This week’s cover represents the coming wave of robot embodiment which will likely replace many existing jobs. However, the cover also hints at the temporal nature of these jobs themselves, as AI agents and software usurp human roles. Generated with MidJourney and upscaled with Magnifique. The font is American Typewriter from the title sequence of the hit TV show The Office, which ended after nine seasons.

Executive Summary

Google Releases “Genie” a robot trainer in disguise: The sneakiest big story of the week. If you’ve seen Jim Fan’s TED Talk, you know the future of AI is robotics. A robot revolution is taking place, and it’s being driven by training in virtual worlds. Google Genie is a virtual gaming “text-to-world” creator. While its novelty is an ability to create video games from text prompts, its secret power is to create training arenas for robots.
Humanoid Robots Are On Their Way: Figure AI, a humanoid robot company gets major funding from Jeff Bezos and Nvidia (adding to funding from OpenAI and Microsoft).
Look for small LLMs running locally on phones and devices: This week Meta proposed an open source model family called MobileLLM. Two major trends to watch this year are actually related: small local models running on devices (phones, assistants) and robots with small local models running ‘on device’ (aka the robot).
Apple Is Launching AI Tools in 2024: Apple’s Tim Cook announces “Apple will break new ground” with generative AI tools this year
Meta’s New AI Model Will Launch In July: Meta plans to launch a major upgrade to its open source LLM model, Llama 3 in July.
Publishers and Page Views Beware:
- Search engine volume is expected to drop by 25% and shift to answer engines (Perplexity) and AI chat (ChatGPT), according to Gartner. Since August, I have been shouting that publishers need to prepare for the death of the pageview
- Perplexity launches an AI news podcast with ElevenLabs
Meta is Building a Non-Invasive Brain Computer Interface: Meta is working on a “neuromotor interface” that lets you control a computer with your thoughts, through a non-invasive wristband.
Image to Video Is Off The Charts: The coolest release of the week. Alibaba released an incredible tool that animates single frames or images into rich speech videos. It has to be seen to be believed. Similarly, a competing company, Pika, released Lip Sync.
AI Impact on Jobs and Business:
- A company called Karma created a customer service bot and laid off 700 customer service reps.
- Tyler Perry paused his $800 million production studio expansion, after seeing OpenAI’s Sora videos.
OpenAI Sora Videos Continues to Blow Minds: OpenAI is releasing more demo videos each day, which increasingly blow away people’s conceptions of what is possible with AI video. See links section.
LTX Studio is End-to-End AI Storyboarding: LTX Studio is an end to end video storyboarding tool worth knowing about. Consistent characters and tones has been a challenge with AI imagery and video, and LTX Studio has these figured out.
Conversational AI Voices: Rima AI debuted a conversational audio engine called Mist that is essentially impossible to tell from human tones and inflections.
“Don’t Study Computer Programming”: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang makes headlines by saying kids should no longer study computer science. He suggests kids focus on other subjects like biology, chemistry, finance, etc.
AI for Finance: Microsoft introduces an AI agent for finance in Microsoft 365. It’s notable how quickly AI is crossing into the stricter office disciplines/apps from arts and writing to finance and math.
Elon Sues OpenAI: Elon Musk sues Open AI for “breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and unfair business practices”. It’s worth following the nuances, as they unfold in the following weeks. See links section.
No More Apple Car: Apple shutters its Apple Car project after spending billions to compete against Tesla.

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/2024/03/04/agents-and-copilots-ai-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

Amazon 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.
Nothing major regarding Amazon this week (other than funding Figure robotics). Here’s the archive: https://ethanbholland.com/category/ai/amazon/

Apple News of the Week: As with Amazon, individual Apple 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/2024/03/04/apple-ai-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/04/artificial-general-intelligence-agi-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/18/augmented-and-virtual-reality-ar-vr-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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.
This week’s autonomous vehicle news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/04/autonomous-vehicles-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/04/ai-audio-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/04/business-and-enterprise-ai-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/04/chips-and-hardware-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/04/consumer-products-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/04/education-ai-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/04/ethics-legal-security-ai-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/04/google-ai-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/04/ai-imagery-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

International AI News of the Week: A lot of international news will get cross listed in the chips, security, or open-source categories, however it’s nice to have a separate category for worldwide AI news.
This week’s latest international AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/04/international-ai-news-china-france-india-korea/

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/2024/03/04/locally-run-ai-models-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/04/meta-ai-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

Microsoft AI News of the Week: This is a space dedicated for Microsoft specific AI advancements and news stories.
This weeks Microsoft AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/04/microsoft-ai-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/04/ai-multimodality-vision-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/04/openai-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/04/open-source-ai-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/04/ai-podcasts-youtube-op-eds-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/04/ai-publishing-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/04/robotics-and-embodiment-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/04/ai-science-and-medicine-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/04/ai-video-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/04/twitter-x-grok-week-ending-03-01-2024/

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/2024/03/04/ai-tech-and-development-news-week-ending-03-01-2024/