Welcome to our weekly roundup of human-crafted AI news.
This week, AI made game creation child’s play.
An AI music scam made $10m.
And OpenAI finally gives us a taste of Strawberry.
Let’s dig in.
At last
After rumors, whispers, and weird posts on X about Strawberries, OpenAI finally released a new product. OpenAI has released new advanced reasoning models dubbed the”o1” series.
From our first tests and the demo videos, it appears to perform significantly better than GPT-4o on reasoning tasks. It takes its time to think before answering but it’s worth the wait. We’re looking forward to seeing how this translates on the benchmarks.
Is Sora or the voice assistant next?
AI games
Is the video game industry facing an AI renaissance? Generative AI is disrupting the industry with new developments happening daily. There’s good news and bad news for gamers and developers alike.
Gaming platform FRVR AI has taken another big step in its mission to democratize game creation and distribution. It joined forces with GenreX to bring AI music composition to game developers.
AI is making it possible for anyone with an idea for a game to create it. But it’s also making it harder for music, voice, and graphic artists to justify their services.
My 8yo son built a Three.js site with zero coding experience
He used Claude AI and let Cursor apply all the code for him. He actually made several projects including 2 platformer games, a drawing app, an animation app and an AI chat app. ~2 hours spent on each. I only helped him… pic.twitter.com/R1Eu5L9qqA
— Meng To (@MengTo) September 1, 2024
A safe bet
Apparently there’s good money to be made in making AI safe. Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence (SSI) raised $1 billion in funding which saw his startup hit a $5 billion valuation.
SSI has no product and only 10 employees. What’s Ilya going to do with all that cash?
On the flip side, AI is helping scammers make money too. The FBI busted a $10 million AI music streaming scam run by a North Carolina ‘musician’. The scam was elegantly simple and it’s probably being duplicated elsewhere.
Oops, my bad
If you watched your NVIDIA shares head south on Friday, it might have had something to do with a sketchy Goldman Sachs report that claimed ChatGPT user numbers were tanking.
The reason for the mistake is actually pretty funny. AI tech shareholders probably aren’t laughing though.
Over the last week, we saw a build-up of excitement over a new open-source model that seemed to blow the top LLMs off the benchmark leaderboards. Reflection 70B looked too good to be true.
And now it looks like “the most powerful open-source LLM” is either a scam or a big misunderstanding.
iPhone 16 and the wait for AI
Apple demoed its new iPhone 16 and its ‘Apple Intelligence’ AI features at the Glowtime event this week.
The new features look cool and we can’t wait to try out the upgraded Siri. If the prospect of Apple Intelligence has you considering upgrading your phone, you may want to hold off on that for now.
The iPhone 16 will be Apple’s first AI-capable phone, but there’s a catch.
Apple Ai summed up pic.twitter.com/ZyJzZOKhdr
— Wall Street Memes (@wallstmemes) September 9, 2024
Hitting the brakes
Governments are trying desperately to have legislation keep up with AI and the associated risks. The world now has its first international AI treaty to align the technology with human rights, democracy, and law.
The first batch of countries have already signed up but we’ll have to wait to see who declines and if it will even make a difference.
Do you like the way Google and other AI-powered platforms give you instant answers to your questions? Not everyone is a fan. A group of US Senators have asked the FTC and DOJ to investigate AI summarizers for antitrust violations.
AI events
If you’re looking to attend an in-person AI event then you’re spoilt for choice next month. The AIAI Boston 2024 event hosts three co-located summits exploring cutting-edge AI. You’ll get to attend the Chief AI Officer, Generative AI, and Computer Vision summits in one spot.
In other news…
Here are some other clickworthy AI stories we enjoyed this week:
- Facebook admits to scraping every Australian adult user’s public photos and posts to train AI, with no opt-out option.
- Sixty countries endorse ‘blueprint’ for AI use in military but China opts out.
- James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader voice lives on through AI.
- Ark report says humanoid robots operating at scale could generate ~$24 trillion in revenues.
- OpenAI is reportedly in talks with investors to raise $6.5 billion at a $150 billion pre-money valuation.
- Adobe says video generation is coming to Firefly this year.
- MI6 and the CIA are using generative AI to combat tech-driven threat actors.
- Mistral releases Pixtral 12B, its first multimodal model.
OpenAI still hasn’t released Sora but they keep teasing us with new videos like this one.
OpenAI Sora new showcase video is out on YT, This is created by Singaporean artist Niceaunties. pic.twitter.com/VjvjzkReXM
— AshutoshShrivastava (@ai_for_success) September 9, 2024
And that’s a wrap.
Do you think games created by AI could ever be as good as the ones made by humans? I’m guessing there are some folks out there with great ideas but no coding skills that could surprise us.
I’d love to know what Ilya Sutskever is cooking up with his newfound cash. Will he be the first to create a safe AGI or the first to figure out that there’s no such thing as a safe superintelligence?
Let us know what you think, follow us on X, and send us links to cool AI stuff we may have missed.
