Daily Digest: This sounds real

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April 01, 2024

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Hello folks, here’s what we have today;

PICKS

  1. OpenAI is testing our patience with another tease. We are moving beyond text, images, and even videos to talk about audio. OpenAI is previewing a model called Voice Engine that creates custom voices in a snap. It’s just a preview and we won’t get to use it anytime soon. 🍿 Our Summary (also below)

  2. Microsoft and OpenAI are secretly plotting one of the most ambitious computing projects ever conceived—a $100 billion AI supercomputer called "Stargate". It's part of a 5-phase plan, with Stargate as the final phase 5. 🍿 Our Summary (also below)

  3. AI companies are hot on their heels but founders make or break companies. Forbes covered the story of Emad Mostaque, Stability AI’s founder and ex-CEO and how “he tanked the billion-dollar startup”. Another founder, Demis Hassabis (Deepmind) just got knighted, but “can he save Google?”

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QUICK BITES

OpenAI is testing our patience with another tease. We are moving beyond text, images, and even videos to talk about audio. OpenAI is previewing a model that creates custom voices in a snap. It’s just a preview and we won’t get to use it anytime soon.

What is going on here?

OpenAI shows a trailer of their custom voice creation tool called Voice Engine.

What does this mean?

This new model, named Voice Engine, can recreate anyone’s voice from just a 15s audio sample. And the generated speech sounds like the real deal. Wild, right? OpenAI is testing multiple use cases of Voice Engine with select partners, including

  • Age of Learning to provide reading assistance and personalised lessons to children.

  • HeyGen to translate videos/podcasts into multiple languages with the original speaker's accent.

  • Dimagi to improve the training of healthcare workers in their native languages.

  • Livox to create unique and customised synthetic voices for non-verbal individuals.

  • Norman Prince Neurosciences Institute to help patients recover their voices.

We’re kinda used to OpenAI dropping bangers now but here’s the truly insane detail: OpenAI developed this model in late 2022. They’ve been sitting on it for a year and a half, testing with these partners.

They have used Voice Engine to build the preset voices in their TTS API and ChatGPT’s Read Aloud feature. They've implemented some safeguards like watermarking the audio to track its origins. But voice impersonation is a serious risk, so they're being cautious about a wider release where users could create new voices on their own.

Why should I care?

As impressive as cloning someone's voice from a short clip is, it opens a whole can of worms we need to be ready for. Just think—voice authentication for banking could be easily bypassed if someone has a realistic synthetic version of your voice. AI voice models will only get more convincing, so we also need to train ourselves to not believe everything we hear.

OpenAI isn’t alone in creating realistic voices though. Play.ht and ElevenLabs are two leading startups that have voice-cloning tech available for use. Their results are already good (similar to OpenAI’s samples) but often need more data and tuning to get that match. OpenAI’s claim is doing the same but with just 15 seconds of sample audio. Do you take OpenAI at its word?

QUICK BITES

Microsoft and OpenAI are secretly plotting one of the most ambitious computing projects ever conceived—a $100 billion AI supercomputer called "Stargate".

What is going on here?

Stargate is part of a five-phase project to create the infrastructure for advanced AI models.

via The Information

What does this mean?

The proposed Stargate supercomputer could cost over $100 billion and require 5 gigawatts of power by 2030—the equivalent of several large data centres. It's part of a 5-phase plan, with Stargate as the final phase 5.

In the near term, Microsoft is working on a $10 billion "phase 4" supercomputer for OpenAI using Nvidia AI chips, targeted for the 2026 launch. We're currently in phase 3, with Microsoft providing hundreds of thousands of GPUs to OpenAI this year and next.

The total multi-phase plan could exceed $115 billion in costs for Microsoft - over 3x of their capital expenditure last year. Key goals are packing way more GPUs per server rack and using non-Nvidia networking tech like Ethernet instead of InfiniBand.

Why should I care?

It’s hard to imagine what OpenAI and Microsoft are plotting. Microsoft keeps investing in OpenAI rivals, but then you see numbers like this which make a few hundred million seem like chump change.

Is Stargate a part of Sam Altman’s plans of raising $7T for building AI infrastructure? Sam is vocal about the need for more powerful computers for AI’s bidding i.e. training the models and serving them to the public.

Building this supercomputer isn’t just about money though. It also relies on OpenAI delivering quality upgrades in its models way beyond GPT-4. Both Microsoft and OpenAI are betting that stupidly high compute will unlock self-improving AI models that can learn from synthetic data.

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