Thanks for reading! Ben’s Bites is a roundup of what’s going on in AI. Not subscribed? Do that here.Link overload? Refer 2 friends with this link and get access to the filterable+searchable database.

Woohoo, we're over 1k subscribers right now!!I'd like to make an apology, yesterday I mentioned a 4k stock video with a music demo...But I was conned. It was a scary video instead (I hadn't watched past 25 seconds where a horrible screaming clown appears). My bad 🤡.

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Let's just get into it, shall we? Oliver, our AI narrator has the audio version here^96†.

Prompt: List the topics in today’s email:

💬 A mini interview with Jasper CEO✍️ Is AI good or bad for writers?🛠 $250k for AI builders❤️ AI-generated love song🥇 9 business ideas to profit from the 2022 A.I. gold rush

🫦 BEN'S BITES

I spoke with Jasper founder, Dave Rogenmoser and asked him a couple of questions given their insane growth in 18 months to a $1.5bn valuation. The standard questions of backstory, pivots etc can be found in his thread¹²³. But here’s what I asked him:

What is one belief about ai that may be contrary to most people? I don't know how contrary this is to people in the know, but the models are a commodity in the future. No moat there. One great moat is in the data you use to train and fine-tune the models. I also think too many people are geeking out on AI tech and the real money to be made is in taking that and making it truly useful to the world.

What are you excited about in AI? This is the greatest space ever. I love how helpful everyone is to each other with a willingness to partner up. I think what we've done better than most is go really deep in understanding the customer and building for them. It's all we care about. It's all we talk about. We've flown under the radar in the tech world, because we just want to be famous to our customers. I'm a marketer at heart, and we've been building for marketers for 8 years, so to us this isn't just some cool technology, but a breakthrough for a very big pain point for marketers everywhere. Obsessing over the customer, rather than the tech, competitors, or ourselves, is a true superpower.

Jasper wrote a note to customers¹³¹ about their mammoth funding round.

• $250k to work on generative AI¹⁸⁷. That’s the challenge Foundation Capital has set. The best will receive a $250K SAFE (uncapped, no discount) investment. Reach out directly¹⁵³ to Jaya with any questions.

• AI is not here to get rid of writers, it’s here to augment human creativity¹⁴⁰. An article from Every writer (the company behind Lex), FADEKE ADEGBUYI,²²⁸ wrote this piece (and Nathan didn’t know it was being written, very timely). The article explores how writers are writing with AI, one example said “I don’t use it to generate words, more for giving me ideas and provocations for directions that I should go,”.

• Create your own 3D avatar²³⁸, in plain English. Now you CAN put your height as 6ft on Tinder. (but asterisk it as your 3D avatar, that’s sure to help with dates)

• We all know the ways we can manipulate images, colour, contrast, saturation, blur, sharpen etc. But why aren’t we thinking of manipulating text in the same way? This blog post¹⁷⁰ explores that idea.

• UniTune¹⁹⁰: Text-driven image editing by fine-tuning an image generation model on a single image.

• An example¹⁸⁰ of text-based real image editing.

• Adding a robot arm to a four-’legged’ machine⁹³ so it can perform tasks. No, you can't put it on your dog.

• A new experiment by First Round¹⁷⁷ (a well-known and beloved VC firm): AI Forum. a small group of talented builders in AI.

👋 Too many links?! I created a database for all links mentioned in these emails. Refer 2 friends using this link and I'll send over the link database.

• No more folding clothes, Hurray! Robotic arms can now fold clothes¹¹¹ for you. Erm, 1, please.

• A short thread¹⁸⁹ on why Generative AI may be similar to the web3 hype. It touches on raising money on insane valuations (which we’ve seen), whether will they become long-budget arms for business etc. My view is that AI is just another tool. Computers enable you to do a job productively. Google is a tool to look up anything I don’t know. AI is a tool that enables more productive work. Sure there’s going to be a bunch of gimmicks along the way. Everything starts off as a toy…

• Combining world models with human imitation learning⁸² for autonomous driving.

• A great podcast with the founder of Stability AI - Emad Mostaque¹⁴⁷. They talk about the future of AI, how it can educate the entire globe more easily, and solving problems with AI.

• My favourite podcast (i listen to every episode) is My First Million. In this episode²³⁰, Sam and Shaan discuss 9 business ideas to profit from the 2022 A.I. gold rush.

• Harvey is building an AI assistant for attorneys - which is one of the biggest opportunities for auto-complete implementations like GitHub Copilot (lots of legal documents are boilerplate). They’re hiring!¹⁴⁹

• Sarah Guo (who raised a $101M fund for AI) is putting together a job board for AI-native companies.¹⁶¹

• An interview⁸⁸ with the co-founder of OpenAI, John Schulman - TalkRL: The Reinforcement Learning Podcast

• Every email is a Runway update—because they ship something all. the. time. They released ¹²³public checkpoints¹²³ for Stable Diffusion Inpainting, which powers their Erase-and-Replace Tool.

• Why is AI’s impact still limited¹⁰⁰?

• Ambi Robotics secures $32M infusion⁶¹ to deploy its item-sorting robots in warehouses.

• 45 Resources to Learn Artificial Intelligence¹⁸² - 2022 (didn’t they already release a list of 70? strange that they’ve compiled another list but seems to be slightly more targeted)

• How long until we see an AI #1 in the charts?! Here’s an ¹⁶⁰AI-Generated love song¹⁶⁰. It’s not actually that bad!!

• Reid Hoffman and Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott chat about Programming Possibilities with AI¹⁰⁶.

• Irina Rish is a professor at the Université de Montréal, a core member of Mila (a community of ML researchers). In this video⁸⁷ they discuss Irina's definition of Artificial General Intelligence, her takes on AI Alignment, AI Progress, current research in scaling laws, the neural scaling laws workshop she has been organizing, phase transitions, continual learning, the existential risk from AI and what is currently happening in AI Alignment at Mila.

🖼 AI IMAGES OF THE DAY

Portrait of me writing these emails 😂

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