Welcome to this week’s roundup of freshly baked AI news.
This week OpenAI teased recent products because it burns through money.
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 money
OpenAI announced “SearchGPT”, its latest bid to remain on the front of the Big Tech pack and a direct assault on Google’s search monopoly.
The prototype search function guarantees a more natural search experience. With web sites increasingly shutting the gates on OpenAI’s web crawler you’ve got to wonder how much SearchGPT shall be missing.
Something else that’s missing at OpenAI is profitability. Sam Altman’s pursuit of AGI is burning through money 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 money, we’d be pleased to pay for Sora and the voice assistant if it got here with Skye’s voice. Your move.
While we wait for Sora, you should use the newest version of Midjourney to generate a picture after which 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
More free Meta AI
While OpenAI looks for paying customers, Meta keeps giving its cutting-edge AI tools away without cost. This week it released SAM 2, an AI model that allows accurate video segmentation in seconds.
The SAM 2 demos are impressive and may very well be an enormous boost for autonomous vehicles and robotics.
Meta has released SAM 2 as open source software and threw within the training dataset too.
Training data is becoming an increasingly rare commodity. The largest models have burned through many of the online human-generated content and so they’re hungry for more.
What would occur if we used AI to generate more content and use that to coach models? A brand new study shows that things go bad pretty quickly whenever you try this.
AI might have humans for just a little while yet.
Strike!
If you’re a gamer, you could have to attend some time before those recent releases hit the shelves.
Video game artists from SAG-AFTRA have launched a strike against video game firms over their use of AI in making games.
Some of the largest video game production firms will see their human talent down tools.
Will the absence of human talent dissuade these firms from using AI, or push them to speed up its adoption?
The politics of AI
AI policy is fast becoming a political issue with legislators attempting to play catchup with the tech.
Political deepfakes are convalescing and are generally viewed as a foul thing. But what in the event that they’re funny?
Elon Musk shared an AI-manipulated video of Kamala Harris that tickled his funny bone but not everyone thinks this can be a joke.
There appears to be an enormous divide between state and federal AI policies within the US. The US Department of Commerce released a policy report endorsing open AI models as an alternative of closed ones.
The report presents some interesting arguments for open models regardless of the risks. But not everyone thinks open weight models are such strategic move for the US though.
Open weights != Open source pic.twitter.com/Bu9kMJaiUl
On the opposite side of the spectrum are two proposed California AI bills. When you see a number of the crazy requirements that would soon change into state law there, it may very well be disastrous for AI development in California.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the EU AI Act got here 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 massive players like Meta discover a option to comply or proceed withholding their products from the EU?
In other news…
Here are another clickworthy AI stories we enjoyed this week:
introducing friend. not imaginary.
order now at https://t.co/7kGiH5pQVK pic.twitter.com/qU58xNvX5v
And that’s a wrap.
If you’re a gamer, are you stressed in regards to the SAG-AFTRA strike or looking forward to the primary 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 listen to your views on the brand new AI law proposals. A superb idea to maintain us protected from killer AI, or a doomsday conspiracy-inspired industry destroyer?
Connect with us on X to tell us and send us links to AI stories and research you’re thinking that we must always cover next.
