An Impossible Fight and Trickery No More 🥊

AI image models such as MidJourney and DALL-E have been trained on large datasets of scraped images from online, many of which are copyrighted, private, or sensitive in subject matter. Many artists have discovered significant numbers of their art pieces in such training data without their knowledge, consent, credit or compensation.

To make it worse, many of these models are now used to copy individual artists, through a process called style mimicry. For artists whose styles are intentionally copied, not only do they see loss in commissions and basic income, but low quality synthetic copies scattered online dilute their brand and reputation. 

What’s the solution? A new system dubbed “Glaze” subtly alters artwork so that it appears unchanged to human eyes but looks drastically different to AI models. Glaze’s goal is to prevent unauthorized replication of an artist's unique style by generative AI.

But does this really work? What if people edited out the Glaze effects or reformatted the image multiple times? 

Well, none of those things would break Glaze, because it is not a watermark or hidden message. Instead, it’s a new dimension of the art, one that AI models see but humans do not (like UV light or ultrasonic frequencies). Humans wouldn’t even know the difference between the original image and the glazed one, no matter how hard one tried (see image above).

This new AI dimension is hard to locate or reverse engineer. Unless an attack knows exactly the dimension Glaze operates on (it changes and is different on each art piece), it will find it difficult to disrupt Glaze's effects. 

Imagine going up against The Rock in a wrestling match at the start of your career or trying to out-do Julia Child in cooking when you’re still learning to make a good ramen. 

Sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it? 

Few people or companies in any industry/field would dare to rival the big guns in their first outing. But that’s exactly what one startup is planning to do. 

Perplexity, a search engine startup, is gearing up to dethrone Google — global market share is ~92%. 

What gives it the confidence? The extra $74m in the bank, per The Wall Street Journal, having swayed prominent investors, including Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.

Why are these big names betting on Perplexity?

AI, naturally. Research is time-consuming. There are millions of website on Google for every search query. And we have to sift through multiple pages to find the best information.Perplexity cuts down that effort by providing a succinct, straightforward AI-fueled response to every query.

So technically, Perplexity is not a search engine but an “answer engine” (that’s what it calls itself). 

Its streamlined approach, which went live in December 2022, has attracted a lot of attention:

• It received 10m monthly active users in 2023, with 500m+ queries served.
• Its latest funding round valued the company at $520m.

So can it really make it to the top? 

Its numbers, though impressive pale in comparison to the industry standard: Google processes ~8.5B searches every day, and its parent, Alphabet, is worth $1.7T. 

It’s also wise to remember Google’s falling foes of yesteryear — AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Dogpile, WebCrawler, and even Bing (the engine by Microsoft that’s now backing Perplexity).

A Labor Department report on Friday revealed that the US job market is looking healthier than many had predicted, with the economy adding 216,000 jobs, leaving the unemployment rate unchanged at a near-record low of 3.7%.

But does increase in jobs equate to increase in pay or real wages (inflation adjusted)?
The answer is No.

Inflation outstripped pay rises in every month from April 2021 to early 2023. That started to change in earnest last summer, as employees’ pay packets began to outgrow inflation, resulting in “real” wage gains for the first time in 2 years. Annual wage growth hit its 2023 peak in July at 5.1%, and it hasn’t fallen below the inflation rate since. 

🔘 The First in 30 Years - Microsoft is adding an AI button to Windows keyboards. 

💲 Coins-a-lot - Bitcoin hit a 21-month high. The cryptocurrency rose to more than $47,000 yesterday.

🇩🇪 Germany Cut Subsidies - Farmers blocked major roads with tractors in Germany to protest a subsidy change. 

🍪 Check if You're One of Them - Google disabled cookies for 30 million Chrome users - the first step towards removing online tracking tools from the browser.

🥁 Old Man Band - A 98-year-old drummer started a band of Holocaust survivors.

😵‍💫 The Paris Syndrome - Ever had so much culture shock when traveling abroad that they called it a disease? Apparently, Japanese tourists did.