This week’s cover image depicts Wintermute from “Neuromancer” on the beach from “WestWorld”, playing a clip of Lumiere from “Beauty and The Beast”. This ties into a groundbreaking TED talk released this week, by researcher Jim Fan, who explains that virtual training will lead to real life robotic embodiment. It also ties into Disney’s new 360 degree treadmill and the name of Google’s new text-to-video tool, Lumiere. The image is from MidJourney and the font is Presicav, same as the “WestWorld” logo.

Executive Summary

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

The most significant story by far is a TED talk from last fall, released this week, highlighting a breakthrough where robots can train in virtual worlds – simultaneously in countless numbers. These worlds operate at a speed 100 times faster than ours. Once a robot has mastered 10,000 virtual worlds, we simply give it a 10,001st world… ours. To a robot, our world is just another VR practice run. This is a “Top 5 of the Year” video.
- Researcher Jim Fan presents the next grand challenge in the quest for AI: the “foundation agent,” which would seamlessly operate across both the virtual and physical worlds. He explains how this technology could fundamentally change our lives — permeating everything from video games and metaverses to drones and humanoid robots — and explores how a single model could master skills across these different realities.
- https://www.ted.com/talks/jim_fan_the_next_grand_challenge_for_ai
Amazon created an incredible tool that allows shoppers to “virtually place any e-commerce item in any setting, ensuring detailed, semantically coherent blending with realistic lighting and shadows.” It’s truly incredible
- https://twitter.com/_akhaliq/status/1750737690553692570
OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, is seeking to raise significant funding, possibly billions or even trillions, to produce specialized chips.
As of this week, Google Bard is competing neck and neck with GPT4 on benchmarks. It’s officially “a horse race”.
A report out of Davos says, “Within 10 years, around 95% of the world’s top tech companies will be American thanks to the U.S. lead in AI. “
Deep fakes are popping up in meaningful ways. A Biden clone told voters to skip the primaries. Taylor Swift was humiliated by pornographic deep fakes. The era of misinformation is worsening.
AI audio translation and video dubbing is improving incredibly quickly. If you don’t know ElevenLabs and HeyGen, it’s time to discover them.
Google launched a second video tool that can reference an image and create endless videos in the same style (for example: neon glows, watercolor, dark evening hues).
The Pentagon is testing AI-powered swarm drones and ships, and completed an autonomous amphibious landing.
GPT-4 beat Stanford School of Medicine students in free-response case questions.

The Rest: AI News of The Week

Don’t let the volume overwhelm you. Have fun and skim them. The links 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/2024/02/05/agents-and-copilots-ai-news-week-ending-01-26-2024/

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/2024/02/05/augmented-and-virtual-reality-ar-vr-news-week-ending-01-26-2024/

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/2024/02/05/ai-audio-news-week-ending-01-26-2024/

Business/EnterpriseAI 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/2024/02/05/business-and-enterprise-ai-news-week-ending-01-26-2024/

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/2024/02/05/education-ai-news-week-ending-01-19-2024-2/

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/2024/02/05/ethics-legal-security-ai-news-week-ending-01-26-2024/

Google AI News of the Week: Individual company products will often by placed in the categories they match (image, audio, agents, robots, etc). Occasionally, I’ll dedicate space to a company’s news if it’s broad
This weeks’s latest Google AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/02/05/google-ai-news-week-ending-01-26-2024/

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/2024/02/05/ai-imagery-news-week-ending-01-26-2024/

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/2024/02/05/locally-run-ai-models-news-week-ending-01-26-2024/

Multimodal AI News of the Week: This is a broad topic for an single AI model that demonstrates an ability to interact with more than one modality (imagery, video, audio, text). Often multimodal news will end up in one of these categories. I’m playing it by ear on a case by case basis. Please be patient with my organizational challenges.
This week’s multimodal AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/02/05/multimodal-ai-model-news-week-ending-01-26-2024/

OpenAI: OpenAI is the leading force in the AI boom of 2023 and now 2024. This section focuses on news that is specific to OpenAI. This section will compete with all of the other sections (imagery, vision, ethics, etc) because OpenAI is so broad. I won’t be able to consistently pick when to put things under OpenAI or other sections, so bear with me.
This weeks’s latest OpenAI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/02/05/openai-news-week-ending-01-26-2024/

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/2024/02/05/ai-podcasts-youtube-episodes-week-ending-01-26-2024/

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/2024/02/05/ai-publishing-news-week-ending-01-26-2024/

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/2024/02/05/robotics-and-embodiment-news-week-ending-01-26-2024/

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/2024/02/05/ai-science-and-medicine-news-week-ending-01-26-2024/

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/2024/02/05/ai-video-news-week-ending-01-26-2024/

X/Twitter/Grok: Grok is one of several AI’s developed by X, and it’s a bit blended in with Telsa and other Elon Musk technology. Not every week will have a Grok section, but like OpenAI, Apple, and Google, X will be in the news enough to have its own section.
This week’s latest X news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/02/05/twitter-x-grok-week-ending-01-26-2024/

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/2024/02/05/ai-tech-and-development-news-week-ending-01-26-2024/