Welcome to this week’s roundup of freshly baked AI news.
This week OpenAI teased new products as it burns through cash.
Meta dished out more state-of-the-art AI freebies.
And funny business in US politics could kill AI.
Let’s dig in.
Searching for cash
OpenAI announced “SearchGPTâ€, its latest bid to stay at the front of the Big Tech pack and a direct assault on Google’s search monopoly.
The prototype search function promises a more natural search experience. With websites increasingly shutting the gates on OpenAI’s web crawler you’ve got to wonder how much SearchGPT will be missing.
Something else that’s missing at OpenAI is profitability. Sam Altman’s pursuit of AGI is burning through cash faster than it’s coming in.
The AI monetization conundrum rages on as OpenAI’s costs rocket while free open models pile on the AI benchmark pressure.
Hey, Sam. If you’re short on cash, we’d be happy to pay for Sora and the voice assistant if it came with Skye’s voice. Your move.
While we wait for Sora, you can use the latest version of Midjourney to generate an image and then use Runway Gen-3 image-to-vid to make cool videos like these.
Runway Gen-3 img-2-vid → Awesome.
My day is ruined.#runwaygen3 #runwayml #midjourney pic.twitter.com/UF2OL53Zwx
— Rory Flynn (@Ror_Fly) July 29, 2024
More free Meta AI
While OpenAI looks for paying customers, Meta keeps giving its cutting-edge AI tools away for free. This week it released SAM 2, an AI model that enables accurate video segmentation in seconds.
The SAM 2 demos are impressive and could be a huge boost for autonomous vehicles and robotics.
Meta has released SAM 2 as open source software and threw in the training dataset too.
Training data is becoming an increasingly rare commodity. The largest models have burned through most of the online human-generated content and they’re hungry for more.
What would happen if we used AI to generate more content and use that to train models? A new study shows that things go bad pretty quickly when you do that.
AI may need humans for a little while yet.
Strike!
If you’re a gamer, you may have to wait a while before those new releases hit the shelves.
Video game artists from SAG-AFTRA have launched a strike against video game companies over their use of AI in making games.
Some of the biggest video game production companies will see their human talent down tools.
Will the absence of human talent dissuade these companies from using AI, or push them to accelerate its adoption?
The politics of AI
AI policy is fast becoming a political issue with legislators trying to play catchup with the tech.
Political deepfakes are getting better and are generally viewed as a bad thing. But what if they’re funny?
Elon Musk shared an AI-manipulated video of Kamala Harris that tickled his funny bone but not everyone thinks this is a joke.
There seems to be a big divide between state and federal AI policies in the US. The US Department of Commerce released a policy report endorsing open AI models instead of closed ones.
The report presents some interesting arguments for open models in spite of the risks. But not everyone thinks open weight models are such a good strategic move for the US though.
Open weights != Open source pic.twitter.com/Bu9kMJaiUl
— Cicero (@PauseusMaximus) July 17, 2024
On the other side of the spectrum are two proposed California AI bills. When you see some of the crazy requirements that could soon become state law there, it could be disastrous for AI development in California.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the EU AI Act came into force yesterday. The implications have supporters and detractors in equal measure as societal protections compete with the AI industry’s gung-ho approach to development.
Will the big players like Meta find a way to comply or continue withholding their products from the EU?
In other news…
Here are some other clickworthy AI stories we enjoyed this week:
Google’s AI achieved a silver-medal standard in solving International Mathematical Olympiad problems.
AI can reveal what’s on your screen via signals leaking from cables.
A neurological disease stole Rep. Jennifer Wexton’s voice. AI helped her get it back.
Olympics’ AI security stokes backlash over mass surveillance.
AI start-up Anthropic accused of ‘egregious’ data scraping.
AI video generator Runway was trained on thousands of YouTube videos without permission.
A new wearable AI called Friend is available for preorder. Things are getting weird.
introducing friend. not imaginary.
order now at https://t.co/7kGiH5pQVK pic.twitter.com/qU58xNvX5v
— Avi (@AviSchiffmann) July 30, 2024
And that’s a wrap.
If you’re a gamer, are you stressed about the SAG-AFTRA strike or looking forward to the first fully AI-generated games?
Did you get to try SearchGPT? We’re on the waiting list but no joy yet. Even though it’s still in beta it’s been pretty brutal on Google’s share price.
If you’re in California, we’d love to hear your views on the new AI law proposals. A good idea to keep us safe from killer AI, or a doomsday conspiracy-inspired industry destroyer?
Connect with us on X to let us know and send us links to AI stories and research you think we should cover next.
The post DAI#50 – Cash crunch, Meta freebies, and AI legal shutdowns appeared first on DailyAI.
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