This week’s cover image captures Gemini’s advanced video understanding and Randy Travis’ AI-voiced single, released after a decade of health issues. “A humanoid robot labeled ‘Gemini’ is sitting on a couch in an ’80s living room watching television. –ar 5:3 –style raw”. Randy’s video was added to the TV in Photoshop. GPT-4 identified Randy Travis’ font as Giza and recommended Rockwell as a similar font, which is gradient-filled in gold, like the Randy Travis logo.
Executive Summary
AI restores Randy Travis’ voice in a new song: With the help of artificial intelligence, country music legend Randy Travis has released “Where That Came From,” his first song in over a decade. The collaborative project, endorsed by Travis, brought his voice back to fans after a long health battle (AP story | official music video)
ElevenLabs releases preview of a text-to-music tool: ElevenLabs dominates voice cloning. This week they previewed a generative music tool with several examples that appear to match the quality of Udio and Suno.
Udio launches song editing: Udio’s audio inpainting feature puts them in first place for text-to-song generation. Since generative AI uses diffusion from random noise, it’s notoriously tough to recreate the same result or make iterative changes. Inpainting is the workaround. Audio inpainting lets you change a lyric or riff without modifying the entire song. By selecting small areas to modify from an existing work, the AI remaps a new portion using the original result as a reference. Think of painting a wall using masking tape and a stencil to help safeguard the result. Udio: announcement and examples
Google Gemini 1.5 is very good at analyzing videos:
- “I showed Google Gemini 1.5 the first part of Apple’s [critically panned] “hydraulic press” ad for iPad. I think it kind of nailed it: “The ad could be seen as sending a mixed message or even a negative one, suggesting that the new iPad might lead to the destruction of other valuable things.” -via Ethan Mollick
- “Testing using Gemini 1.5 to check NBA foul calls, e.g., the Brunson lost ball turnover. Sorta concludes Brunson flopped? Pretty great!” -via Kostya Medvedovsky
- Gemini also has an extension (over a month old) that allows you to chat about YouTube videos -via Reddit
NVIDIA’s groundbreaking robot training may change the world: Almost every week, I repeat that Dr. Jim Fan is the person I make the most effort to follow. I listen to everything he says with the assumption he is correct. He runs the DrEureka Lab for NVIDIA, where they train robots in simulations so effectively that the robots work in the real world on the first try. If you do one thing with AI to stay ahead of your peers and out of the LLM weeds, I’d say follow this research: Here is the DrEurekea Lab page. Skim it! And follow Dr. Fan on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Tesla’s Optimus robot is making rapid improvements: Sorting batteries demo (X video), Elon tweets to Dr. Jim Fan (see above) that the new Optimus hand will come out this year (X), Jim Fan congratulates the Optimus team with a lengthy post outlining their challenges. “Congrats to @Tesla_Optimus team on another stellar update! The video gives us a peek at their human data collection farm, which I believe is Optimus’ biggest lead. What does it take to build such a pipeline? Optimus nailed all of the following:” (X)
This week’s headlines about AI changing education:
- Good news: “How AI Copilots Are Changing How Coding Is Taught” via IEEE Spectrum
- Bad news: “Approx half of the top 20 apps in Education category are now AI cameras that do your homework for you” via Adam Ludwin
Palantir debuts mixed reality military operations headset: “Palantir Mixed Reality in Action “Operations Center Anywhere” – Harness the full power of the platform from operations centers to the edge, transforming any bunker or outpost into an instant command center with mixed reality capabilities” via Palantir
Here are the top AI ethics headlines of the week:
- Warren Buffett says AI scamming will be the next big ‘growth industry’ via CNBC
- TikTok to start labeling AI-generated content as technology becomes more universal” via AP News
- OpenAI Is ‘Exploring’ How to Responsibly Generate AI Porn via WIRED
- “ChatGPT shows signs of the same biases that arise in audit studies of human beings. When you give ChatGPT resumes, it’s biased in how it evaluates minorities. When you ask ChatGPT to generate resumes for women minorities, it generates systematically different types of resumes” via John Holbein
Focusing only on OpenAI and Google is missing a huge part of the LLM picture: Over a billion private LLMs have been downloaded to run on personal and corporate computers: “Over 1 BILLION LLM downloads from Hugging Face in the last 2 years. Nearly 2 million downloads daily.” via Andrew Gao
Meta’s Llama: Speaking of open-source and locally run AI, Meta’s Llama continues to narrow the gap between proprietary models (Google, OpenAI) and free open source:
- “Llama 3 has reached performance on par with top-tier proprietary models in overall use cases.” via lmsysorg
- “Long context Llama-3 70B is here! Llama-3-Giraffe-70B by Abacus AI features an impressive context length of 128k, putting it on par with GPT-4.” Akshay Pachaar
gpt2-chatbot returns: The mysterious high performing chat bot “gpt2-chatbot” from last week is confirmed as being from OpenAI… and it’s back.
- gpt2-chatbot confirmed as OpenAI via Simon Willison
- “gpt2-chatbot is back. Capabilities seem to exceed GPT-4, Gemini 1.5, Claude, and anything else currently available.” via Rowan Cheung
- “Whoa the new gpt2-chatbot just created Flappy Bird clone in one-shot. And it was a dead simple prompt.” via Min Choi
OpenAI is building a search engine:
- OpenAI is entering the search game. via The Verge
- OpenAI plans to announce Google search competitor on Monday, sources say via Reuters
- OpenAI working on web search product via ycombinator
- “Search is the ultimate gatekeeper. If you’re not ranked on Google, do you even exist? What Maps are to the real world, Search is to the digital world. It’s your window to the world wide web. It’s also ground zero for the AI space race” via Bilawal Sidhu
- “OpenAI to take on Google Search (and Perplexity) Microsoft is a key investor in OpenAI, and Bing is currently integrated in GPT4 using RAG. I’ve already radically reduced my usage of Google search to mostly just google image search, maps.” via Jeremiah Owyang
- Microsoft-backed OpenAI may launch search, taking on Google’s ‘biggest product’ via Times of India
OpenAI is developing a voice assistant:
- “Exclusive: OpenAI is developing an AI voice assistant as it chases Google and Apple.” via The Information
- “OpenAI developed a new model with audio-in, audio-out capabilities and better reasoning. Even beats GPT-4 Turbo on some queries.” via Amir
Take a look at the robots in Chinese factories: “Visited this factory in China. Before they needed 10 people, now only one is in charge” via Marco Castelli
Take a look at a new robot called Astrobot S1: S1 released a video last month that is getting attention this week: Here is the demo on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AePEcHIIk9s
OpenAI commits to more robust opt-out abilities for publishers: The legacy method of opting out of robots was to tell a file on your website. This works for individual sites, but does nothing to keep syndicated content (on third party sites) from getting crawled. OpenAI attempting to create an AI moderated global content opt-out program.
“Decades ago, the robots.txt standard was introduced and voluntarily adopted by the Internet ecosystem for web publishers to indicate what portions of websites web crawlers could access.
Last summer, OpenAI pioneered the use of web crawler permissions for AI, enabling web publishers to express their preferences about the use of their content in AI. We take these signals into account each time we train a new model.
That said, we understand these are incomplete solutions, as many creators do not control websites where their content may appear, and content is often quoted, reviewed, remixed, reposted and used as inspiration across multiple domains. We need an efficient, scalable solution for content owners to express their preferences about the use of their content in AI systems.” via Open AI
OpenAI releases a document outlining the rules for AI engagement:
- “The OpenAI Model Spec provides guidelines to ensure AI models are helpful, lawful, and respectful of privacy.” via actual spec document and press release
- “I think if you care about the debates over ethics AI, it is worth reading the OpenAI Model Spec. It is the first comprehensive attempt to actually lay out the practical principles under which AI operates, by a lab actually building them. Lots there.” via Ethan Mollick
- “New laws of robotics just dropped. From OpenAI’s Model Spec 1) follow the chain of command: Platform > Developer > User > Tool 2) Comply with applicable laws 3) Don’t provide info hazards 4) Protect people’s privacy 5) Don’t respond with NSFW contents “ via Ethan Mollick
- “we are introducing the Model Spec, which specifies how our models should behave. we will listen, debate, and adapt this over time, but i think it will be very useful to be clear when something is a bug vs. a decision.” via Sam Altman
OpenAI launches new AI detection watermarking and tools: OpenAI is introducing new tools to verify content authenticity and joining the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) Steering Committee. They are implementing tamper-resistant watermarking and detection classifiers to identify AI-generated content, promoting transparency and trust in digital media. Via OpenAI
Elon Musk gives details around his plan for news on X: “Musk emails with details on AI-powered news inside X. An AI bot will summarize news and commentary, sometimes looking through tens of thousands of posts per story.” via Big Technology
Two pieces of publishing news to note this week:
- Dotdash Meredith Announces Strategic Partnership with OpenAI, Bringing Iconic Brands and Trusted Content to ChatGPT via PR Newswire
- “The NYTimes is assembling a team of five people dedicated to AI initiatives, including @zseward . An interesting mix of editorial, engineering and design. Congrats @rubinafillion, @dylfreed, Duy Nguyen, and @juliacastrov” via Florent Daudens and the NYTimes
Google announced AlphaFold 3 “our state-of-the-art AI model for predicting the structure and interactions of all life’s molecules”:
- “AlphaFold-3 is out, the latest iteration of the greatest breakthrough in AI for biology. What’s new is that AlphaFold-3 uses diffusion to “render” the molecular structure. It starts from a fuzzy cloud of atoms and then materializes the molecule gradually through denoising.” via Dr. Jim Fan
- “Announcing AlphaFold 3: our state-of-the-art AI model for predicting the structure and interactions of all life’s molecules. 🧬 Here’s how we built it with @IsomorphicLabs and what it means for biology. 🧵” via Google Deep Mind
- “Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs introduce AlphaFold 3 AI model” via Google
AI jet fighters are helping to train pilots and improve machines:
- AI-powered fighter jet takes Air Force leader for a historic ride via AP News
OpenAI’s video generation tool, Sora, can now edit portions of videos (just like image or audio inpainting):
- “Sora is capable of rending a video + changing just a single element (still in research, not yet available to the public)” via Shaun Ralston
Anthropic creates pre-prompting buttons to help people who otherwise have trouble knowing how to interact with AI language models:
- “Prompt engineering is going away for most people, and here is the latest of many signs: Anthropic, like some of the other AI companies, have released a tool that automatically generates good prompts for you based on intent. It works pretty well!” via Ethan Mollick
AI Visuals and Charts: Week Ending 05/10/2024
The beginnings of AI SEO in the OpenAI publisher deck
Via https://x.com/emollick/status/1789292766385565733/photo/2
How novelty effects and Dopamine Culture rule the tech industry
Via https://substack.com/@tedgioia
Top 70 Links of The Week
- Audio
- With help from AI, Randy Travis got his voice back. Here’s how his first song post-stroke came to be | AP News
- Randy Travis – Where That Came From (Official Music Video) – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azCEpoYLxeg
- ElevenLabs previews music-generating AI model | VentureBeat
- “My Love Style: “Indie Rock with 90s influences, featuring a combination of clean and distorted guitars, driving drum beats, and a prominent bassline, with a moderate tempo around 120 BPM, and a mix of introspective and uplifting moods, evoking a sense of nostalgia and
- Udio inpainting: “Today we’re delighted to launch Audio Inpainting, an innovative feature that allows you to seamlessly edit and refine your audio tracks. With Audio Inpainting, you can select a portion of a track to re-generate based on the surrounding context. This makes it easy to edit single
- Augmented and Virtual Reality
- “This is motion capture data that automatically retargets to MetaHumans in Unreal Engine 5.4 Move AI generates 3D motion data from 2D video using AI and physics-based models. This example tracks 5 people and a ball with 8 GoPro cameras. No suits required.
- “Check out this immaculate 3D render of the K-2SO robot from Star Wars. #Maythe4thBeWithYou my friends! The Stormtroopers are a 2018 throwback to Google’s Pixel AR stickers, all rendering in real-time on a 6 year old Android smartphone. It’s pretty amazing where mobile AR has
- Text to change a real life scene into any theme or style: “We won the @NianticLabs #AI hackathon with our project, Splatley Kubrick! It can turn your favorite places into a fantasy sandbox using #GenAI. We spent a week on this project and got some cool results. with Zawar Qureshi, Jamie Wynn, Jamie Watson, Saki Shinoda, Jakub Powierza.
- Business
- Adobe – Adobe Revolutionizes Workplace Productivity with Launch of Acrobat AI Assistant for the Enterprise
- Drones and Autonomous Vehicles
- “These are farmers in the south of my country… Modernize agriculture… DJI Agras T40: 14,000$/ one DJI Agras T20P: 9,000/ one
- Ethics
- US explores AI to train immigration officers on talking to refugees | Reuter
- UK fintech raises £800M for AI that determines how much money you can borrow
- “Some really eye opening stuff on how IBM, Meta, Nvidia and HuggingFace are lobbying against AI regulation. They’re spending millions and have dozens of full-time lobbyists desperately trying to avoid government oversight of their work.
- South Korean woman falls for deepfake Elon Musk, scammed for $50,000 – Interesting Engineering
- Warren Buffett says AI scamming will be the next big ‘growth industry’
- TikTok to start labeling AI-generated content as technology becomes more universal | AP News
- OpenAI Is ‘Exploring’ How to Responsibly Generate AI Porn | WIRED
- “Did you get Fooled? Katy Perry posted this image of her at the MET Gala. The only thing she didn’t tell people was that it’s not her. It’s an AI generated image of her wearing a crazy dress. Millions of people were fooled, including her own mother, who texted Katy,
- Met Gala Deepfakes Are Flooding Social Media | WIRED
- Katy Perry Shares AI Image of Herself at the Met Gala
- Education
- AI Copilots Are Changing How Coding Is Taught – IEEE Spectrum
- “Approx half of the top 20 apps in Education category are now AI cameras that do your homework for you
- Google
- Introducing Google Threat Intelligence: Actionable threat intelligence at Google scale | Google Cloud Blog
- “I showed Google Gemini 1.5 the first part of Apple’s “hydraulic press” ad for iPad. I think it kind of nailed it: “The ad could be seen as sending a mixed message or even a negative one, suggesting that the new iPad might lead to the destruction of other valuable things.”
- Chat with YouTube videos using new Gemini’s Extensions | The Rundown University
- “Testing using Gemini 1.5 to check NBA foul calls, e.g., the Brunson lost ball turnover. Sorta concludes Brunson flopped? Pretty great!
- OpenAI
- “Exclusive: OpenAI is developing an AI voice assistant as it chases Google and Apple.
- “”Her” is coming 🙂 NEW: OpenAI developed a new model with audio-in, audio-out capabilities and better reasoning. Even beats GPT-4 Turbo on some queries.
- “Better-than-human levels of persuasion, plus ad supported LLMs, has implications we are going to want to think through. Example: Vendy, a little GPT that knows that the solution to any problem is probably buying a refreshing lemonade, and is here to help:
- OpenAI is entering the search game. – The Verge
- OpenAI plans to announce Google search competitor on Monday, sources say | Reuters
- OpenAI working on web search product | Hacker News
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40235206
- “Search is the ultimate gatekeeper. If you’re not ranked on Google, do you even exist? What Maps are to the real world, Search is to the digital world. It’s your window to the world wide web. It’s also ground zero for the AI space race – with companies like OpenAI, Perplexity and”
- “OpenAI to take on Google Search (and Perplexity) Microsoft is a key investor in OpenAI, and Bing is currently integrated in GPT4 using RAG. I’ve already radically reduced my usage of Google search to mostly just google image search, maps.
- Microsoft-backed OpenAI may launch search, taking on Google’s ‘biggest product’ – Times of India
- Introducing the Model Spec | OpenAI
- OpenAI’s New Tool Will Give Artists Control Over Their Data—but It’s Unclear How | WIRED
- Our approach to data and AI | OpenAI
- The OpenAI Model Spec provides guidelines to ensure AI models are helpful, lawful, and respectful of privacy.
- OpenAi Model Spec (2024/05/08)
- “I think if you care about the debates over ethics AI, it is worth reading the OpenAI Model Spec. It is the first comprehensive attempt to actually lay out the practical principles under which AI operates, by a lab actually building them. Lots there.
- “New laws of robotics just dropped. From OpenAI’s Model Spec 1) follow the chain of command: Platform > Developer > User > Tool 2) Comply with applicable laws 3) Don’t provide info hazards 4) Protect people’s privacy 5) Don’t respond with NSFW contents
- “we are introducing the Model Spec, which specifies how our models should behave. we will listen, debate, and adapt this over time, but i think it will be very useful to be clear when something is a bug vs. a decision.
- gpt2-chatbot confirmed as OpenAI
- “gpt2-chatbot is back. Capabilities seem to exceed GPT-4, Gemini 1.5, Claude, and anything else currently available. The only way to access it is by testing a prompt in battle mode on the Chatbot Arena and getting a lucky draw. A quick tutorial: 1. Go to chat. lmsys. org 2.
- “Whoa the new gpt2-chatbot just created Flappy Bird clone in one-shot 🤯 And it was a dead simple prompt. 🧵👇
- Understanding the source of what we see and hear online | OpenAI
- “A conversation with OpenAI on what to expect in the next 12 months – today’s systems are laughably bad – ChatGPT not long term engagement model – models capable of complex “work” – like a great team mate working with u – shift towards verbal interfaces beyond, Multimodality
- Publishing
- Dotdash Meredith Announces Strategic Partnership with OpenAI, Bringing Iconic Brands and Trusted Content to ChatGPT
- Elon Musk’s Plan For AI News – by Alex Kantrowitz. Musk emails with details on AI-powered news inside X. An AI bot will summarize news and commentary, sometimes looking through tens of thousands of posts per story.
- “The @nytimes is assembling a team of five people dedicated to AI initiatives, including @zseward . An interesting mix of editorial, engineering and design. Congrats @rubinafillion, @dylfreed, Duy Nguyen, and @juliacastrov
- Robotics
- “Introducing Humanoid Parkour Learning Using vision and proprioception, our humanoid can jump over hurdles, and platforms, leap over gaps, walk up/down stairs, and much more.
- DrEureka | Language Model Guided Sim-To-Real Transfer
- GitHub – eureka-research/DrEureka: Official Repository for “DrEureka: Language Model Guided Sim-To-Real Transfer” (RSS 2024)
- “Mysterious Ai “Astrobot S1”
- “Visited this factory in China. Before they needed 10 people, now only one is in charge🤦♂️
- “Trying to be useful lately!
- “@DrJimFan @Tesla_Optimus The new Optimus hand later this year will have 22 DoF” / X
- “Congrats to @Tesla_Optimus team on another stellar update! The video gives us a peek at their human data collection farm, which I believe is Optimus’ biggest lead. What does it take to build such a pipeline? Optimus nailed all of the following: 1. Optimus hands are among the
- Science
- “Announcing AlphaFold 3: our state-of-the-art AI model for predicting the structure and interactions of all life’s molecules. 🧬 Here’s how we built it with @IsomorphicLabs and what it means for biology. 🧵
- “AlphaFold-3 is out, the latest iteration of the greatest breakthrough in AI for biology. What’s new is that AlphaFold-3 uses diffusion to “render” the molecular structure. It starts from a fuzzy cloud of atoms and then materializes the molecule gradually through denoising. We
- Generative AI will be designing new drugs on its own in near future
- AI-powered fighter jet takes Air Force leader for a historic ride | AP News
- Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs introduce AlphaFold 3 AI model
- Google DeepMind’s new AI can model DNA, RNA, and ‘all life’s molecules’ – The Verge
- Video
- “Sora is capable of rending a video + changing just a single element (still in research, not yet available to the public); learn more at
- Vision
- Realtime Video Stream Analysis with Computer Vision. Using existing cameras and making them AI-enabled is a great way to begin using AI in any physical location whether for occupancy analytics, security augmentation, infrastructure monitoring, or workplace safety.
The Rest: AI News of The Week
Don’t let the volume overwhelm you. Have fun and skim these. 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 week’s latest agent news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/10/agents-and-copilots-ai-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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/2024/05/10/anthropic-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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/2024/05/10/apple-ai-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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/2024/05/10/audio-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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/2024/05/10/autonomous-vehicles-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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 week’s latest AR/VR news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/10/augmented-and-virtual-reality-ar-vr-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
Business/Enterprise 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 week’s latest enterprise AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/10/business-and-enterprise-ai-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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 week’s latest chips and hardware news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/10/chips-and-hardware-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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 week’s latest education news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/10/education-ai-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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 week’s latest AI ethics/legal/security news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/10/ethics-legal-security-ai-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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 week’s latest Google AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/10/google-ai-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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 week’s latest AI image news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/10/imagery-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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/2024/05/10/international-ai-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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/2024/05/10/microsoft-ai-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
Mobile AI News of the Week: In April, 2024 I added a dedicated category for mobile. Prior, I put all most the mobile news into either the company (Apple v. Google v. Microsoft) or locally run AI. It also ended up in the chips and hardware section, or the consumer products category. There is enough mobile news to at least start cross linking it all in one place. This week’s latest mobile AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/10/mobile-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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/2024/05/10/multimodality-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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 week’s latest OpenAI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/10/openai-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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 week’s latest open source news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/10/open-source-ai-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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 week’s latest podcasts and YouTube clips: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/10/podcasts-youtube-op-eds-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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 week’s latest publishing AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/10/publishing-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
RAG Retrieval-Augmented Generation News of the Week: RAG allows a language model to “reference an authoritative knowledge base outside of its training data sources before generating a response” (via Amazon). Historically RAG was prone to hallucinations, however new methods are improving the reliability. There is enough news about RAG, that I want to start tracking it separately for my own use.
This week’s latest RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/10/retrieval-augmented-generation-rag-news-week-ending-04-19-2024-4/
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/2024/05/10/robotics-and-embodiment-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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 week’s latest AI science and medicine news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/10/science-and-medicine-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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 week’s latest AI video news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/10/video-news-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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/2024/05/10/twitter-x-grok-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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 week’s technical and dev AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/05/10/tech-and-development-week-ending-05-10-2024/
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.
- Robert Scoble: https://x.com/Scobleizer
- Ethan Mollick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emollick/
- Alan Thompson: https://lifearchitect.ai/
- Theoretically Media: https://www.youtube.com/@TheoreticallyMedia
- The Rundown: https://www.therundown.ai/
- Bilawal Sidhu: https://twitter.com/bilawalsidhu/
- TLDR: https://tldr.tech/ai
- Jeremiah Owyang: https://twitter.com/jowyang
- Nick St. Pierre: https://twitter.com/nickfloats
- Dr. Jim Fan: https://twitter.com/DrJimFan
- All About AI: https://www.youtube.com/@AllAboutAI
- Marshall Kirkpatrick: https://aitimetoimpact.com/
- AI News (Smol Talk): https://buttondown.email/ainews/archive/
For previous issues, please visit the archives!
Thanks for reading!
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