Fireside Chat with Sam Altman

What's going on in AI? Elad Gil chats with Sam Altman. Joe Rogan interviews Steve Jobs on his podcast, Boe Jogan Experience. (Un)Stable Diffusion Discord Drama.

Author

Ben Tossell
October 12, 2022

Thanks for reading! Ben’s Bites is a roundup of what’s going on in AI.

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Hey! I'm testing a new format today - let me know what you think 😊 - I'm not much of a copywriter and I like getting to the point quickly. Let's see how it goes.

Prompt: List the topics in today’s email:

  • 🔍 Guess that prompt

  • 🫦 Bens Bites - What’s going on in AI

  • 💰 Funding roundup

  • 🖼 AI Images of the Day

🔍 GUESS THAT PROMPT

Guess what prompt made the following output. Hit reply and let me know your guess. Answers will be at the end of the next email.

🫦 BEN'S BITES

Elad Gil spoke with Sam Altman in a YouTube Livestream. Lots to dive into. But they still struggled at the beginning to get mics working properly 😂 - worth a listen (on full volume). Here are my notes:

  • There should be more apps like Codex (auto-completing code)

  • Models are the best way to grow the ecosystem. Not so focused on smaller models. The application layer hasn't started. Bets we will see trillion dollar companies from these

  • Big co’s can create the most powerful models but startups will figure out what interesting things to do with those models

  • The role of Open-Source and AI alignment/safety

  • Past predictions were AI will take truck driving jobs etc first then creative. But those predictions have been very wrong

  • Is GPT-3 conscious?

  • The more you know about AI, the worse you are at using it. Kids vs Adults. It won’t reward deep technological expertise really well, but it reward knowing your problem space or being really creative

  • AI winter will not come any time soon because if we’re stuck with our current capabilities there is still so much economic value that can come of what we have.

Joe Rogan interviews Steve Jobs on the Joe Rogan Boe Jogan Experience via https://podcast.ai/. A fake podcast, with fake voices. But they do such a good job of making it almost sound real. Scary and exciting!

Copy.ai the popular AI copywriter (clue in the name, huh?!) has reached $10M ARR in just 2 years of launching - I wonder what their hosting costs are 😬. Vertical AI is taking off and it’s essentially a layer on top of OpenAI’s playground. Come up with your own training models and/or prompts that get specific outputs for your audience.

Discord Drama for (Un)Stable Diffusion. What happened? Basically, a moderator of SD created the unofficial Discord community for SD users. Then it sort of became labelled the official one, then not, then again. It was seemingly transferred (without notice) from the creator to the SD team, then back. Yes, I’m lost too. Here's the mods side of the story. Apparently, it is all resolved now.

🤫🤫🤫 What’s that?! Whisper is available in Hugging Face 🤗 Transformers. What is a transformer? Basically a type of Neural Network architecture.

Shaan Puri asked Twitter for the top AI demos and here’s a handful from the list:

  • Salt - the world's first fully AI-generated multi-plot "film"

  • Runway - video creation, editing and soon text-to-video

  • Podcast.ai - as mentioned before. From the folks at Play.ht: AI-powered text-to-voice generation

  • AI selfies - custom tuned Stable Diffusion embeddings that let you generate flattering images of yourself in any context and style

  • InteriorAI - interior design as an AI-service by Pieter Levels

  • Playgroundai - a place to create and share AI art

  • the list goes on...check it out

Product Images just got an artificial glow-up 💅 - Russ (Shopify) trained a model with 200-250 similar products, 20-25 training images and 4000 (!!) iterations. - When can non-technical folk train models super easily?!

Prompt Engineering - the next new thing? Or easily replicable by seeing others work? Suhail (recently built playgroundai.com) said on Twitter that we need AI Creative Tools courses, not prompt engineering as it’s easy with pre-made prompts. Agreed....but we're still asking 'what's the prompt?'.

Onceuponabot.com has reached over 2k stories generated already! (I mentioned them in yesterday’s email. And I even generated a story of my own: “Facebook Founding Story - An Alternative. GJ replied that it looks like Kanye’s Pablo Album cover. I’d argue the story was better than any of those songs)

AI needs to be simpler! You can’t just enter a YouTube link and get the transcription/summary. There’s a way to go yet. (or maybe i just can't do it)

Are we going to get ‘Pick-your-own-adventure’ audiobooks soon? - again, I think there’s a way to go but onceuponabot gives a good glimpse into what’s possible. (I keep harping on about them, sorry! - not affiliated I promise 😂)

The WALL-E DALL-E robotic arm can rearrange objects. When can I get one for all the clothes on my floor?

Predicting the future of AI with AI? Sure, why not.

Conversational AI Market is to reach USD 37.94 Billion with a growing CAGR of 24.04% by 2029.

Google reveals what’s next for Cloud AI.

💰 FUNDING ROUNDUP

Voice AI platform Vozy raises $5M Pre-Series A to expand to the US and Spain

Didimo’s raises $7.5M Series A to bring digital clones come to games, stores and the metaverse.

NumberOne AI raises $13M to Fund Predictive AI/ML Startups

Quant and AI-driven Investment Advisor Wright Research raises $1 million as seed capital from Orios Venture Partners

Kive closes $7M funding for its AI-powered visual content library

Insite AI raises $19M to help consumer brands figure out their in-store strategies.

🖼 AI IMAGES OF THE DAY

Putin imagined as a supervillain - not sure we need to ‘imagine’ that. Do we?!

Restroom sign for 3 genders

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