AI News #16: Week Ending 01/19/2024 with Executive Summary and Top 16 Stories

February 4, 2024

This week’s cover depicts a person staring out into nothingness. It represents the unknown fate of authenticity, interfaces, and business. The font was suggested by ChatGPT. I asked GPT4, “What is a font that could go with this image?” GPT4 replied, “For an image that evokes starkness, sadness, loneliness, and emptiness, you’d want a font that complements these themes without overwhelming the visual message. A font that is minimalist, perhaps with a touch of elegance or melancholy, would work well. Josefin Sans: This font has a geometric, elegant design with a vintage feel. Its clean lines and Scandinavian simplicity can add a touch of melancholy to the image without detracting from its starkness.” The MidJourney prompt was simple, to reflect starkness:” iphone photo of a man looking out into nothingness –ar 16:9 –v 6.0 –style raw.” I changed the date format in the title to yyyy/mm/dd, my preference.

Executive Summary

Here are the top stories to know, at a high level. I’m showcasing the ones I feel are most important and underreported.

Make a PowerPoint in 47 Seconds: Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick highlights that Microsoft Office’s Copilot can generate a full PowerPoint with speaker notes from a Word document in just 47 seconds.
AGI Rapidly Approaching: Experts are increasingly predicting the arrival of artificial general intelligence within seven years, with few expecting it later than 2070—when today’s first graders will be 51 years old.
Google Killer and App Killer Unite: AI company Perplexity, dubbed the ‘Google killer,’ has partnered with Rabbit, the ‘app store killer’ hardware device. Satya Nadella called the Rabbit launch demo the best product pitch since the iPhone. If you want to see the future, follow Perplexity and Rabbit for clues.
Meta is All-in On AI: Meta is training LLaMa 3 on the equivalent of 600,000 top of the line H100 cloud clusters (worth $20 billion).
HeyGen Video Clones: Now w/ Audio, Video, Language, and Clothes Swapping: HeyGen advances its avatars—photo-realistic video clones—by enabling AI-driven clothing swaps and brand alignment. Now… you can clone and swap voices, languages, bodies, and clothing. It’s incredible.
Elon Will Fold Your Laundry: Elon Musk’s robot “Optimus” has incredible dexterity and can fold laundry.
Foley Artists, Look Out: A company called SonicVision can take a silent video and use AI to add sound effects (doors closing, footsteps, cars passing). It’s startlingly good.
Roblox Sneaking Up on VR: If user bases matter, “kids gaming platform” Roblox is in pole position with more active users per month than people living in the US. Roblox is often talked about as a target for Disney or Meta acquisition.
Google Geometry Bot: AlphaGeometry from Google Deep Mind, is rivaling human gold medalists in solving Olympiad geometry math problems, without any human demonstrations.
Complex Image Creation: A project from Google allows people to save images as objects and refer to them in prompts. This is a huge advancement for complex image creation. An example could be “<me> wearing <Kanye boots> on a ski slope with <Tom> <Gerald> and <my dog>”.
Sam’s Club AI Receipt Checker: Sam’s Club is going to launch AI object recognition to check receipts as people exit the store without human assistance.
Page Views and Browsers May Become Extinct: Publishers are recognizing that browsers and page views may become obsolete. Nikita Roy suggests that the way forward may be to create original “multimodal” content, i.e. not the written word.
Sleeper Agents: Anthropic AI trained LLMs to act secretly malicious. They found that, despite their best efforts at alignment training, deceptions slipped through.
Virtual Surgery: AR/VR surgery is FDA approved (and looks better than real life)

Top Sixteen Links

These are the must-click links if you only have time for a few. Even if they look boring, click them! I did the work, so you don’t have to worry. All are 10/10 would recommend.

Pop video created with AI (the song already existed but is so esoteric that it seems like AI also) (여자)아이들 ((G)I-DLE) – ‘퀸카 (Queencard)’
- https://youtu.be/23FeTYIdxh4?si=Y60lhWqqfctMOLI2
Flying a radio-controlled jet with VR headtracking
- https://twitter.com/bilawalsidhu/status/1747783612836053236
Optimus folds a shirt
- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1746964887949934958
SonicVisionLM can generate sound effects for videos. It uses vision language models (VLMs) to identify events within videos and generate sounds that match the video content.
- https://twitter.com/dreamingtulpa/status/1747547441014993042
PALP: Prompt Aligned Personalization of Text-to-Image Models Using HTML style tags to dynamically build complex personal images with AI. (watch the demo video, it will make sense)
- https://prompt-aligned.github.io/
Remixing in –v 6 is so much better than –v 5.2 (worth a look at swapping consistent images)
- https://twitter.com/nickfloats/status/1748101984672993736
FDA-cleared, AI-powered Augmented Reality platform for surgeries (this is crazy!)
- https://twitter.com/MGalvosas/status/1748700907049746794
HeyGen releases new avatars. Team Branding Kits enable you to maintain a consistent feel, ensuring a unified brand voice and appearance to keep your business messaging aligned. New Generative Outfits. Perhaps the most jarring of all. HeyGen is one to watch.
- https://twitter.com/HeyGen_Official/status/1747697831207485541
Introducing Multi Motion Brush. Control multiple areas of your video generations with independent motion. A breakthrough for AI image animation.
- https://twitter.com/runwayml/status/1747982147762188556
Sam’s Club announces it will stop checking receipts and start using AI at exits
- https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2024/01/12/sams-club-uses-ai-at-exit/72201366007/
Bill Gates: My conversation with Sam Altman. Worth watching.
- https://www.gatesnotes.com/Unconfuse-Me-podcast-with-guest-Sam-Altman
Peplexity partners with Rabbit. We’re thrilled to announce our partnership with Rabbit: Together, we are introducing real-time, precise answers to Rabbit R1, seamlessly powered by our cutting-edge PPLX online LLM API, free from any knowledge cutoff.
- https://twitter.com/perplexity_ai/status/1748104763470680181
“Increasingly finding that the one thing that most makes managers panic about AI is showing them, not the advanced features of GPT-4, but rather the fact that Copilot for Office can create an OK PowerPoint with speaker notes from a document in 47 seconds.”
- https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1748495692933317077
Midjourney’s —v 6 style tuner will be very interesting. It’ll work like an image prompt, applying the style of the image referenced to any prompt. (another great demo)
- https://twitter.com/nickfloats/status/1748039999264584016
“Baidu denies any ties to reported Chinese military training on its GenAI chatbot. Scientists say they’re training a military system based on Baidu’s Ernie Bot. The Chinese tech giant refutes having any links to such research.”
- https://www.zdnet.com/article/baidu-denies-any-ties-to-reported-chinese-military-training-on-its-genai-chatbot/
Nikita Roy is the first journalist (I’ve seen) to echo the page view/UX challenges ahead… “The coming year will be defined by the increasing prominence of generative AI search, which offers AI-generated summaries and responses to user inquiries in a conversational format. This will decimate search traffic for news media. In response to the risks from generative AI and its effects on the journalism business model, publishers will need to rethink the news.”

AI kills the one-size-fits-all model

The Rest: AI News of The Week

I’m breaking out the rest of the news into separate posts. Don’t let the volume overwhelm you. Have fun and skim them. The links on each page are organized by topic, sorted from ‘coolest’ to ‘least cool’, and each topic is clearly defined with a headline. I’ve added a description and glossary of what the topics mean, beneath each label, in plain language. I do the work so you don’t have to! When you visit the pages, note that the links and descriptions are often pulled directly from tweets or articles, so it’s not always my voice. Pause when you see something that interests you. Reach out to me any time. I enjoy sharing and discussing these items.

Agency/Agents/Copilots News of the Week: Agency is when AI can do things for you (like Googling an actress name or fetching the latest weather forecast). An agent is one step further, when AI given autonomy to take action on your behalf (“Alexa, book a reservation for three at Peak in Hudson Yards for Friday night”). A co-pilot is an assistant (like spell check or autofill).
- This weeks’s latest agent news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/21/agents-and-copilots-ai-news-week-ending-01-19-2024/
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) News of the Week: Loosely speaking, artificial general intelligence refers to when AI can beat humans at everything, and we potentially lose control of the narrative. More formally, OpenAI defines AGI as “when highly autonomous systems outperform humans at most economically valuable work”.
- This weeks’s latest AGI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/20/artificial-general-intelligence-agi-news-week-ending-01-19-2024/
Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) News of the Week:Augmented reality is when you see images or information on top of the real world. A car windshield with a heads-up display of the speed. Or glasses that have facial recognition and overlay the names of everyone in view. Virtual reality is when you are transported into another place, usually wearing goggles, but a flight simulator could also be considered virtual reality.
- This weeks’s latest AR/VR news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/20/augmented-and-virtual-reality-ar-vr-news-week-ending-01-19-2024/
AI Audio News of the Week: In this case, AI audio can mean a few things. The first is “generative audio” which refers to creating sounds with AI, much like ChatGPT writes words or MidJourney creates images. For example, asking for the “sound of waves crashing on the beach” would be text to sound. Another example would be an AI ‘watching’ a video and adding sound to it, like a foley artist would add footsteps or a creaking door to a movie scene. Lastly, AI audio can refer to microphones that only pick up certain speaker’s voices or headsets that cancel out all voices but your friends.
- This week’s latest AI audio news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/20/ai-audio-news-week-ending-01-19-2024ai-audio-news/
Business/Enterprise AI News of the Week: This broad category is for stories that impact corporations and large scale AI implementation. Enterprise refers to a type of AI that is often custom built for a business or leverage an API to connect secure data to an AI model.
- This weeks’s latest enterprise AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/20/business-and-enterprise-ai-news-week-ending-01-19-2024/
Consumer Electronics AI News of the Week: This is a broad category meant to capture end user tools and products that incorporate artificial into their feature, from high-end grills to smartphones.
- This weeks’s latest consumer AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/20/consumer-goods-ai-news-week-ending-01-19-2024/
Education AI News of the Week: There is a lot of buzz around the impact of AI in education. This section focuses both on the risks and rewards of how AI can impact learning. It’s broader than just K-12 and includes things like skills, trade, professional, and higher education. This is not about how to learn AI, it’s about AI’s impact on learning.
- This weeks’s latest education news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/20/education-ai-news-week-ending-01-19-2024/
Ethics/Legal/Security AI News of the Week: This section focuses on the impact AI is having on ethics (deep fakes, war, trust, false information, plagiarism, job loss, income), legal (rights, laws, regulations), and security (hacking, phishing, national interests, safety). For huge news stories like the NY Times suing OpenAI, I usually put them under the main section or give them their own page.
- This weeks’s latest AI ethics/legal/security news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/20/ethics-legal-security-ai-news-week-ending-01-19-2024/
AI Imagery News of the Week: AI imagery covers “generative AI” image tools. This usually text-to-image, where a user enters a prompt (“a polar bear walking through NYC”) and a tool like Dalle or MidJourney generates an image in the likeness of the description. This is different than AI vision, where an AI “looks at” an image and can derive context, details, and contents. AI vision is a subset of AI called multimodality. Imagery, in this case, is for image creation and modification/editing. Adobe Photoshop’s AI tools would fall into this category. I’ll also include things like automatic masking and object removal, even though that’s in between imagery and vision… but practically speaking it fits into editing.
- This weeks’s latest AI image news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/20/ai-imagery-news-week-ending-01-19-2024/
Locally Run AI Models News of the Week: This is a niche mostly for serious AI followers. It refers to AI that can be privately downloaded and run on a device without an internet connection. These have an array of powerful implications, from ethics of rogue users with untethered agents, to practical uses like Apple running a full AI on your phone, to corporate installations for security, to embodied robots with AI running in their virtual brain.
- This weeks’s latest locally run AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/20/locally-run-ai-news-week-ending-01-19-2024/
Meta AI News of the Week: This is a space dedicated for Meta specific AI advancements and news stories.
- This weeks Meta AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/20/meta-ai-news-week-ending-01-19-2024/
Podcast/YouTube Clips of the Week: This is for more general interviews and explainer videos and podcasts that provide access to leadership, demos of new products, and walkthroughs and tutorials. Videos focused on specific topics will live in the topic category (i.e. images), but broader videos will live here.
- This weeks’s latest podcasts and YouTube clips: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/20/ai-podcasts-youtube-episodes-week-ending-01-19-2024/
Publishing AI News of the Week: These are stories about AI’s impact on the publishing industry. From copyright and crawling to the death of page views or even the end of browsers.
- This weeks’s latest publishing AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/20/ai-publishing-news-week-ending-01-19-2024/
Robotics/Embodiment News of the Week: This is the most intense area of AI. Embodiment refers to putting an AI inside of a machine. It’s “embodying” the object and therefore giving a robot agency in the real world. An example would be using a large language model as an interface to a complex coding task. Just as you ask “Alexa, play Bad Blood by Taylor Swift on Spotify” using plain language, with embodiment you could ask a robot to “Go to the laundry basket and bring me all of the red shirts”. The language model in the robot would translate your request into the proper code to go get the red shirts. The robot was never trained on the task. Another type of embodiment would be training a robot using virtual reality simulations. Using an simulation, a robot could be trained on thousands of scenarios until the real world can be swapped out and the robot doesn’t “notice”. This section also includes factory automation and human prosthetics. There will be some overlap with other categories. I first learned about embodiment from Alan Thompson. I highly recommend his video explainer: https://youtu.be/peLqYP9BAUg?si=2FzrvDlw-qaQFaCx.
- This week’s latest robot and embodiment AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/20/robotics-and-embodiment-news-week-ending-01-19-2024/
Science/Medicine AI News of the Week: AI’s strength is learning patterns. This applies nicely to medical diagnosis and identifying trends. When combined with data and AI vision, this means AI is good at looking at x-rays. Language models are helping with patient interface, and robotics and augmented reality are advancing surgery. Powerful enterprise models like Google’s Alphafold can master protein folding. Other models can read ancient scrolls without opening them.
- This weeks’s latest AI science and medicine news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/20/ai-science-and-medicine-news-week-ending-01-19-2024/
AI Video News of the Week: AI video in this case refers to generative video. Much like imagery meant generative imagery. This usually text-to-video, where a user enters a prompt (“a wizard walking out of a flaming building”) and a tool like Pika or Runway generates an video in the likeness of the description. It also covers animation of still images, where an image is given motion (like a photo of a waterfall appearing to have flowing water). As with images, this is different than AI vision, where an AI “looks at” an image or video and can derive context, details, and contents. Video, in this case, is video creation and modification/editing.
- This weeks’s latest AI video news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/20/ai-video-news-week-ending-01-19-2024/
AI Vision News of the Week: AI is getting better at “seeing” what is in an image. Reading signs, understanding what objects are present, knowing the context and emotions, and predicting what might happen next. This is part of a broader topic called “multimodality”. It’s one of the coolest and most important areas of AI development.
- This weeks’s latest news in AI vision: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/20/ai-vision-multimodality-news-week-ending-01-19-2024/
Technical and AI Developer News of the Week: Everything that is too technical for general consumption goes here. These are stories I think are important, but might be inaccessible and confusing. It’s also a space for developer news and deep dives into how AI works, under the hood.
- This weeks technical and dev AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/20/ai-tech-and-development-news-week-ending-01-19-2024/