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Spooky all-electric Atlas robot moves like a contortionist
Plus, the race to the first billion-dollar, one-person company
Steve Brown
April 18, 2024
In partnership with
This Week in AI
You are about to lose several hours of your life experimenting with Udio, a new music generation tool built by four former DeepMind employees. And it’s good; Really good. Currently in beta, the AI platform will create music in any style you choose, AND it will compose and record lyrics for you, too, all based on a text prompt. Rolling Stone shares a number of examples, and while it’s in beta, anyone can try it for free. Udio’s investors include a16z, Common, and will.i.am.
Every major AI company faces lawsuits from content creators who claim their works were scraped and used to train models without their consent, or any kind of remuneration. Last year, researches at the University of Chicago released a free tool to help artists fight back. Glaze makes minor edits to images that are imperceptible to humans but that throw AI models for a loop. The latest version, Glaze 2, is significantly faster to use and provides additional protection. A video protection tool is planned.
Later this year, video editors will have some incredible new capabilities at their fingertips, courtesy of Adobe’s Firefly video model. An Adobe preview video shows the ability to add and remove objects, extend video clips, and generate new b-roll content. Partnerships with leading AI video generators, Pika, Runway, and Open AI, are in their early stages. Content creation is transforming forever. It will be interesting to see what Apple has in store for their Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro product line.
Chinese TV maker, TCL, has announced it will be releasing an AI-generated romantic comedy this summer titled “Next Stop Paris”. The 60-second trailer is a must-see to fully appreciate its sheer awfulness. A great example of technology not yet being ready for prime time.
Video: All-electric Atlas Robot Teaser
Earlier this week, robotics pioneer, Boston Dynamics, shared a video retiring their old Atlas robot. The often humorous video shows Atlas’s many successes and failures over the years with crashes and falls usually resulting in a death spray of hydraulic fluid.
In a new video, shown below, the company teases their new Atlas robot. Hydraulics are gone, and this fully electric robot seems incredibly limber and agile. The unnatural body twists are somewhat unsettling, but they make Atlas more effective in real-world work environments. Here at Synthetic, we’re curious to see how the new Atlas stacks up against market leader, Figure, on dexterity, learning, and conversational understanding.
AI Innovation
The Humane AI pin, first announced in 2023 and shipping first units this month, has been widely criticized as buggy and slow. The new AI pendant from Limitless is a personal AI accessory designed to make in-person meetings and Zoom/Teams calls easier to recall. It follows conversations, takes real-time notes, and extracts action items for you. Limitless seems to have put privacy first. Data is anonymized and encrypted, and it won’t record a voice without a person’s verbal consent. Pretty neat. The Limitless Pendant has a 100 hour battery life and a $99 price tag. First units ship in August with many additional features and capabilities coming soon. HIPAA compliance is planned so doctors will be able to use it, too. Incidentally, Limitless is the new brand name for Rewind, which built similar technology for the desktop before its pivot to wearables.
MLCommons is best known for developing what have become the industry standard benchmarks for machine learning and AI performance. Now, embracing Peter Drucker’s doctrine that “what gets measured gets improved”, MLCommons is developing an AI safety benchmark for large language models. The v0.5 proof of concept release tests vulnerabilities related to harmful content generation such as bomb-making instructions, hate speech, and scenes of child abuse. Benchmark contributors include Intel, Meta, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Sony, Google, and many universities around the world. This benchmark is an important step towards assuring AI safety.
Stratechery analyzes the many announcements at Google’s recent cloud event and concludes that Google is undergoing a cultural shift as it moves from advertising towards new business models. A clear message from Google at the event: AI infrastructure matters, and Google has the best AI cloud infrastructure out there. The article includes video clips of key announcements and AI product demos. If you’re thinking about building AI capabilities for your organization, it’s important to know what the big cloud companies can offer you.
AI Insights
“Maybe we'll have the age of the first one-person, billion-dollar company.”
Pat Gelsinger, CEO, Intel
Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel, sees an era when a person can use AI to build a company worth over a billion dollars. He’s not the first to share such a vision, and in an age of high automation with a wide range of AI agents at our beck and call, it may soon be possible to build valuable companies where most of the ‘employees’ are machines. In the same talk, Pat shared that he expects AI demand to boost the global market for semiconductor chips to over $1 trillion annually (it’s predicted to be around $588B in 2024). Rival chipmaker, TSMC, beat expectations for Q1 today with a 16% rise in revenue on strong AI chip sales.
The seventh edition of Stanford’s annual report on the current state of artificial intelligence is well worth a look if you want to explore AI technology trends, shifting public perceptions on AI, and the geopolitics surrounding AI’s development. The 500-page report first lists its top 10 takeaways and then includes chapters on: research and development, technical performance, responsible AI, the economy, science and medicine, education, policy and governance, diversity, and public opinion. You can access and download the report for free together with all their previous reports. For a visual recap of report highlights, check out the 15 graphs that explain the state of AI in 2024. You might also be interested in Goldman Sachs’ recent report on humanoid robots.
The perennial debate over whether AI will augment or automate work rages on. The answer, of course, is both. The demand for soft skills is on the rise as people focus on workers who can do the things that AI can’t do.
With more and more men addicted to AI girlfriends it seems the future of dating is more complicated than ever. One 24-year-old apparently spends $10,000 per month on chatbots that simulate relationships. With loneliness at epidemic levels in many countries, particularly among younger people, are AI friends and romantic partners a sign of things to come? The movie, “Her”, seems to have been somewhat prescient. And there is concern that AI girlfriends will hit the business of dating apps like Bumble, Tinder, and Match.
Toolkit for the Future
AI-powered apps and services to try….
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