The AI Wars Intensify – January 20th, 2023

AlphaFold assists with liver cancer drug discovery. Google throws down the gauntlet, Microsoft releases OpenAI services, and OpenAI says people are begging to be disappointed with GPT-4. Lawsuits start flying, acrobatic robots on the job site, Star Wars kitchen mixers, and AI for Tinder? Your concise guide to a dizzying week starts now.

The Big Stuff

Lawsuits Start Flying Against Stability AI, Midjourney & Others (link1, link2)

Two lawsuits in one week. Impressive! First came the Class Action Lawsuit from three artists, then came Getty Images. Harkening back to the "fair use" struggles with sampling in hip-hop music in the '90s, these lawsuits are based on some assumptions that AI image models are "Collaging" (copy/pasting) from original source material, which simply isn't how the technology works.

There are lot's of attribution and compensation issues to be worked out, but these lawsuits seem to have a lot of holes in them. So much so that...

Lawsuit Counterarguments Start Flying Back (link)

A group of tech enthusiasts unaffiliated with the lawsuits, have put together "Stable Diffusion Frivolous" which offers argument-by-argument counter-narratives to the flawed logic in one of the lawsuits. We've got our bags of popcorn in the microwave. It's going to be a juicy year or 10.

Google throws down the gauntlet (link)

Google brought in the big gun, Jeff Dean, to showcase their progress in 2022 and vision for 2023. Jeff Dean is a cult hero amongst engineers, Chuck Norris-style jokes and all! In the paper, they discuss PaLM, a 540B parameter large language model. They also cover Chain of Thought Prompting to show how the model arrived at its conclusion, as well as multi-modal models combining a video understanding model with a language model. Ask the model questions like "What was the second ingredient poured into the bowl" and get an accurate answer! 🤯 It's technical, but worth reading.

AlphaFold assists discovery of new liver cancer drug (link)

DeepMind (Google) released AlphaFold in 2021. AlphaFold is able to accurately predict protein structures. This last summer, they an AI-powered protein structure database, created by running the generative-AI against the known 200M+ proteins. Researchers found a molecule to bind to the treatment target 30 days after identifying the target. 30 days later, they found an even more potent hit.

This is the first major discovery announced after AlphaFold released the protein structure database, however, it is certainly not the last. This announcement will no doubt inspire other scientists and lead to an acceleration of medical breakthroughs. Bring it on!

Acrobatic Robots on the Job Site (link)

While these bots aren't (apparently) using AI yet, their capabilities are getting powerful enough that you can see a futures where we are working beside our friendly mechanical counterparts... or—you know,—"that movie you saw." Why include this video here if the behaviors aren't controlled by AI yet? Because it looks cool, and everyone loves video of robot parkour, right?! (Watch till the end!)

Microsoft's Brings OpenAI to its Cloud (link)

Microsoft dominated the news last week with their $10 billion investment in OpenAI, their announcement of VALL-E, a hyper realistic voice generator, and the release of Bing Image Creator. This week, Microsoft announced Azure OpenAI Service as generally available, which includes access to GPT-3.5, Codex, and DALL-E. Microsoft says that support for ChatGPT is coming soon.

Smaller, but still Cool Stuff

• ChatGPT is forcing universities to rethink how they teach (link) [paywall]

• Microsoft Releases OpenAI Services (link)

• OpenAI Opens a Waitlist for ChatGPT API (link)

• GPT-4 timeline not known, will include video, expectations too high (link)

• Tinder: There's an AI for That (link)

• Abstracts written by ChatGPT fool scientists (link)

• 90% of online content could be generated by AI by 2025 (link)

• ChatGPT takes an astrophysics exam at Columbia and passes (link)

• Reid Hoffman interviews ChatGPT (link)

• a16z - Who Owns the Generative AI Platform? (link)

• Put your journalling on steroids with GPT-3 (link)

• Nvidia Debuts Generative AI Model for Medical Research (link)

• GitHub Code Brushes uses ML to update code ‘like painting with Photoshop" (link)

• AI will be used as a legal assistant in court for the first time in February (link)

• Opinion: Generative Art is Stupid (link)

Incredible Resources: Just CLICK. Trust us.

AI has never been more accessible. Whether you’re just getting started, or you’re a veteran, there are some amazing resources to either help you get started, or take your abilities to the next level.

• Hippocratic AI - Semantic Search for Medicine (link)

• TwitterBio.com - Generate your Twitter bio with AI (link)

• Booth.ai - Pro quality product photography with AI (link)

• Sprinkle - Customized storybooks for children (link)

• GetAIway - Plan your dream trip with AI (link)

• Magic Thumbnails - Generate thumbnails for your YouTube video (link)

• GPT for Sheets - Access the power of GPT-3 in Google Sheets (link)

• Vowel AI - Auto generated meeting summaries (link)

Tweets of the Week

The Industrial Revolution for Knowledge Work (link)

Google's Stance on AI Generated Content (link)

Justin Fineberg - The Importance of UX for AI Products (link)

Clair Silver - How to train your own AI models for avatars. It's not as hard as you'd think (link)

Eye Candy

Star Wars-inspired KitchenAids

Robotinfatuations posted a series of beautiful Star Wars-inspired mixers. Two points: 1) Take my money, 2) It's going to be amazing to see the creativity AI-generated art will inspire. Before text-to-image generators, an anspiring industrial engineer would have had to spend an extensive amount of time learning how to render something like this, or, they would have been forced to describe their idea with a lofi drawing, "OK, HEAR ME OUT, MIXERS...BUT STAR WARS!".

Alternate Reality Movies (link)

Check out William Freitag's awesome vision of movies that should have been! William presented this project to the AI Artist Salon this week and people were wowed. We're not that far off from these still images coming to life!

Nike-inspired Shoes (link)

Barsee created these amazing shoes. He shared the following prompt if you want to try it yourself. Head over to Midjourney, and input the following prompt:"a pair of Nike shoes with flowers on top of it, a bronze sculpture by Victorine Foot, behance contest winner, cloisonnism, rendered in cinema4d, ornate, rendered in maya, ultarealistik, 8k, HDR, cinematic --ar 2:3 --upbeta"

Whew! Till next week.