A Lack of Restraint
AI News, Highs and Lows of theWeek
‘The Information’ on Sora’s Potential Impact
The Information is a very influential journal, usually has it’s finger on the pulse of what’s happening in tech, but unfortunately costs $400/year. I frequently scan their headlines while doing research, but cannot get past their paywall. On Sunday I wrote that OpenAI’s Sora was going to destroy the competition. Here’s their take on it: Link
When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last week posted a series of ultra-realistic and cinematic videos made by Sora, his company’s latest artificial intelligence technology, we imagined alarm bells ringing across the technology industry and, perhaps, Hollywood. Most of all, the videos should put fear in the hearts of at least seven companies in our Generative AI Database that develop AI video generators—and the investors who collectively gave them more than $550 million. In the wake of the mania that greeted the videos, one investor told us privately that they felt lucky they had passed on a recent fundraising round for a hot AI-generated video startup. Another investor who has funded a young AI video startup said they took solace in the fact that the startup’s strong leaders will make it a good acquisition target, if it comes to that.
Up until last week, I was championing tools like RunwayML and Pika Labs, but now they feel like MS Paint. The OpenAI hype machine is very good, but some people are concerned.
Video from Sora and Sound from Eleven Labs?
Eleven Labs recently announced that they would soon be including the ability to generate sound effects. To show this off, they made a mashup of the recent Sora videos and added their own sound effects. Read about it here, or just watch the video below.
Stable Diffusion is Back
I had pretty much given up on Stable Diffusion as I wrote about all the new AI tools, but perhaps they’re worth another look. If you’re still on the fence about which inage generator you should learn or you’re more in the “free and open source” camp, you should really check out this article about Stable Diffusion 3 and get on the waiting list.
Everyone in This Video Is AI Generated
You might have heard about the recent $25 million dollar heist, where an employee was duped in a deep fake video call. While not using Sora, Mark Frauenfelder of Boing-Boing wanted to see if he could make something similar, You can read his thoughts here
AI Has a Bad Week for Public Relations
If you ever feel like some of these AI products are being rushed to market, this week should validate your assumptions. When I started writing this newsletter I was an enthusiastic booster, but as I learn more, I am becoming a disgruntled curmudgeon. I’m sure that running these things is more complicated then I can imagine, but this week we sam some evidence that they’re not ready for prime time. On Wednesday night, ChatGPT was spitting out gibberish for a few hours. And on Thursday, Google had to pause image generation on Gemini because their attempts to create diversity in their image outputs was creating historical inaccuracies. While it’s admirable that Google is trying to bake in diversity, they’re finding out that none of this will be easy.
I Love Getting Feedback!
I’m always striving to learn more and improve the quality of my work, but I can’t possibly do a deep dive into all the things I’m exploring. If you’re trying out a tool I recommended, I’d love to hear about your results, even if they’re negative. One of my favorite former students sent this and it made my day. Thanks Marie!
Wow, what a week. I actually have about a dozen other things I could write about, but it’s 5 AM and I need to ship this thing this morning before I begin my day. As always, if you want to have a deeper dialog about these things, send me a message.