Welcome back to Daily Zaps, your regularly-scheduled dose of AI news ⚡️ 

Here’s what we got for ya today:

• 🤷‍♂️ Amazon’s fix for chatbot hallucinations

• 🗣️Voice agents from ElevenLabs

• 💻 Amazon Nova

•  🇨🇳 Chine strikes back on AI chip restrictions

Let’s get right into it!

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BIG TECH

Amazon unveils a fix for chatbot hallucinations

At AWS re:Invent 2024, Amazon unveiled new AI tools aimed at improving generative AI reliability and efficiency. One key feature, Automated Reasoning checks, helps reduce hallucinations by validating AI responses against customer-provided data, ensuring more accurate outputs.

Another innovation, Model Distillation, allows large AI models to transfer capabilities to smaller, cost-efficient models with minimal accuracy loss, while multi-agent collaboration enables AI agents to handle subtasks in larger projects, managed by a "supervisor agent" that coordinates workflows.

STARTUPS

Voice agents from ElevenLabs

Eleven Labs has launched a new Conversational AI platform that enables users to create custom voice agents for tasks such as outbound sales, scheduling, interactive game characters, tutoring, and customer support across 31 languages. Integrating various LLMs like GPT and Claude, the platform offers real-time rendering and flexibility to switch between models.

The platform includes a library of customizable voices, options to build unique voices, and the ability to clone users' own voices, making it a versatile solution for diverse applications.

BIG TECH

Amazon Nova

Amazon has introduced a new series of AI foundation models under the "Nova" brand, now available in the Amazon Bedrock model library on AWS. The lineup includes three text and multimodal understanding models—Nova Micro (optimized for speed and cost), Nova Lite (low-cost, multimodal), and Nova Pro (highly capable multimodal)—with Nova Premier, a more advanced model for complex reasoning, planned for early 2025.

Unveiled at the AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon also announced a massive AI compute cluster using Trainium 2 chips, expected to be the world's largest, in partnership with Anthropic. With AWS powering much of the internet, Amazon is leveraging its infrastructure and reputation to stay competitive in the AI race against companies like OpenAI.

GOVERNMENT

Chine strikes back on AI chip restrictions

The U.S. has imposed strict export controls on advanced semiconductor technology to hinder China’s AI and military advancements, prompting a sharp rebuke from Beijing, which called the measures an abuse of national security and a threat to global supply chains.

In retaliation, China banned exports of critical materials like gallium and germanium used in semiconductors, further escalating the tech rivalry. These moves underscore the growing tension between the two powers as the U.S. seeks to limit China’s technological ambitions while China invests heavily in self-reliance to bolster its position as a global tech leader.