Ahead of Spotify’s upcoming Stream On event, where the company is expected to announce a redesigned home feed and other updates, the company today launched a new AI feature called “DJ” to better personalize the music listening experience for its users. Similar to a radio DJ, Spotify’s DJ feature will deliver a curated selection of music alongside AI-powered spoken commentary about the tracks and artists you like, using what Spotify says is a “stunningly realistic voice.”
The idea, explains the company, is for Spotify to get to know users so well that the DJ can choose what to play for you when you hit the button. Or, as Spotify says, it’s putting an “AI DJ in your pocket.” Read More
Monthly Archives: March 2023
Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment
The open release of the Stable Diffusion image generation model back in August 2022 was a key moment. I wrote how Stable Diffusion is a really big deal at the time.
People could now generate images from text on their own hardware!
More importantly, developers could mess around with the guts of what was going on.
The resulting explosion in innovation is still going on today. Most recently, ControlNet appears to have leapt Stable Diffusion ahead of Midjourney and DALL-E in terms of its capabilities.
It feels to me like that Stable Diffusion moment back in August kick-started the entire new wave of interest in generative AI—which was then pushed into over-drive by the release of ChatGPT at the end of November. Read More
China’s Hidden Tech Revolution
How Beijing Threatens U.S. Dominance
In 2007, the year Apple first started making iPhones in China, the country was better known for cheap labor than for technological sophistication. At the time, Chinese firms were unable to produce almost any of the iPhone’s internal components, which were imported from Germany, Japan, and the United States. China’s overall contribution to the devices was limited to the labor of assembling these components at Foxconn’s factories in Shenzhen—what amounted to less than four percent of the value-added costs.
By the time the iPhone X was released, in 2018, the situation had dramatically changed. Not only were Chinese workers continuing to assemble most iPhones, but Chinese firms were producing many of the sophisticated components inside them, including acoustic parts, charging modules, and battery packs. Having mastered complex technologies, these firms could produce better products than their Asian and European competitors. With the latest generation of iPhones, this pattern has only accelerated. Today, Chinese tech firms account for more than 25 percent of the device’s value-added costs.
Although the iPhone is a special case—as one of the most intricate pieces of hardware in existence, it relies on an exceptional range of technologies—its expanding footprint in China captures a broader trend. In a majority of manufactured goods, Chinese firms have moved beyond assembling foreign-made components to producing their own cutting-edge technologies. Along with its dominance of renewable power equipment, China is now at the forefront of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. These successes challenge the notion that scientific leadership inevitably translates into industrial leadership. Despite relatively modest contributions to pathbreaking research and scientific innovation, China has leveraged its process knowledge—the capacity to scale up whole new industries—to outcompete the United States in a widening array of strategic technologies. Read More
The US Air Force Is Moving Fast on AI-Piloted Fighter Jets
After successful autonomous flight tests in December, the military is ramping up its plans to bring artificial intelligence to the skies.
ON THE MORNING of December 1, 2022, a modified F-16 fighter jet codenamed VISTA X-62A took off from Edwards Air Force Base, roughly 60 miles north of Los Angeles. Over the course of a short test flight, the VISTA engaged in advanced fighter maneuver drills, including simulated aerial dogfights, before landing successfully back at base. While this may sound like business as usual for the US’s premier pilot training school—or like scenes lifted straight from Top Gun: Maverick—it was not a fighter pilot at the controls but, for the first time on a tactical aircraft, a sophisticated AI..
Overseen by the US Department of Defense, VISTA X-62A undertook 12 AI-led test flights between December 1 and 16, totaling more than 17 hours of autonomous flight time. The breakthrough comes as part of a drive by the United States Air Force Vanguard to develop unmanned combat aerial vehicles. Initiated in 2019, the Skyborg program will continue testing through 2023, with hopes of developing a working prototype by the end of the year. Read More
AI re-creates what people see by reading their brain scans
A new artificial intelligence system can reconstruct images a person saw based on their brain activity
As neuroscientists struggle to demystify how the human brain converts what our eyes see into mental images, artificial intelligence (AI) has been getting better at mimicking that feat. A recent study, scheduled to be presented at an upcoming computer vision conference, demonstrates that AI can read brain scans and re-create largely realistic versions of images a person has seen. As this technology develops, researchers say, it could have numerous applications, from exploring how various animal species perceive the world to perhaps one day recording human dreams and aiding communication in people with paralysis.
Many labs have used AI to read brain scans and re-create images a subject has recently seen, such as human faces and photos of landscapes. The new study marks the first time an AI algorithm called Stable Diffusion, developed by a German group and publicly released in 2022, has been used to do this. Read More
Structure and Content-Guided Video Synthesis with Diffusion Models
Text-guided generative diffusion models unlock powerful image creation and editing tools. While these have been extended to video generation, current approaches that edit the content of existing footage while retaining structure require expensive re-training for every input or rely on error-prone propagation of image edits across frames.
In this work, we present a structure and content-guided video diffusion model that edits videos based on visual or textual descriptions of the desired output. Conflicts between user-provided content edits and structure representations occur due to insufficient disentanglement between the two aspects. As a solution, we show that training on monocular depth estimates with varying levels of detail provides control over structure and content fidelity. Our model is trained jointly on images and videos which also exposes explicit control of temporal consistency through a novel guidance method. Our experiments demonstrate a wide variety of successes; fine-grained control over output characteristics, customization based on a few reference images, and a strong user preference towards results by our model. Read More
Worldcoin, co-founded by Sam Altman, is betting the next big thing in AI is proving you are human
Fake virtual identities are nothing new. The ability to so easily create them has been both a boon for social media platforms — more “users” — and a scourge, tied as they are to the spread of conspiracy theories, distorted discourse and other societal ills.
Still, Twitter bots are nothing compared with what the world is about to experience, as any time spent with ChatGPT illustrates. Flash forward a few years and it will be impossible to know if someone is communicating with another mortal or a neural network.
Sam Altman knows this. Altman is the co-founder and the CEO of ChatGPT parent OpenAI and has long had more visibility than most into what’s around the corner. It’s why more than three years ago, he conceived of a new company that could serve first and foremost as proof-of-personhood. Called Worldcoin, its three-part mission — to create a global ID, a global currency and an app that enables payment, purchases and transfers using its own token, along with other digital assets and traditional currencies — is as ambitious as it is technically complicated, but the opportunity is also vast. Read More
China’s ChatGPT Black Market Is Thriving
A booming illicit market for OpenAI’s chatbot shows the huge potential, and risks, for Chinese generative AI.
Yuxin Guo is a master’s student studying at a Beijing University. For a few months, she had been following online discussions about ChatGPT, the generative AI tool that produces almost natural-sounding language in response to text prompts. One video she found on social media platform Weibo showed how college students in the US were using the technology to write research papers. In February, she finally decided to try it out for herself.
“I got curious because so many people are talking about it,” Guo says, “although not a lot of people seem to clearly know how to access it.”
ChatGPT isn’t available in China—it’s not blocked, but OpenAI, which built the tool, hasn’t made it available there—so Guo went onto Taobao, China’s biggest ecommerce site, where hundreds of thousands of merchants offer everything from iPhone cases to foreign driver’s licenses.
ChatGPT logins have become a hot commodity on Taobao, as have foreign phone numbers—particularly virtual ones that can receive verification codes. Read More
D-ID’s new web app gives a face and voice to OpenAI’s ChatGPT
D-ID, the Israeli startup behind Deep Nostalgia, announced today that it’s launching the beta version of its new web app that allows users to talk face-to-face with photorealistic AI. The web app, called chat.D-ID, combines D-ID’s text-to-video streaming technology with OpenAI’s ChatGPT to make conversations with AI more accessible.
The startup’s CEO and co-founder, Gil Perry, told TechCrunch that D-ID believes giving ChatGPT a voice and face will allow more people to use the technology, as people who can’t read and write will now be able to converse with AI. Another goal of the chat.D-ID to make it easier for elderly people to use AI. The company believes its new web app opens up access to ChatGPT more widely.
“The app is an easier way to use the power of AI and converse with ChatGPT,” Perry said. “We are wired to communicate with faces, we understand the situation better when we do. We feel more comfortable and we can observe complex information better when we’re in what feels like a real scenario. Video is more effective than text, so the app increases the power of large language models by adding a face.” Read More
Meet DuckAssist, DuckDuckGo’s New AI Feature
DuckAssist isn’t a chatbot, but it uses artificial intelligence to help answer your questions.
Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo unveiled on Wednesday an optional artificial intelligence feature called DuckAssist. Users of DuckDuckGo’s browser apps or extensions can access a beta version of the feature now, for free.
Unlike ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Bing AI, DuckAssist isn’t a chatbot, DuckDuckGo says. Instead, it’s an addition to the search engine’s existing Instant Answers feature. Instant Answers taps various online sources to give you a quick answer to your query without you having to click one of the links in the search results. Now DuckAssist can lend a hand, but it pulls from a smaller set of sources. Read More
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