This week’s cover celebrates a double feature: Google announced Gemini, a new AI with enough memory to upload and chat about an entire feature film or 70 books.  That same night, OpenAI revealed Sora, a generative video AI that can create photorealistic movies up to one minute in length.  The image shows a drive-in movie theater with a double feature of Sora and Gemini, representing the sunset of traditional media assumptions.  On either side is a series of film frames symbolizing what Sora and Gemini can do together as well as the derivative nature of pop culture influence.  I chose Euphoria from HBO, because it is based on an Israeli TV series. Gemini could load Euphoria and know that Jules’s angel costume references Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by way of Shakespeare. Gemini would also know that Fez looks a lot like Mac Miller.  Fez and Lexi watch “Stand By Me”, which is based on a novel by Stephen King.  Sora could create a movie set in 1959 with angel youth walking down a train track.  Sora’s demo is a Shiba Inu playing in the snow, and Sora could easily turn the dog into an angel. The images were created in MidJourney, and the fonts are Ohm Bold and Neue Haas Grotesk to mimic the Euphoria title sequence.

Executive Summary

The two top stories this week are OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Gemini.  Both were announced the same day, and they are considered the biggest public AI releases since GPT4 in March 2023.  Sora is a photorealistic text-to -video AI and Gemini is a powerful multimodal AI able to hold entire feature films or up to 70 novels in its memory and mine them for data via plain conversation or even hand-drawn notes.  Be aware that there are over 350 links in the full newsletter and 39 top links.  It was another busy week in artificial intelligence.  Here’s the executive overview:

  • Google Gemini 1.5: “Gemini can find a challenge message 99.7% of the time, even in a sea of 7M words” “The new version of Gemini holds 30,000 double-spaced pages in memory at the same time. Up to 1 hour of video.”  An English major in college could load their entire year of reading into Gemini and find trends across 70 works of literature.  Police departments could run loops of minute-long clips from 60 cameras at a time and conversationally ask the AI to tell them what’s happening in all the videos at once.  If you are a creative person, your mind is racing.
  • OpenAI Sora: Speaking of creative ideas… “Introducing Sora, our text-to-video model. Sora can create videos of up to 60 seconds featuring highly detailed scenes, complex camera motion, and multiple characters with vibrant emotions.”  The examples (links below) are incredible.  Nvidia’s Jim Fan says, “If you think OpenAI Sora is a creative toy like DALLE, … think again. Sora is a data-driven physics engine. It is a simulation of many worlds, real or fantastical. The simulator learns intricate rendering, ‘intuitive’ physics, long-horizon reasoning, and semantic grounding.”
  • OpenAI Agents: Buzz continues around OpenAI’s next project, agents that can use your computer, surf the web, and complete complex tasks. Brace yourself for fall 2024. I’m old enough to remember “before the internet” and “before cell phones”.  Everyone reading this is living through another one of those moments.
  • Proprietary Training Data Doesn’t Matter: New models are being successfully trained on synthetic data. This harkens to Jim Fan’s TED talk that AGI will be born from virtual reality and our reality will simply be an extension of what the AI thinks is pretend.
  • Nvidia Value Skyrockets: Nvidia is now worth as much as the whole Chinese stock market.
  • Open Source Will Change Everything: Open Source AI models are closing in on GPT4 level performance. They will be incredible at hacking, SQL injections, scamming, and phishing.  
  • Sam Altman Owns the OpenAI Venture Fund: “Sam Altman isn’t just the CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI. He’s also the owner of OpenAI Startup Fund, which Altman once called a “corporate venture fund,” according to federal securities filings.”
  • Nvidia Chatbot Runs On Your Device: Nvidia just released Chat with RTX, an AI chatbot that runs locally on your PC.
  • AI is Teaching Itself: Google launched an internal AI to write code.  Meta released a model that can learn and model the real world by watching videos.
  • Chat GPT4 Personalization: OpenAI is rolling out memory for GPT4, so the AI will learn and adapt to your personal style.
  • Andrej Karpathy Leaves OpenAI: Andrej is one of the top thinkers in AI, and his departure from OpenAI is not controversial, but everyone wants to know what he will do next.  Rumors are he wants to make an entire operating system that runs on AI – goodbye, iOS and Windows. 
  • The Future of Publishing: Websites and banner ads may go away in a few years.  Legacy publishers are resentful.  My assumption is subscription models will be important, and unique storytelling will rule.  Data like weather and sports scores may lose value.  A big open question will be what margin will look like (it keeps shrinking) and how to scale enough to be worth the investments.

Top 39 Links 

These are the must-click links, in order,  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.   Watch all the Sora videos.  

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/2024/02/26/agents-and-copilots-ai-news-week-ending-02-09-2024-2/

Apple 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 or a major product release.
This weeks’ latest Apple AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/02/26/apple-ai-news-week-ending-02-16-2024/

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) News of the Week: Artificial General Intelligence, in a nutshell, is when artificial intelligence is able to beat humans at everything (including embodying physical forms and completing physical tasks).  It’s usually a thought catalyst for predictions, like when AGI will occur. 10 years? 25 years? 100? AGI is an event horizon that is tough to define, tough to imagine, and tough to predict. OpenAI defined AGI in its charter as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work”. OpenAI has a section of its website dedicated to AGI. Google’s DeepMind published my favorite report on the five levels of artificial intelligence on the way to AGI (see also here).
This week’s latest Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/02/26/artificial-general-intelligence-agi-news-week-ending-02-16-2024/

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/2024/02/26/augmented-and-virtual-reality-ar-vr-news-week-ending-02-16-2024/

Autonomous Vehicles/Driverless Cars News of the Week: Driverless car news doesn’t always get its own category, because it’s so close to robot embodiment. I go with my gut each week around what to place in each category. My recommendation would be to follow Robotics/Embodiment also, as the two fields are converging.
No major news this week: here are the category archives

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/2024/02/26/ai-audio-news-week-ending-02-16-2024/

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/2024/02/26/business-and-enterprise-ai-news-week-ending-02-16-2024/

Chips and Hardware AI News of the Week: Most of the chip news is NVIDA usually, yet more and more Meta, Google, and OpenAI are starting toward their own manufacturing. I have to make the call whether to put Meta, Google, and OpenAI’s chip news under this section or their company sections. Lately, I’m putting each company’s chips news into the company category, rather than the chips category. This is the rest of the chips headlines.
This weeks’s latest chips and hardware news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/02/26/chips-and-hardware-week-ending-02-16-2024/

Consumer Electronics AI News of the WeekThis 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: Nothing major this week, but here is the category archive.

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/2024/02/26/education-ai-news-week-ending-02-16-2024/

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/2024/02/26/ethics-legal-security-ai-news-week-ending-02-16-2024/

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/2024/02/26/google-ai-news-week-ending-02-16-2024/

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/2024/02/26/ai-imagery-news-week-ending-02-16-2024/

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/2024/02/26/locally-run-ai-models-news-week-ending-02-16-2024/

Meta AI News of the WeekThis is a space dedicated for Meta specific AI advancements and news stories.
This weeks Meta AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/02/26/meta-ai-news-week-ending-02-16-2024/

Microsoft AI News of the WeekThis is a space dedicated for Microsoft specific AI advancements and news stories.
This weeks Microsoft AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/02/26/microsoft-ai-news-week-ending-02-16-2024/

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/2024/02/26/ai-multimodality-vision-news-week-ending-02-16-2024/

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/2024/02/26/openai-news-week-ending-02-16-2024/

Open Source Models: An open source AI model refers to a class of artificial intelligence models with public source code. They can be inspected, copied, installed, and customized on private computers. In contrast, a closed source model is proprietary and owned by a company that you pay to use (like PowerPoint or Photoshop). One of the most famous open source language models is a French model called Mistral. Its code is completely publicly available, and anyone can download it and customize it. On one hand, open source is a transparent and powerful way to democratize AI, but on the other hand, open source models circumvent the guard rails and copyright protections that private companies implement. Open source models are the wild west of artificial intelligence, but also the potential saving grace (depending on who you ask). It’s a bit like gun control debates but for computing power.
This weeks’s latest open source news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/02/26/open-source-ai-news-week-ending-02-16-2024/

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/2024/02/26/ai-podcasts-youtube-episodes-week-ending-02-16-2024/

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/2024/02/26/ai-publishing-news-week-ending-02-16-2024/

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 like autonomous vehicles. 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/2024/02/26/robotics-and-embodiment-news-week-ending-02-16-2024/

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/2024/02/26/ai-science-and-medicine-news-week-ending-02-16-2024/

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/2024/02/26/ai-video-news-week-ending-02-16-2024/

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 Meta, Google, Apple, and OpenAI, X will be in the news enough to have its own section.
This week’s latest X news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/02/26/twitter-x-grok-week-ending-02-16-2024/

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/2024/02/26/ai-tech-and-development-news-week-ending-02-16-2024/

Credits/Sources

Most of these links come from just a few incredible sources.  Please follow them:

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