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Hollywood creators show first incredible AI films

Plus, AI could make better beer!

Author

Steve Brown
March 28, 2024

Sponsored by

This Week in AI

Before we get into this episode’s news, a quick note that AI Futurist, Steve Brown, will be speaking at events open to the public. Click for tickets!

Now let’s get on with the big AI news…

It’s now clear that AI is going to change media creation in profound ways. A few lucky visual artists were given early access to Sora by Open AI, who just published some of their first creations. The results are mixed, but here at Synthetic we particularly like “Air Head”, the short story of a man with a balloon for a head, and “Beyond our Reality”, a trailer for an imagined nature show that showcases blended wild animals like the girafflamingo. AI video generation is exciting not for the things it can replace but for the new frontiers in creativity that it will unlock. You’re definitely going to want to spend a few minutes watching some of these incredible videos.

If you use Microsoft Teams, you’ll want to read this article to find out all the juicy new AI capabilities you’ll soon be getting. If you don’t, well, move along.

Apple is scrambling to catch up on AI so they can assure the continued relevance of their flagship products and operating systems. While iOS 18 reportedly won’t feature Apple’s own Chatbot technology, a rumor has surfaced that Apple may use WWDC, their annual developer conference, to announce a new App Store specifically for AI.

Amazon announced that it will spend another $2.75 billion to back Anthropic, adding to its previous $1.25 billion investment. The race for AI talent and knowhow is well and truly on.

Video: AI Revolution, NOVA documentary

NOVA, known for their high quality science-based documentaries, just dropped an hour-long episode on artificial intelligence. It explores the early history of AI, its capabilities today, its many important applications, and the risks we face in the future. As a primer for AI beginners, this is a great resource.

AI Innovation

In this lengthy article, David Luan, formerly of Open AI and Google Brain, and now founder and CEO of Adept, talks about how his company is building AI agents that can do anything a human can do with a computer. In the process, he dishes some dirt on Google and talks about the early days of Open AI.

If you’re trying to choose which model to use for a future project, and you’re wondering what the latest benchmark results show for data center and edge inferencing speeds and energy efficiency, you’re going to want to click on this link and drink in the data and charts in this article.

Researchers at Tencent have released details on a novel framework to generate high-quality animation driven by speech audio and a reference portrait image. On GitHub they detail the pipeline they built and show a number of sample videos that you can check out.

Researchers at the universities of Manchester and Oxford have collaborated to build an proof-of-concept AI that demonstrates the potential use of machine learning methods as an alert tool for the early discovery of emerging major variants. The article shares more on their approach and future plans.

AI Insights

Craft brewing is all the rage, but making good beer is part art, part science. This article in MIT Technology Review covers how researchers spent five years chemically analyzing over 250 beers and assembling related data on the assessments of human tasting panels and raters. The resulting data set that links chemical data with sensory features was used to train AI models that accurately predict a beer’s taste, smell, mouthfeel, and its likely consumer rating. Click through to the Nature article for extra detail.

Coming a few months after the announcement that BMW is doing trials with the Figure 01 humanoid robot, Mercedes-Benz is getting in on the act. They are partnering with Apptronik to trial their Apollo robots at a factory in Hungary. The article details the type of work the robots will be doing and includes some videos of Apollo in action.

It’s a great time to be a talented AI engineer. The competition for talent is hot, especially between the big AI labs: Open AI, Meta, Microsoft, and Google. This article shares information on typical salaries for key roles in the industry. You may be surprised by what you read.

ICON is best known for building robots to 3D print homes. Their latest innovation is Vitruvius, an AI architect with a conversational interface that helps you to design buildings of your own. Currently in beta, it will be interesting to watch how Vitruvius develops, and to see AI-designed homes, offices, and other structures being built in the real world.

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