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OpenAI introduces Sora, its text-to-video AI model

OpenAI has unveiled Sora, a new video-generation model that can create realistic scenes from text instructions. The model is capable of generating complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background. It can also generate a video based on a still image, fill in missing frames on an existing video, or extend it. Despite some limitations in simulating the physics of complex scenes, the model has shown impressive results. Currently, Sora is only available to a select group of testers and visual artists for feedback and risk assessment. This development marks a significant advancement in the field of AI, with video generation improving at a remarkable pace.

Gemini 1.5 is Google’s next-gen AI model — and it’s already almost ready

Google has announced the launch of Gemini 1.5, the successor to its large language model, Gemini. The new model, which is available to developers and enterprise users, boasts significant improvements over its predecessor, including a general-purpose model that matches the performance of the high-end Gemini Ultra and outperforms Gemini 1.0 Pro on 87% of benchmark tests. Gemini 1.5 utilizes a technique known as “Mixture of Experts” (MoE), which allows it to process only a part of the model for each query, enhancing speed and efficiency. A key feature of Gemini 1.5 is its expanded context window, capable of handling 1 million tokens, significantly more than OpenAI’s GPT-4 and the current Gemini Pro. This allows the AI to process larger queries and more information simultaneously, which Google CEO Sundar Pichai believes will be particularly beneficial for businesses.

Other News

Tools

NVIDIA NeMo Canary - NVIDIA NeMo Canary model advances speech recognition and translation, achieving top performance in transcribing and translating English, Spanish, German, and French, while offering efficient architecture and open-source availability.

Apple Readies AI Tool to Rival Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot - Apple is developing a new AI tool for app developers that will compete with Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, using artificial intelligence to predict and complete blocks of code, and exploring AI features for testing applications and other functions.

Fan wiki hosting site Fandom rolls out controversial AI features - Fandom introduces controversial AI features, including Quick Answers and AI image review, allowing users to opt out and promising improved accuracy after previous complaints.

ChatGPT is getting ‘memory’ to remember who you are and what you like - ChatGPT is introducing “memory” to personalize conversations by remembering specific details about users and their preferences, although the feature raises concerns about privacy and data control.

Apple Readies AI Tool to Rival Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot - Apple is developing an AI tool to compete with Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, aiming to provide a strong alternative in the AI software development space.

Gemini Advanced is most impressive when it’s working with Google - Gemini Advanced, powered by Google’s AI, offers a mixed bag of capabilities, excelling at Google-related tasks but falling short in other areas such as image generation and translation.

Nvidia reveals its Eos supercomputer for AI processing sporting 4,608 H100 GPUs - Nvidia’s Eos supercomputer, designed for AI applications, boasts 4,608 H100 GPUs and 18.4 exaflops of FP8 AI performance, showcasing the capabilities of Nvidia’s technologies at scale.

Business

OpenAI Completes Deal That Values the Company at $80 Billion - OpenAI completes a deal valuing the company at $80 billion, allowing employees to cash out their shares and solidifying its position as one of the world’s most valuable tech start-ups.

Microsoft’s AI growth is helping cloud business chip away at Amazon’s lead - Microsoft’s AI growth is rapidly closing the gap with Amazon’s cloud services, with a significant portion of Azure’s revenue growth attributed to AI capabilities.

AI Computing Firm Lambda Raises $320 Million in Fresh Funding - Lambda, an AI computing firm, raises $320 million in funding to expand its AI cloud business, as top technology companies race to integrate AI into their products and services.

Google pledges 25 million euros to boost AI skills in Europe - Google pledges 25 million euros to support AI skills in Europe, offering funding for social enterprises, non-profits, and free online AI training courses in 18 languages to ensure that no one is left behind in the AI revolution.

German chancellor welcomes Microsoft’s $3.5 billion AI investment in Germany - German Chancellor Olaf Scholz welcomes Microsoft’s $3.5 billion AI investment in Germany, emphasizing its commitment to progress, growth, and global openness.

Companies Hope Super Bowl AI Commercials Score With Viewers - AI makes its presence known in Super Bowl commercials, from Microsoft’s Copilot to Google’s Pixel 8 and even the Minions in Despicable Me 4.

Exclusive: Ex-Salesforce Co-CEO Bret Taylor and longtime Googler Clay Bavor raised $110 million to bring AI ‘agents’ to business - Ex-Salesforce Co-CEO Bret Taylor and Google veteran Clay Bavor raised $110 million to launch Sierra, a conversational AI startup focused on business customers, aiming to provide easy-to-understand, pragmatic uses of AI technology and compete against larger players in the market.

Stability AI’s Intel fundraise came with hefty hardware purchase commitments, sources say - Stability AI raised funding through a “compute for equity” deal with Intel, committing to purchase access to the chip company’s hardware resources, while also exploring new revenue streams and a potential sale to cover costs.

Anthropic takes steps to prevent election misinformation - AI startup Anthropic is testing a technology to detect and redirect users of its GenAI chatbot to authoritative sources of voting information to prevent election misinformation.

Cruise names first chief safety officer following crash and controversy - Cruise appoints its first “chief safety officer” to oversee safety management systems and operations following a controversial incident involving a pedestrian and one of its robotaxis.

Waymo recalls and updates robotaxi software after two cars crashed into the same towed truck - Waymo recalls and updates robotaxi software after two cars crashed into the same towed truck, causing minor damage and prompting the company’s first recall.

Abu Dhabi AI Firm to Pare Back China Presence in Pivot to US - Abu Dhabi AI firm shifts focus from China to the US in its expansion strategy.

Chinese tech startups quietly stop testing driverless cars on Californian roads - Chinese tech startups, including Didi, are quietly stopping their testing of driverless cars on Californian roads, possibly due to souring US-China relations and growing public backlash towards autonomous vehicles.

AI Companies Take Hit as Judge Says Artists Have “Public Interest” In Pursuing Lawsuits - Judge rejects AI companies’ free speech defense in lawsuit brought by artists over unauthorized use of images to train AI systems, allowing key claims to move forward and emphasizing public interest in protecting against misappropriation of names and likenesses.

Masayoshi Son Seeks to Build a $100 Billion AI Chip Venture - Masayoshi Son aims to establish a $100 billion AI chip venture.

ChatGPT creators OpenAI are generating 100 billion words per day, CEO says - OpenAI’s ChatGPT creators are generating about 100 billion words per day, which is roughly 13 words for every person on Earth, but still far less than what humans generate.

Reddit has reportedly signed over its content to train AI models - Reddit has reportedly signed a content licensing deal to allow its data to be used to train AI models, potentially sparking user backlash over the ethics of using public data for AI.

No ‘GPT’ trademark for OpenAI - OpenAI’s attempt to trademark “GPT” has been denied by the USPTO, as the term is deemed “merely descriptive,” potentially leading to diluted dominance over GPT-related terminology.

Research

BUD-E: ENHANCING AI VOICE ASSISTANTS’ CONVERSATIONAL QUALITY, NATURALNESS AND EMPATHY - AI voice assistants are being enhanced to provide natural, empathetic, and contextually rich conversational experiences, with the BUD-E project aiming to reduce latency, increase naturalness of speech, keep track of conversations, enhance functionality, understand emotional context, and extend to multi-language and multi-speaker environments.

World Model on Million-Length Video And Language With RingAttention - Training a large context size neural network on long video and language sequences using the RingAttention technique, this paper overcomes challenges to develop a deeper understanding of human knowledge and the multimodal world.

Amazon AGI Team Say Their AI Is Showing “Emergent Abilities” - Amazon’s new AI model, BASE TTS, is exhibiting emergent language abilities that it wasn’t explicitly trained on, showing naturalness in conversational text and understanding punctuation, non-English words, and emotions.

MusicMagus: Zero-Shot Text-to-Music Editing via Diffusion Models - A new approach to editing music generated by text-to-music models allows for modification of specific attributes while maintaining consistency, demonstrating superior performance in style and timbre transfer evaluations.

How Quickly Do Large Language Models Learn Unexpected Skills? - Large language models’ emergent abilities are not as sudden or unpredictable as previously thought, but rather develop gradually and predictably depending on how they are measured, challenging the notion of “breakthrough” behavior in AI.

Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Without Prompting - Enhancing reasoning capabilities of large language models through a novel approach of altering the decoding process to elicit chain-of-thought reasoning paths, bypassing the need for manual prompting and achieving higher confidence in the model’s decoded answers.

Prismatic VLMs: Investigating the Design Space of Visually-Conditioned Language Models - Visually-conditioned language models (VLMs) are being investigated and evaluated across various design axes, including image preprocessing, architecture, and optimization, with the aim of understanding their performance and capabilities.

Multilingual E5 Text Embeddings: A Technical Report - A technical report presents the training methodology and evaluation results of open-source multilingual E5 text embedding models, including three different sizes and a new instruction-tuned model.

GhostWriter: Augmenting Collaborative Human-AI Writing Experiences Through Personalization and Agency - AI-powered writing system GhostWriter allows users to exercise enhanced agency and personalization, learning their writing style implicitly and empowering them with multiple ways to control the system’s writing style.

OS-Copilot: Towards Generalist Computer Agents with Self-Improvement - A framework called OS-Copilot is introduced to build generalist agents capable of interfacing with comprehensive elements in an operating system, showcasing strong generalization to unseen applications and self-improvement in automating general computer tasks.

Computing Power and the Governance of Artificial Intelligence - Governments and companies are leveraging computing power to govern the development and deployment of artificial intelligence, with potential benefits and risks that need to be carefully managed.

Concerns

Richard Branson and Oppenheimer’s grandson urge action to stop AI and climate ‘catastrophe’ - High-profile figures urge world leaders to address the existential risks of artificial intelligence and the climate crisis, emphasizing the need for urgent multilateral action.

Microsoft and OpenAI say hackers are using ChatGPT to improve cyberattacks - Hackers are using large language models like ChatGPT to refine and improve their existing cyberattacks, prompting Microsoft and OpenAI to detect and counter these early-stage attempts.

Hackers for China, Russia and Others Used OpenAI Systems, Report Says - Hackers from nation-states are using OpenAI’s systems for cyberattacks, using AI for mundane tasks like drafting emails and translating documents.

Automating ableism - AI can have positive effects on the disability community, but the future of AI and disability is looking grim, as it can perpetuate ableism and discrimination, particularly in areas such as healthcare, employment, and social inclusion.

Sarah Silverman’s lawsuit against OpenAI partially dismissed - Sarah Silverman’s lawsuit against OpenAI, along with other authors, alleging that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is pirating their work, has been partially dismissed by a California court, with the main complaint of direct copyright infringement remaining.

The text file that runs the internet - A tiny text file called robots.txt has governed the internet for three decades, allowing website owners to control which robots can access their site, but the rise of AI has complicated this handshake agreement, leading to a debate over the future of web crawling and data access.

A High School Deepfake Nightmare - High school students used AI to create deepfake images of their classmates, leading to a police investigation and calls for updated laws to address the use of AI tools for harassment and bullying.

Policy

AI companies agree to limit election ‘deepfakes’ but fall short of ban - AI companies agree to develop tech to identify, label, and control AI-generated deceptive content in elections, but fall short of banning it, as they aim to combat the spread of “deepfakes” and educate the public on the risks.

Watermarking the future - AI-generated deepfakes are a growing concern, and the Biden administration is pushing for the use of watermarks to identify AI-generated content, but experts question whether this will effectively combat disinformation.

Big tech vows action on ‘deceptive’ AI in elections - Big tech companies, including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, have pledged to combat deceptive AI in elections by deploying technology to detect and counter voter-deceiving content, but some experts believe the voluntary pact may not be proactive enough to prevent harmful content.

Analysis

Better than a real man’: young Chinese women turn to AI boyfriends - Chinese women are turning to AI boyfriends for companionship and emotional support, customizing their virtual partners to meet their needs and finding comfort in the AI’s ability to adapt to their personalities.

Fun

Helen Mirren Rips Up AI-Generated Speech at American Cinematheque Awards - Helen Mirren rips up AI-generated speech at American Cinematheque Awards and shares her favorite memories and aspirations, including a desire to conquer a musical movie.