Sunday Signal #18

Musk Launches X.AI, The Human or Not Turing Test & CoreWeave Raises $221M

Hey friends 👋 ,

Happy Sunday AI friends. It's been a week of big tech adoption and open-source announcements. Luckily, you’re reading Sunday Signal where I filter > 500 pieces of AI-related content and deliver only the most important to your inbox. I’m just back from a Sunday morning run, so like the streets of London, let’s filter through the chaos and get into this week's best AI news.

🤖 AI Summary

This week’s newsletter, summarised with humour, by ChatGPT in 3 sentences:

Elon Musk launches a new AI company called X.AI Corp as part of his vision to create an all-encompassing app named X, Google launches Magi, an AI-powered search function as their $3 billion contract with Samsung approaches renewal. Snapchat launches a new AI chatbot called "My AI," which runs on OpenAI's GPT technology and has been customised for its users, which can answer trivia questions, recommend birthday gifts, and write haikus about cheese. With these developments, it seems AI is taking over the world—how long before we see entirely AI-generated Tarantino movies, or AI-made music better than humans? (right now, check out the last 2 links).

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⛏ 5 News Nuggets

Elon Musk / PCMag

  • 🔗 Link: Elon Musk has launched a new AI company called X.AI Corp which is part of Musk's plan to create a new super company, which takes inspiration from his vision to create an all-encompassing app named X (Nothing to do with X-men). Musk has been busy recruiting researchers for his new venture, aiming to establish a rival effort to OpenAI. This comes at a time when Musk has openly criticised Microsoft for unlawfully using Twitter’s data in the training of their AI model.

  • 🔗 Link: As their $3 billion contract with Samsung approaches renewal, Google is quick to launch Magi - an AI-powered search function that aims to offer a more personalised experience for its users. With competitors like Bing already offering similar products and Apple's contract worth a staggering $20 billion, Google is under pressure to innovate and remain competitive in the tech industry.

  • 🔗 Link: Snapchat has launched a new AI chatbot called "My AI," which runs on OpenAI's GPT technology and has been customised for its users. The new chatbot can do things like answer trivia questions, recommend birthday gifts, and write haikus about cheese. With over 363 million users, it’s becoming difficult to underestimate AI’s growing influence.

  • 🔗 Link: Stability AI just released a new open-source language model called StableLM, which can generate text and code, and will be used to power a range of downstream applications. The model is surprisingly powerful despite its small size of 3-7 billion parameters (by comparison, GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters).

  • 🔗 Link: NVIDIA releases a generative AI model that turns text to video. Using diffusion models with temporal dimensions the model can create 4.7s video clips from simple text prompts. How long before we see entirely AI-generated Tarantino movies?

😎 4 Cool Creations

Human or Not / The Irish Sun

  • 🔗 Link: You should try Human or Not—a social Turing test, where players engage in a chat with someone or something, and then guess whether their chat partner was human or artificial intelligence. The game uses state-of-the-art large language models and a different bot character is generated in each game, so users can challenge their assumptions about how people would interact with AI bots in the near future.

  • 🔗 Link: Transforming your room has never been easier with Zmo! Upload a photo of your space and instantly explore multiple design options at the click of a button. Best of all, this open-source project is available for free to the public. Let me tell you this, my office space has never looked more aesthetic—time for an upgrade?

  • 🔗 Link: User submitted ChatGPT prompts. Personally found this one to be incredibly useful as It works on a Reddit-like upvote/downvote system—with trending prompts receiving the most attention. The social aspect provides more legitimacy to the prompts in my opinion.

  • 🔗 Link: YouTube user Tamulur integrates ChatGPT with VR to create an incredibly immersive gaming experience. The user has a spiritual chat with an AI-generated monk where they discuss how to achieve happiness. Is Ready Player One far off from reality?

🔦 3 Startup Spotlights

Brian Venturo / The Sequence

  • 🔗 Link: CoreWeave, a New York-based cloud computing provider raises $221M in a Series B funding round led by Magnetar Capital, with participation from Nvidia, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and ex-Apple executive Daniel Gross. The company is now valued at $2B and plans to use the capital to expand its US data centers.

  • 🔗 Link: Robust.AI, a startup that operates in the warehouse automation space, has raised $20M in a Series A-1 funding round led by Prime Movers Lab. The company produces an autonomous warehouse cart that is designed to be flexible enough for human employees to move around manually if needed.

  • 🔗 Link: London-based tech startup Evermile has raised $6M in seed funding led by 10D, and supported by Mensch Capital Partners and various angel investors. The company offers small businesses a single delivery platform that simplifies all their delivery needs reducing delivery costs by 30-50%.

🐥 2 Top Tweets

Tim Sweeney / MCVUK

  • 🔗 Link: Epic Games CEO and founder, Tim Sweeney, has drawn attention to the rapid pace at which AI is evolving. Specifically, he highlighted OpenAI's latest research on consistency models, which have emerged as a formidable alternative to diffusion models. These new models can generate images in just one or two steps, in stark contrast to diffusion models that require thousands.

  • 🔗 Link: Roberto Nickerson drops a Kanye verse using only AI. After recording some basic vocals, and finding a Kanye-style beat on YouTube, Nickerson generates an indistinguishable Kanye song. This prompts larger questions for music, creativity, and art–is creativity innately human?

😮 1 Media Marvel

Drake, The Weeknd / NBC News

  • 🔗 Link: "Heart on My Sleeve," a track that uses AI to create a passable mimicry of Drake and The Weeknd's voices, went viral on social media, accumulating millions of plays before it was removed. This song is an example of a grey-area genre that has exploded in recent months, which uses A.I. technology to conjure familiar sounds that can be passed off as authentic, posing intellectual property concerns for music corporations. Another addition to wildly impressive music mimicry—could AI be better at making music than humans?

Are you on board with AI-generated art?

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