Mini Announcement, The AI Alliance, Google's Gemini & Independence Mantra

I started Practical AI School this week. The goal is to help you use cutting-edge AI tools in your work and life. Go sign up.

In the short term, I'll start sending out some free resources and organizing a Practical AI Workshop.

I'm talking with some AI experts to bring them in to provide the highest quality materials. If you wanna contribute in some way, just reply to this email 😃

A lot of AI in today's issue...

Thing 1 - The AI Alliance

AI-generated representation of the Alliance. Logos are not all correct.

IBM and Meta have teamed up to start the AI Alliance, and they've got over 50 big names on board! Think of the coolest tech and research places you know - like AMD, NASA, and universities like Yale and Tokyo - they're all in.

They plan on

• building benchmarks and standards
• boosting the AI hardware game
• focusing on open foundation models

The goal is to make AI more inclusive and safe. Plus teaching people AI skills and getting the word out about the good and bad of AI.

The Alliance will work in teams, focusing on everything AI-related. They're not going it alone - they'll team up with governments, nonprofits, and others in the AI field.

Members

Screenshot of a map with names and locations of AI Alliance members

Thing 2 - AI of the week

• Google announced and kinda sorta launched Gemini. The model that we all want to have our hands on - Ultra - is not out yet. Pro is available through Bard. Nano will run on user devices.

Gemini demo. It's not real-time as some people thought. The capabilities are there but the video is aspirational.

• ByteDance launched MagicAnimate, a competitor to last week's Animate Anyone - it's already open source and you can test it!
• Perplexity AI added a feature to locate the time in the YouTube video where the answer to your question lies
• Microsoft announced Copilot will soon use GPT-4 Turbo, the new DALL-E 3 model, Code Interpreter (!), and more
• Meta demoed SeamlessExpressive - a new AI translation model, high-quality speech translation that maintains the speaker's vocal style, tone, and unique expressions
• PlaygroundAI published Playground v2, a from-scratch trained model

Playground v2 examples vs SDXL

• Meta announced new generative AI features and updates to existing ones introduced at Connect
• Meta introduced Audiobox - a new foundation research model for audio generation. Natural language prompts to describe sounds or the type of speech to generate.

And so many more...

Thing 3 - Optimize for independence

Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay. If you have independence and you’re accountable on your output, as opposed to your input—that’s the dream.

- Naval Ravikant

If you have all the money in the world but you're a slave to it and can't pick what you want to do with your time... What is it all for?

Cheers, Zvonimir