Meta's text-to-video AI 📺, Elon's texts released 💬, a creator's guide to stable diffusion 🎨

Daily Update 2022-09-30

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Big Tech & Startups

Meta’s new text-to-video AI generator is like DALL-E for video (4 minute read)

Meta's new system, Make-A-Video, can create videos from rough descriptions of a scene. The clips are only up to five seconds long and contain no audio. Make-A-Video is currently closed to the public. Meta is planning to release a demo to the public, but it has not indicated when or how access to the model may be limited. Examples of clips generated by Make-A-Video are available in the article.

Google’s Phil Harrison told employees of Stadia’s shutdown minutes before the public (2 minute read)

Google is shutting down Stadia. Stadia had recently launched a redesign of its web app and it just released a new game hours before the shutdown announcement. Employees were told about the shutdown in a virtual meeting 45 minutes before the public announcement. Google last year shut down the Stadia Games and Entertainment division in a similar way, announcing the shutdown to employees minutes before making the public announcement.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

The Era of Fast, Cheap Genome Sequencing Is Here (6 minute read)

Illumina's new NovaSeq X series genome sequencing machines can sequence human genomes for just $200 each. The new machines can sequence 20,000 genomes per year, while current machines can only sequence around 7,500. Cheaper sequencing will benefit researchers by boosting datasets and allowing them to perform larger research studies. The new machines are now available for sale and Illumina will start shipping them next year.

New trial finds first-ever Alzheimer’s drug to slow cognitive decline (4 minute read)

A drug called Lecanemab seems to be successful in slowing cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer's disease. Results from a Phase 3 human trial show that the drug may slow down the symptomatic progression of the disease. Experts are wary of how meaningful this effect will be for patients in the real world. The drug does not cure Alzheimer's disease, but slowing down cognitive decline will help those suffering from the condition live well for longer.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Alinea (GitHub Repo)

Alinea is a content management system for the modern web. It stores content fully typed in flat files that are easily queryable through an in-memory SQLite database. Alinea supports custom backends that can be hosted as a Node.js process or on serverless runtimes.

Getting Started With Stable Diffusion: A Guide For Creators (20 minute read)

This guide talks about how to work with Stable Diffusion using Dream Studio. It covers how to tweak outputs by keeping the seed constant, prompt engineering basics, modifiers, image-to-image generation, how to run Stable Diffusion on a local machine, and much more. The guide is the third part of a series on AI content generation.

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Miscellaneous

Musk’s Texts Reveal Inside Look At Twitter Deal’s Collapse (5 minute read)

A large collection of Elon Musk's texts have been made available to the public as part of evidentiary discovery in Twitter's lawsuit against him. The texts provide valuable insight into the thought process behind the attempted acquisition. Musk had secured billions in funding and support from his backers directly from his phone. This article provides a summary of the texts and tells the inside story of how the Twitter deal collapsed.

Mark Zuckerberg tells Meta the company will freeze hiring and cut costs (2 minute read)

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced plans to freeze hiring and restructure some groups within the company. The company plans to shrink budgets widely. Meta has been slowing hiring since July to prepare for an anticipated downturn. While many other tech companies are also downsizing due to the worsening global economic outlook, Meta is dealing with additional threats to its advertising business, such as the privacy changes implemented in iOS last year.

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Quick Links

CIA Just Invested In Woolly Mammoth Resurrection Tech (6 minute read)

The CIA has invested in biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences through In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit venture capital firm that the CIA funds.

Saudi Arabia to invest $37 billion in gaming (1 minute read)

The Savvy Gaming Group, a Saudi Arabian government-funded gaming conglomerate, is investing $37 billion in gaming as part of a plan to diversify the country's economy.

DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion (6 minute read)

DreamFusion generates 3D objects and scenes from diverse captions.

Meta cracks down on ad-free Instagram client a day after it launched (3 minute read)

'The OG App', a third party-Instagram app that promised an ad-free feed like the original Instagram experience, has been pulled from Apple's App Store just one day after it officially launched.

NASA’s Juno Shares First Image From Flyby of Jupiter’s Moon Europa (4 minute read)

The image was captured at a distance of about 219 miles and it reveals surface features in a region near the moon's equator.

Private profiles are now generally available (2 minute read)

GitHub users can now control what user data is shared across the platform with private profiles.

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Meta's text-to-video AI 📺, Elon's texts released 💬, a creator's guide to stable diffusion 🎨

Daily Update 2022-09-30

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

What did you think of today's newsletter?

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