a surreal scene where a robot kneels on the sand, facing an enormous wave. The wave itself seems to blend into a stormy sky, creating a seamless transition from sea to cloud. The water is a mix of deep blue and turquoise, with white foam highlighting its turbulent nature. The robot has his left knee on the ground and his right foot planted firmly. His right arm is extended upwards, offering a sheet of paper to the wave. More sheets of paper whirl around him, caught up in the wind and the pull of the water, some fluttering towards the sky and others towards the wave's crest. He is situated near the center of the composition, slightly to the right, with an open black briefcase beside him from which it seems the papers are being swept out. The sand around him is littered with additional papers. The sky above the wave is filled with dark, ominous clouds that blend into the wave, suggesting a powerful storm. The light source appears to come from the left, as evidenced by the highlights on the wave's crest and the robot's left side. Overall, the scene creates a dramatic and possibly metaphorical statement about challenges, nature's power, or feeling overwhelmed. The precise details and textures in the image lend a hyperrealistic quality to this surreal scenario.

AI News #24: Week Ending 03/15/2024 with Executive Summary, Top 36 Links, and Helpful Visuals

March 16, 2024

This week’s cover represents the sea of AI-generated content that could potentially overwhelm our ability to filter, process, and determine reality. Cowering beneath the coming wave is a robot, symbolizing the emergence of embodied AI. The font is Neue Machina Regular, which is the font used by Figure AI, a leader in embodied robotics in the news this week. The image is inspired by the art of Joel Rea, who paints photorealistic surreal images of businessmen standing in front of impending waves. Image prompted in MidJourney (in alt tag), upscaled using Magnific, and finished in Photoshop.

Executive Summary

Top Story – Talking With An Embodied Robot: The top story is the Figure 01 robot, which has an onboard neural network and OpenAI loaded onto it. Watch this robot have a conversation about its environment while completing untrained tasks, in real time.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq1QZB5baNw&t=6s
Covariant separately launches a second robot interaction model:
- “RFM-1 allows robot operators and engineers to instruct robots to perform specific picking actions using plain English. By allowing people to instruct robots without needing to re-program, RFM-1 lowers the barriers of customizing AI behavior to address each customer’s dynamic business needs and the long tail of corner case scenarios.”
Google DeepMind’s Video Game AI
- SIMA “can follow natural-language instructions to carry out tasks in a variety of video game settings”. Robots are going to be trained on video games for real world actions. The real Ender’s Game will feature an AI, not a kid.
Devin the first AI software engineer, is going to replace jobs: Cognition Labs released an AI agent that was able to pass practical engineering interviews from leading AI companies. Devin successfully completed tasks posted on Upwork, a freelance engineering job board. You can talk with Devin while it works in the background. Devin can learn new technologies, train itself, and run complex debugging. Must-watch video plus more in the links section, below.
Claude introduces the challenge of learning another LLM interface: Mac v. PC, iPhone v. Android. Now there’s Claude v. GPT. Casual AI users have been spoiled by OpenAI’s year-long dominance, but now we need to break open Claude and learn how to use it. Lots of examples in the links section below. Will you pay the $20/month to learn a second tool, or will OpenAI’s lead be the inertia keeping you from trying Claude? What if Claude is better?
AI content Will Flood The World
- The percentage of human content is going down from now on: “Now would be the time for archivists and librarians to begin separating post-2022 written and visual work from what was produced before. As I saw once on Twitter, “this is the K-T boundary of information.” Anything afterwards is increasingly unlikely to be made by humans.” –Ethan Mollick
- Finding truth will be daunting: “The true threat of AI generated content is not that it will convince us to believe things that aren’t true, it’s that we won’t believe anything unless it reinforces what we already think is true, or we’ll just disengage completely because the truth seems impossible to find.” –Eliot Higgins
- Science can’t keep pace: “Peer review isn’t built to handle the flood of AI content, especially as not all of it will be obvious, and not all will be malicious (lots of scholars pay editors to help make their writing better, now they will use chat). The system, already straining, won’t be able to adjust.” –Ethan Mollick
Five of this year’s Pulitzer finalists disclosed AI-assistance:
- “11% of the best pieces of journalism from the last year used AI in some way. This is evidence of the power of AI as a tool or co-intelligence – boosting the work of even great humans. Uses are likely boring, like transcription, which is the point. It does stuff you don’t want to.” –Ethan Mollick
- It’s the first time the awards, which received around 1,200 submissions this year, required entrants to disclose AI usage. –NiemanLab
OpenAI To Release Sora in 2024: In an interview with the WSJ Open AI shares that their groundbreaking and potentially disruptive text-to-video tool will be released this year. –The Verge
Human Extinction Risk: “Current frontier AI development poses urgent and growing risks to national security,” the report, which TIME obtained ahead of its publication, says. “The rise of advanced AI and AGI [artificial general intelligence] has the potential to destabilize global security in ways reminiscent of the introduction of nuclear weapons.” –Time
Adult Content AI Image Creation: It was a matter of time. ImgnAI launched a publicly available subscription-based adult content AI image creation tool.
Under Armour AI Commercial: “The 60-second spot, directed by Wes Walker, focuses on British boxer and UA endorser Anthony Joshua. No footage of Joshua was shot for the film. The voiceover was AI generated, using recordings of the athlete’s voice.” -AdAge
Amazon Launches AI Tools for Sellers: Amazon has launched AI tools to help sellers list their products. Be ready for a flood of AI copy.
AI Video Surveillance: “I don’t think people are appreciating what capabilities are possible when AI can reason over an entire video (or live video feed). I gave Gemini 1.5 a video of traffic and asked it to identify dangerous situations, and to guess the year of the video, and got accurate answers.” –Ethan Mollick
OpenAI PR Gaffe: OpenAI CTO Mira Murati drops the ball when asked if Sora trained on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram or Shutterstock video. She comes across as completely untrustworthy. Sadly, it’s must see video.
Apple published an incredibly open paper: Is Apple back to their old school roots? NVIDIA AI expert Jim Fan (of best TED Talk of 2023 fame) posted a rave review:
- “Apple, a company famous for its secrecy, published a paper with a staggering amount of details on their multimodal foundation model. Those who are supposed to be open are now wayyy less than Apple. MM1 is a treasure trove of analysis. They discuss lots of architecture designs and even disclose that they train on GPT-4V-generated data. They provide exact scaling law coefficients (to 4 significant figures), MoE settings, and even optimal learning rate functions. I have not seen this level of details from a big tech’s whitepaper for a very, very long time. Apple’s so back!” –Jim Fan
X to Open Source Grok: Elon posts that X will open source their chat bot, Grok, this week.
Consistent Images: Image creation tool MidJourney launched a powerful tool called “Character Reference”, overcoming one of AI imagery’s toughest hurdles. Examples in links below.
Morgan Stanley Names Head of AI: Quantitative trading is not new, but Morgan Stanley is turning AI inward with employee facing AI products to boost productivity.
Pinterest Using AI to Drive Inclusive Search Results: “The tool is powered by Pinterest’s patent-pending innovation, body type technology, which uses shape, size and form to identify various body types in over 3.5 billion images on the platform.“

AI Visuals and Charts: Week Ending 03/15/2024

Get ready to learn another language model. “Claude is challenging GPT4. Claude-3-Opus now shares the top-1* rank with GPT-4-Turbo, while Sonnet has surpassed GPT-4-0314.”

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/2024/03/15/agents-and-copilots-ai-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

Amazon News of The Week: Individual company products will often be 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 week’s latest Amazon AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/15/amazon-ai-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

Anthropic News of the Week:
Anthropic is a company that builds LLMs like OpenAI, Mistral, Meta, etc. Their main AI brand is Claude. As with Amazon and Apple, individual Anthropic company posts will often be 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 week’s Anthropic news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/15/anthropic-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

Apple News of the Week: As with Amazon, individual Apple company products will often be 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/2024/03/15/apple-ai-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/artificial-general-intelligence-agi-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/augmented-and-virtual-reality-ar-vr-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/autonomous-vehicles-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/ai-audio-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/business-and-enterprise-ai-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/chips-and-hardware-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/consumer-products-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/26/education-ai-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/ethics-legal-security-ai-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

Google AI News of the Week: Individual company products will often be 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/2024/03/15/google-ai-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/ai-imagery-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/international-ai-news-china-france-india-dubai-korea-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/meta-ai-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/microsoft-ai-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/multimodality-vision-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/openai-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/open-source-ai-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/ai-podcasts-youtube-op-eds-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/ai-publishing-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/robotics-and-embodiment-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/ai-science-and-medicine-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/ai-video-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/twitter-x-grok-week-ending-03-15-2024/

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/2024/03/15/ai-tech-and-development-news-week-ending-03-15-2024/

Credits/Sources

Most of these weekly links come from just a few prolific oversharing sources. Please follow them, as they work hard to find the news each week and they make it a lot easier for me to compile.