👩‍💼 Rough start of the year for AI ⚖️ Week 1

Author

Kain Ditmer
January 01, 2024

👩‍💼 Rough start of the year for AI ⚖️

🎆 Happy new year! 🎇

We hope you had a great New Years Eve and you’re ready to crush 2024. Starting your year with reading a newsletter on one of the biggest technological revolutions of this century is definitely a good start. Good for you!

The world of AI is not starting the year as good as you are, something happened that can have a really big impact on technical advancements in AI.

Table of contents

  • 2023 AI wrapped 🔁

  • A lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft ⚖️

  • OpenAI CEO getting into AI hardware ⚙️

  • Alibaba letting AI come to life 🧟‍♂️

  • 🛠️ New text-to-video tool 📽️

  • LG using AI and robotics 🤖

🤖 AI wrapped in 2023 🔁

2023 was a big year for AI and a lot has happened. In fact so much has happened it is difficult to remember exactly what. That’s why we have put together a list with some of the biggest things that happened in AI. Have a look:

  • January 15: ChatGPT becomes the fastest growing consumer app in history.

  • January 27: Microsoft Invests $10 Billion in OpenAI.

  • February 28: Snapchat launches their AI chatbot ‘My AI’.

  • March 1: OpenAI launches ChatGPT and Whisper API’s.

  • March 17: OpenAI launches GPT-4.

  • March 22: Google unleashes Bard, and the stock tanks.

  • March 24: OpenAI releases ChatGPT Plugins and everyone thinks it's the ‘App Store of AI’.

  • March 30: Elon Musk and AI experts call for a 6 month pause developing AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.

  • April 3: Italy bans ChatGPT.

  • April 13: AutoGPT and open-source Autonomous agents make waves across social media.

  • April 14: Amazon and AWS release Bedrock and CodeWhisperer.

  • April 17: Elon Musk starts xAI.

  • April 21: Google Brain and Google DeepMind join forces.

  • April 25: AI discovers a new planet.

  • May 12: Anthropic extends Claude’s token window to 100,000.

  • May 19: OpenAI launches a free ChatGPT iOS app.

  • June 6: Apple reveals Apple Vision Pro at WWDC.

  • June 27: Breakthrough AI research can understand and decode whale language

  • July 6: OpenAI introduces Super alignment to address the super intelligence alignment problem.

  • July 12: Anthropic launches Claude 2.

  • July 17: Hollywood goes on strike against AI.

  • July 19: Meta and Microsoft release Llama 2.

  • July 20: Apple enters the AI frenzy with ‘Apple GPT‘.

  • July 21: ChatGPT update allows ‘custom instructions’.

  • August 7: Tim Cook says Apple is building AI into every product.

  • August 30: Tesla launches a powerful $300 million AI supercomputer.

  • September 20: Google announces Bard Extensions for Workspace.

  • September 21: OpenAI announced DALL-E 3.

  • September 22: Microsoft reveals Copilot, “Your everyday AI companion“.

  • September 28: OpenAI announces the return of ChatGPT browsing.

  • September 29: Mistral AI unveils open-sourced 7B language model.

  • October 16: Ukraine deploys the first-ever autonomous attack drones on the battlefield.

  • October 23: NVIDIA breakthrough enables robots to teach themselves.

  • November 6: Elon Musk's xAI launches Grok.

  • November 7: OpenAI reveals GPT Builder, GPT-4 Turbo, Assistants API and more at DevDay.

  • November 17: Sam Altman fired as CEO of OpenAI.

  • November 22: Sam Altman rehired as CEO of OpenAI.

  • December 6: Google DeepMind reveals Gemini.

  • December 12: French startup Mistral AI releases Mixtral.

  • December 28: The New York Times sues Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement.

Updates

The beginning of the end for OpenAI and Microsoft?

The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the companies have infringed on its copyright by using millions of the publication's articles to train their AI models. The Times claims that these models, which power ChatGPT and Copilot, can generate output that closely resembles its content, thereby competing with and undermining the Times' relationship with its readers. The lawsuit also argues that the AI models threaten high-quality journalism by hindering the ability of news outlets to protect and monetize their content.

The Times is seeking billions of dollars in damages and asking the court to prevent OpenAI and Microsoft from training their AI models using its content, as well as to remove its work from their datasets. The lawsuit is part of a larger trend, with several news outlets, including the BBC, CNN, and Reuters, blocking OpenAI's web crawler from scraping their content. However, some publications, such as Politico and Business Insider, have struck deals with OpenAI to allow its AI to pull information directly from their sources. The legal action reflects the growing tension between traditional media and tech companies over the use of AI and its impact on content creation and monetization.

OpenAI CEO planning a new AI hardware project

Jony Ive and Sam Altman are collaborating on a new artificial intelligence hardware project, aiming to create devices with the latest capabilities. As part of this effort, Tang Tan, an outgoing Apple executive, will join Ive’s design firm LoveFrom to shape the look and capabilities of the new products. Altman plans to provide the software underpinnings for the project. The work is one of the most ambitious efforts undertaken by Ive since he left Apple in 2019 to create LoveFrom.

The project is still in the early stages, focusing on hiring talent and creating concepts, with Tan leading hardware engineering at the project while working at LoveFrom. The project includes devices for the home and has the potential to become a new company. The article also mentions the departure of design talent from Apple, including several members of Ive’s former team. LoveFrom has assembled a roster of high-profile clients, including Airbnb Inc., Ferrari NV, and Moncler SpA. In total, more than 20 former Apple employees have joined the design firm, including Shota Aoyagi, another member of Ive’s industrial design team at Apple, who recently started at LoveFrom.

Alibaba is letting AI come to life

Alibaba recently unveiled a text-to-3D model called Make-A-Character (Mach), which leverages large language and vision foundation models to generate detailed and lifelike 3D avatars from simple text descriptions or natural language. The current version focuses on generating visually appealing 3D avatars of Asian ethnicity, with plans to expand support for different ethnicities and styles in the future. The tool seamlessly converts textual descriptors into visual avatars, providing users with a simple way to create custom avatars that resonate with their intended personas. The process involves mapping semantic attributes to corresponding visual clues, guiding the generation of reference portrait images using Stable Diffusion along with ControlNet. Through a series of 2D face parsing and 3D generation modules, the mesh and textures of the target face are generated and assembled along with additional matched accessories.

The parameterized representation enables easy animation of the generated 3D avatar. Additionally, Alibaba introduced other AI models such as Richdreamer, a normal-depth diffusion model, and 'Animate Anyone,' an advanced character animation technology utilizing diffusion models for transforming static images into dynamic character videos. Furthermore, Alibaba launched Qwen-72B, a language model with increased parameters and enhanced customization, following the earlier release of Qwen-7B in October, and presented a smaller language model, Qwen-1.8B, as a gift to the research community, featuring a 2K context length and a modest 3GB GPU memory requirement.

🛠️ Tool of the week 🗓️

Turn your ideas into videos simply by typing what you want to see. Or, input a photo and watch it come to life. Assistive Video is currently in alpha and here is how you can use it:

Step 1 Imagine what you want to see

Type a prompt that describes the video you want to create. Or, upload an image (e.g. a stock photo or a Midjourney generation), to see it come to life.

Step 2 Adjust the settings

Choose the quality of the video, consistency with prompt, the amount of motion, and optionally set a seed.

Step 3 Watch your creation

Generate your video. If you like what you can see, you can enhance it to increase the frame rate. Your video will be saved to your library, and you can also download it.

Have a look at their website here.

More updates

Two legged AI robot developed by LG

LG has developed a two-legged AI-powered robot that is capable of watching pets and performing various tasks around the house. The robot, which will be unveiled at CES 2024, is equipped with a wide range of capabilities, including the ability to notify users of various events, recognize faces and voices, and measure indoor air quality and temperature. It can also be programmed to look after pets and act as a mobile security guard, sending notifications if any unusual activity is detected. The robot is powered by Qualcomm’s Robotics RB5 Platform, which combines hardware and software to run its AI program. While the price of the robot has not been announced yet, it is expected to be available for sale after its debut at CES 2024.