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Daily Digest #295

Hello folks, here’s what we have today;

PICKS

  1. I think about AI ideas all the time. I wrote a breakdown of AI wrappers, how much money they’re making etc plus new opportunities others should go after. ‘Why do AI Wrappers get a bad (w)rap?’ 🙃 - I want to do more of these, I’ve got a million notes on things like this. Let me know if I should do more (at the bottom of the post I just linked).

  2. Pika Labs, the AI video startup, has raised $35 million for its series A from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Elad Gill, Andrej Karpathy and others including Ben’s Bites (that’s us!). Forbes wrote a profile on the company and founders covering their story and next steps.

    They are coming out of Discord and Pika 1.0 is bringing the heat [examples] in text-to-video space with studio-quality video production. You can sign up for the web app here.🍿Our Summary (also below)

  3. ElevenLabs is providing over 4000 grants to startups and small teams to access their voice AI platform for free for 3 months. This allows you to test and develop voice-enabled products without large upfront costs.🍿Our Summary (also below)

  4. Stability AI is releasing SDXL Turbo. This new text-to-image model can generate images in real-time from text descriptions. Stability claims “create as fast as you type.”🍿Our Summary (also below)

  5. AWS announces Amazon Q - The assistant for work and business. Amazon Q will help employees by answering questions, summarizing reports, writing content, and automating tasks using a company's connected data and documents.🍿Our Summary

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NEWS
QUICK BITES

Pika Labs, the AI video startup, has raised $35 million for its series A from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Elad Gill, Andrej Karpathy and others including Ben’s Bites. It’s bringing the heat in text-to-video space with studio-quality video production. Pika 1.0 is now open to everyone.

What is going on here?

Pika Labs raises $55M to turn your ideas into videos for everyday consumers.

What does this mean?

Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng founded Pika Labs after participating in Runway’s AI film festival last year and are now ready to give them tough competition. Pika Labs has already over 500,000 users creating viral videos via Discord and now it’s launching the web app.

You can sign up for Pika 1.0, a major upgrade from their early product. It has a new AI model that can generate and edit videos in diverse styles such as 3D animation, anime or cinematic. It slays at the usual text-to-video, but to top it off works with images and videos as inputs as well. You can resize video canvas, selectively edit parts in a video and more. Check it out.

The four-person startup has raised $55 million across three funding rounds within months. The first two were led by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and the latest—a $35 million Series A from Lightspeed Venture Partners. Forbes wrote a profile on the company and founders covering their story and next steps.

Why should I care?

Karpathy (also an investor) tweeted that this is similar to how image model quality increased across the X and Y axes, going from small 32×32 patches to high-resolution, realistic images. This time it’s along the time axis, instead of a single frame, you are getting seconds of videos.

For the normal user, I think of it as how Canva brought design to everyone. Imagine creating beautiful (or rare) videos for your everyday use.

QUICK BITES

ElevenLabs is providing over 4000 grants to startups and small teams to access their voice AI platform for free for 3 months. This allows you to test and develop voice-enabled products without large upfront costs

What is going on here?

ElevenLabs is offering grants to help entrepreneurs and startups build products using their realistic voice AI technology.

What does this mean?

The grants provide startups with 11 million characters of free voice AI usage per month. That translates into over 200 hours of generated speech audio you can use to create vocal interfaces for chatbots, virtual assistants, audiobooks, and more innovative ideas. You get enterprise-level access with extra capacity and early previews of new voice AI features ElevenLabs releases.

It's an opportunity for solo founders, small teams, and startups under 25 people to experiment with advanced realistic voice tech they may not otherwise have access to. ElevenLabs wants to empower developers and entrepreneurs to create unique voice-powered products, regardless of company size and funding constraints.

Why should I care?

If you have an early-stage startup focused on voice interfaces and audio, this grant program lets you not just prototype ideas but fully build and launch them. You can take a concept to market with essentially free access to studio-quality voices for the first 3 months without big upfront investment.

It also connects you into ElevenLabs' ecosystem. If your product gains traction, you can continue access at a discount. It's a chance to partner further and leverage ElevenLabs' industry-leading voice AI expertise to accelerate your own company's growth.

Ultimately, these grants aim to foster innovation by eliminating financial barriers entrepreneurs and startups face when working with advanced enterprise AI technology. It allows small players to punch above their weight class.

QUICK BITES

Stability AI is releasing a new text-to-image model called SDXL Turbo that can generate images in real-time from text descriptions. SDXL Turbo uses a novel distillation technique to enable single-step high-fidelity image generation, reducing the number of steps required compared to previous models.

What is going on here?

Stability AI has released a new text-to-image model named SDXL Turbo that can generate images from text in real-time.

What does this mean?

SDXL Turbo uses a new technique called Adversarial Diffusion Distillation (ADD) to produce high-quality images in just one processing step, unlike other models that require multiple steps.

It combines the speed of GAN AI models with the detail quality of diffusion models. So SDXL Turbo generates images incredibly fast yet with intricate fidelity—the best of both worlds. Where top existing models need 50 steps to create images, SDXL Turbo only needs 4 and makes images just as good or better. On fast hardware, it generates a 512 x 512 picture in barely over 200 milliseconds!

Why should I care?

In blind testing against leading models, humans consistently picked SDXL Turbo's images as most closely matching text prompts—showing creativity and clarity. This new combo of speed + quality opens possibilities for using AI image generation creatively.

You can try a beta of SDXL Turbo on Stability AI's Clipdrop platform to create visuals on-demand. While not commercially usable yet, SDXL Turbo means exciting progress in text-to-image AI.

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