Hey everyone, welcome to another installment of What’s New in AI, the weekly newsletter summarizing trends happening in the world of artificial intelligence. Lots of news this week, from AI world takeovers, to company partnership deals and more. Let’s dive in:
AI Pessimism
The Bankless podcast hosted AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky for a conversation about the future of artificial intelligence. There was heavy pessimism throughout the full discussion, with points about AI escape velocity, superintelligence, and death of the human species by AI.
The podcast is over an hour long and goes deep into predictions on how AI will take over. It provides an interesting analysis of how the AI revolution may lead us into a dystopian future.
AI Partnerships Deals
There were two major partnerships announced between established companies and startups.
First up, AWS and HuggingFace partnered up to make it easier for customers to access popular machine learning models and create generative AI applications. With the partnership in place, they will be able to bring the technology to more customers.
This expanded strategic partnership enables Hugging Face and AWS to accelerate machine learning adoption using the latest models hosted on Hugging Face with the industry-leading capabilities of Amazon SageMaker. Customers can now easily fine-tune and deploy state-of-the-art Hugging Face models in just a few clicks on Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), taking advantage of purpose-built machine learning accelerators including AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia.
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Second, Bain and OpenAI are partnering together to further streamline solution delivery for clients across different industries.
Our services alliance with OpenAI brings clarity to the expanding array of its potential business applications, combining OpenAI’s technology with our deep understanding of business strategy and social responsibility.
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Spotify AI DJ
Spotify is launching a new feature called “DJ” - an AI powered personalized music experience.
Similar to a radio DJ, Spotify’s DJ feature will deliver a curated selection of music alongside AI-powered spoken commentary about the tracks and artists you like, using what Spotify says is a “stunningly realistic voice.”
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The question here is - will people want to listen to someone talking between tracks that they listen to, similar to a radio DJ? Or will they simplify prefer just hearing the track without interludes?
Tome Raises $43M
Tome, the AI powered story teller (slide deck generator) announced that they raised a $43M Series B round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. A huge round, especially in the current market conditions, for a pre-revenue startup.
AI Written E-Books
Over the last week there has been an influx of books released on Amazon’s Kindle that were written with GPT.
There were over 200 e-books in Amazon’s Kindle store as of mid-February listing ChatGPT as an author or co-author, including "How to Write and Create Content Using ChatGPT", "The Power of Homework" and poetry collection "Echoes of the Universe." And the number is rising daily. There is even a new sub-genre on Amazon: Books about using ChatGPT, written entirely by ChatGPT.
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With GPT in the mix, writing and releasing literature got a whole lot easier. The question is, will this help the creators, overwhelm the audience, or a bit of both?
Qualcomm Shows Off
Qualcomm released a demo video showcasing the power of their flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset. In the demo, the were able to run Stable Diffusion on a phone and generate a 512x512 pixel image in under 15 seconds
Getting big AI models running locally on mobile devices offers all sorts of advantages over relying on cloud compute. There’s convenience (you don’t need a mobile connection), cost (developers won’t charge users when the server bills come due), and privacy (running locally means you don’t send data to someone else’s computer).
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Fun Bites
Roblox, the online game platform, is introducing generative AI into their tooling to simplify the creation of 3D world experiences.
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A human player defeated a top-ranked AI system at the board game Go, to reverse the original 2016 computer victory that was seen as a milestone in the rise of artificial intelligence. The winner used a previously unknown flaw that had been identified by another computer.
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@DrJimFan showcased a paper from Carnegie Mellon University that proposed a method for transforming 2D drawings into 3D images & models.
@itsandrewgao built a project at the Stanford TreeHacks hackathon that monitored illegal fishing areas using satellite imagery, computer vision, and stable diffusion (for creating training data).
@LumaLabsAI added 3D NeRF rendering technology into their web video editor, check out the video here:
That’s all the highlights for this week. Here are some links to stay up to date with the latest in AI:
Twitter list of who I follow in AI - Twitter list
What’s New In AI Discord community - https://discord.gg/kApBrN8uqv
Join the Cerebral Valley movement - cerebralvalley.ai