

🤖News - AMD has announced the acquisition of Brium, a lesser known AI startup focused on software optimization for machine learning models. While the terms of the deal were not disclosed the move is a strategic one. 

🤓Here’s how - Brium’s work centers on enabling AI inference the process of applying trained models to new data across a variety of hardware  not just the dominant Nvidia chips.

Here it's worth noting that a lot of AI software today is built specifically for Nvidia hardware, which has made it harder for alternatives like AMD’s Instinct GPUs to compete on equal footing.

Brium’s tools help make existing AI models more flexible so they can run effectively on other hardware platforms too. AMD says this supports its commitment to building an open high performance AI ecosystem that empowers developers.

Brium’s only public blog post published last November directly called out this Nvidia centric ecosystem and highlighted the performance potential of AMD’s hardware. It also pointed out the difficulty developers face when trying to repurpose their models for anything other than Nvidia.

🤔Why it matters - This is AMD’s fourth AI focused acquisition in two years following deals with Silo AI, Nod.AI, and Mipsology. Each one reflects the company’s long term goal of reducing Nvidia’s dominance and opening up the AI space to more competition.

Read the full story here.

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Perplexity CEO says AI agents are the future of the web

Key Points 

• Srinivas believes AI agents will replace traditional app-based workflows, if given the access they need to function.

• He says platforms like iOS and Android limit agent capabilities by restricting access to native and third-party apps. 

☕News - Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas believes AI agents will define the next generation of computing. While some see ecommerce as their killer use case, he argues agents can enhance everything from shopping to scheduling. “It’s about what’s best for the user,” he says.

Perplexity’s partnership with Motorola reflects its focus on reaching users where they already are. Srinivas insists their goal isn’t to build hardware, but to integrate a trustworthy assistant into daily life, especially on mobile. Accuracy and trust, he says, will be what set agents apart, not just flashy capabilities.

🚧A major obstacle - App compatibility. Most platforms, including Android and iOS, restrict what AI can access. “If apps opened up APIs,” says Srinivas, “agents could handle everything from booking a ride to ordering food without switching apps.”

🧐The chrome question - Srinivas also pushed back on OpenAI’s interest in taking over Chrome, calling it a threat to the open web. “OpenAI and open source are an oxymoron,” he says. If Google ever had to divest, Perplexity might step in but only to preserve the browser’s open-source foundation.

🔜What’s next? In the near term, agents may become most useful for personal, repetitive tasks: recalling content, summarizing social feeds, or handling calendar conflicts. Srinivas says the tools aren’t perfect but neither were self-driving cars at first.

Read the full story here.