🛸 TALKING SPACESHIPS • AI ACT • GEMINI • MUSIC GEN • AI GOLD RUSH | V28
From science fiction to science fact
🧑🚀 NASA IS WORKING ON TALKING SPACESHIPS
Astronauts might soon be able to talk to their spaceships. Researchers at NASA are pushing to make these science fiction ideas a reality with a ‘ChatGPT-style interface‘
Conversational interfaces are nothing new, but until now were heavily limited by the complexity of natural, human conversation – could you imagine using Alexa or Siri to operate a spaceship? I doubt it. Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT or Bard change that.
And with technology developed at NASA often ending up in everyday products, I wouldn’t be surprised if we soon are able to talk to a lot more things around us, instead of fiddling around with all sorts of buttons or screens. An idea that is also at the heart of Apple’s recently presented vision for ambient computing.
🇪🇺 THE EU PASSED THE AI ACT
On the 14th of June members of the European Parliament passed an initial version of the AI Act in a word’s first attempt to regulate AI.
The rules would ensure that AI developed and used in Europe is aligned with EU rights and values – for example human oversight, safety, privacy, transparency, non-discrimination and social and environmental wellbeing.
The AI Act would ban some use cases like emotion-recognition AI, real-time biometrics and predictive policing in public spaces as well as social scoring. It also would take a closer look at generative AI (for example by banning copyrighted material from training sets) and recommender systems (which are the basis for almost all social media platforms) which would be deemed ‘high risk‘. Under the new rules high risk applications would force tech companies to be more transparent on the inner workings of their systems and make them more liable for their output.
Next up: talks with EU countries in the Council on the final form of the law.
👾 GOOGLE’S CHAT-GPT COMPETITOR: GEMINI
↗ Wired
Demis Hassabis, the Co-Founder of DeepMind and leader of Google’s newly unified AI lab Google DeepMind, has been teasing some of the systems his team is working on.
One of their next-generation foundation models, called Gemini, is still training but apparently already showing ‘impressive multimodal capabilities not seen in prior models’.
According to Mr Hassabis, Gemini will eclipse ChatGPT by using ideas that helped AlphaGo make history in 2016. A pretty bold claim, given that Google joined the chatbot party pretty late. And we’ll have to wait and see if Gemini can live up to such claims.
It is worth noting, that the transformer architecture that kicked off the recent generative AI wave was actually invented at Google (it is even rumoured that GPT-4 is based on an idea that originated within Google 2 years ago). So, even if Google missed the first wave of implementation of their own ideas, it is far too early to call the race.
🎹 FACEBOOK’S NEW MUSIC GENERATION MODEL
Ever wanted to know what an electro track supported by a gothic choir sounds like? Or your favourite song played on the infamous Theremin? Well, you are about to find out.
Facebook Research released a new text-to-audio model called MusicGen, which is able to generate pieces of audio from a text description. The researchers created a single transformer model that is able to generate better results than prior approaches (which often combine different models)
You can give MusicGen a try here.
💸 SOME MONSTER FUNDING ROUNDS
Inflection AI, the start up founded by DeepMind Co-Founder Mustafa Suleyman, LinkedIn Co-Founder Reid Hoffman and ex-DeepMind Principal Scientist Karén Simonyan raised an eyewartering amount of $1.3 billion from Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, and new investor NVIDIA.
Paris based Mistral AI raised $113 million just 4(!) weeks after being started by 3 DeepMind and Meta AI alumni. 👀
Generative AI OG Runway raised another $141 Million From Google and Nvidia.
The AI gold rush is in full swing. This post by Morning Brew made me chuckle:
The Input is a newsletter made with 🖤 by Nice Outside on planet earth. If you have feedback, are interested in geeking out about any of the things mentioned above or just want to jam on an idea, feel free to reach out to max@no.studio.