Thanks for reading! Ben’s Bites is a roundup of what’s going on in AI.

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Prompt: List the topics in today’s email:

• 🔍 Guess that prompt

• 🫦 Bens Bites - What’s going on in AI

• 💰 Funding roundup

• 🖼 AI Images of the Day

• 🙋 Answer for Guess that prompt

🔍 GUESS THAT PROMPT

Guess what prompt made the following output. Hit reply and let me know your guess. Answers will be at the end of the next email.

🫦 BEN'S BITES

Runway (video creation + editing) released their AI Magic Tools¹¹⁷; green screen, inpainting, motion tracking, super-slow motion, text-to-image, image-to-image, text-to-colour grade, extract depth and frame interpolation. Phew, that's a lot of magic 🪄. They created their (very good) promo video all in Runway. It took 11 days¹¹⁵.

Danny Postma (who built StockAI.com) released 'Article2Image'¹²². Turn your article into a cover image.

A fully-fledged AI voice studio¹³⁶ called Coqui has released its waitlist. I'm #16450 but us Brits love a queue. No referral links here. Create voices (or use AI 'voice actors'), emotions, voice cloning and organise dialogue. We can all interview fake Steve Jobs soon!

Cool demo¹³⁶ showing how GPT-3 can explain academic papers. The demo showcases 'Attention is all you need' - the paper that started it all!

YouTube transcription tool¹³⁰ on top of Whisper. Paste a link → get the transcription.

Hugging Face is not only a company 'named after an emoji' 🤗. It started as a chat app for bored teens, now it offers a library of Natural Language Processing models - quite the pivot. 

They've just released 3 BIG things¹⁰⁷...(I'd say one big and 2 basic things)

1. Spaces GPU Upgrades for everyone. You can now upgrade to T4 and A10G, and A100 is in private beta. You can also apply for a community GPU grant to cover costs and see which hardware it’s running on. The more powerful your GPU is, the faster the fan 💨

2. Billing - see a real-time view of your usage

3. Pricing page makes it clear what they monetize: providing simple access to compute for AI

Microsoft brings DALL-E 2 to the masses¹⁰¹ with Designer and Image Creator. Anyone use Office and seen AI images replace clip art yet?!

A podcast with Sarah Guo¹⁰¹ (ex-Greylock investor) who has just raised $101m to fund AI companies. It's so awesome to see funds specific to these areas BUT why not just cap it at $100M, it's a much nicer number.

A community for discovering and sharing AI art¹³² and prompts. A few of these are popping up consistently. I've been promised a deep dive next week on one of the most powerful! Stay tuned.

20min video on how Imagen & Parti make the artistic process more accessible¹¹⁴. Context: Imagen and Parti, Google’s text-to-image models, have the ability to generate photorealistic images with different approaches. Imagen is a Diffusion model, which learns to convert a pattern of random dots to images. Parti’s approach takes advantage of existing research and infrastructure for large language models such as PaLM and is critical for handling long, complex text prompts to produce high-quality images.

Synesthetic.ai¹⁷³, search and remix 10M+ Stable Diffusion images.

Another one... Visualise.ai¹⁴⁴ - stable diffusion tool and prompt sharing site

Raoul Pal, former hedge fund manager, came in with this bold prediction:

If GDP growth = Population growth + Productivity growth

...then with global falling birth rates and ageing populations AI/Robots will replace the missing people and increase per capita productivity.

AI/Robot ARE demographics AND productivity AND therefore GDP.

It is written.

— Raoul Pal (@RaoulGMI)
4:31 PM • Oct 12, 2022

³

This¹²³ video demo shows Luma AI - It uses self-learning AI to guess parts of the missing scan when you're photo scanning. Shoutout to Amit¹¹⁵ who's building Luma (ex cameras, CV, AR at )

An article came out yesterday about a ghostwriter making $200k/yr writing tweets for VCs. Alexis Ohanian tweeted the below, which I imagine is already happening!

Make fun of the paid tweeter for VCs all you want, but I'm gonna have GPT-3 writing half my tweets in a year. 🤪

— AlexisOhanian7️⃣7️⃣6️⃣ (@alexisohanian)
9:38 PM • Oct 12, 2022

²

If you didn't watch the Elad Gil interview with Sam Altman (which i summarised in the last email) here's a transcription⁷⁵ (made by Whisper of course!) created by Kazuki¹⁰³.

Agreed, Tren, everything's moving super quickly

Does the emergence of rapidly improving models (eg, OpenAI) powered by unprecedented compute remind me of 1993 when the internet started being used for commercial purposes at scale? Yes.

The pace of change feels similarly nonlinear. The unexpected will happen. Big changes due.

— Tren Griffin (@trengriffin)
3:11 AM • Oct 13, 2022

³

Reid Hoffman (the other ' The Hoff') digs into¹⁰¹ the latest on autonomous vehicles, safety and challenges.

AI is now an expert⁹⁰ at the games; no-press Diplomacy and Hanabi.

New AI algorithms predict sports teams’ moves¹⁰¹ with 80% accuracy. Move over Brad Pitt, you're old news, there's a new Moneyball in town.

Input a YouTube link → get a video with subtitles (+ txt, .vtt, .srt files). An auto-subtitled video generator⁷³ using Streamlit and OpenAI Whisper hosted on HuggingFace spaces. Oh yeah and Whisper can translate 98 languages to English. That's 98 more than me!

🚨 SCARE WARNING at 9 seconds!!! Someone on Reddit was using the Uberduck voice to read a story and a DEMON ⁶²😈 started speaking⁶² 😱 - I actually did get a little freight. Hope I can sleep tonight.

A pretty epic video⁹⁶ of animation and magic.

Ai-Da makes history after becoming the first robot to be grilled by UK's House of Lords⁶⁴

💰 FUNDING ROUNDUP

Levity AI raised $8.3M¹²¹ co-led by Balderton Capital and Chalfen Ventures to build the world’s leading No-Code AI workflow automation platform.

🤔 Hmmmm. Seems Prime day took away all the cash from venture investments yesterday, as well as from my bank account.

Relevant read¹¹⁰: Meta, Google, and startups flock to AI art’s economic potential

🖼 AI IMAGES OF THE DAY

Sir Benedict Cucumberbatch

It's Turkey season soon so they're already up in arms giblets about it. So unrealistic, how are they holding their signs?!

"Hell" - yup that's pretty much what I'd visualise too

Add me on DingBang, a dating app for bananas - username @CanDoSplitsxx

🙋 ANSWER - GUESS THAT PROMPT

Yesterday's image:

Close guesses we had:

• "Colorful paint bubbling"

• "Gooey paint bubbles"

ANSWER:

"colorful gooey Play-Doh car engine, dripping neon lava toothpaste, vibrant colors, melted plastic toy soldiers"

WAS IT GOOD FOR YOU?