Sunday Signal #33

AI Arms Race, Autonomous Aviation and Meta's Text-to-Music

Hey friends 👋 You’re reading Sunday Signal where I filter > 500 AI updates and deliver the best straight to your inbox. This morning I’m heading to a local farmer’s market on the hunt for some cheese and chutney to munch on this evening—a block of Brie has been my recent favourite. In a week full of noise let’s get to the signal.

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💎 5 News Nuggets

Midjourney / PromptHero

  • 🔗 Link: AI helps quadriplegic Keith Thomas move his arms again. The procedure involved implanting microchips to interface with AI algorithms that reconnected Keith’s brain to his body and spinal cord, turning thoughts into actions.

  • 🔗 Link: Google launches free AI training courses in the UK for businesses and individuals. The 10-module curriculum covers topics from productivity enhancement to machine learning and requires no prior AI knowledge.

  • 🔗 Link: Palantir's CEO declares AI arms race: our 'Oppenheimer moment'. Alex Karp, advocates for the development of AI weapons, warning that regulations hindering progress could disadvantage countries in the face of global AI dominance.

  • 🔗 Link: US Air Force successfully uses AI to pilot XQ-58A Valkyrie. The 3-hour flight took place on July 25th, marking a major leap for autonomous military aviation.

  • 🔗 Link: MI5 is using AI to automate their search for terrorists. The British secret intelligence service is using the technology to predict whether people who watch violent videos online have the potential to become terrorists.

🎨 4 Cool Creations

Robotic Transformer 2 (RT-2) / Google DeepMind

  • 🔗 Link: Google announces a model that can control robots. Robotic Transformer 2 (RT-2) is a vision-language-action (VLA) model that learns from both web and robotics data. It then translates this knowledge into instructions to control the robot.

  • 🔗 Link: Meta releases AudioCraft, an AI tool to create music from text. It features three models: AudioGen, EnCodec, and MusicGen, all of which are open-source, for music composition, compression, and generation.

  • 🔗 Link: YouTube experiments with AI auto-generated video summaries. The test is already live for a select group of English-language viewers, providing a quick overview of a video, and letting the user decide if it’s the right one for them.

  • 🔗 Link: Google adds generative AI in search. Their AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE) integrates images and video directly into the summary box of search results.

💡 3 Startup Spotlights

GoStudent

  • 🔗 Link: GoStudent raises $95M for VR and AI tutoring. The company, who’s building a virtual reality language learning platform, has raised €686 in total with a current valuation of €3B.

  • 🔗 Link: CoreWeave secures a $2.3B. The company, which offers access to various Nvidia GPU models in the cloud, will use the capital for advanced data centre creation and cloud infrastructure expansion.

  • 🔗 Link: Akkio raises $15M for their no-code platform to help businesses deploy AI in minutes. By 2023, 65% of application development will take place on no-code and low-code machine learning platforms.

🐥 2 Top Tweets

Genesis Trailer / Nicolas Neubert

  • 🔗 Link: AI videos are getting scarily good. This is the trailer to “Genesis”, made using Midjourney & Runway.

  • 🔗 Link: HyperWriteAI is developing ‘Agent-1’, a model that can operate software like a human. Current models (like GPT-4) store lots of knowledge, leaving few parameters for reasoning. HyperWrite are aiming to put all of the model's horsepower to work on reasoning.

🍿 1 Media Marvel

“The Water-Lily Pond”, Claude Monet / The National Gallery

  • 🔗 Link: 43 Monet paintings brought to life with AI. Reddit user u/johngrady77 generated hundreds of versions with different prompts alongside the tool PikaLabs to instil life into Claude Monet’s artwork.

🔥 A Little Something Extra

  • Brilliant is the best way to level up your AI skills in minutes.

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