Thanks for reading! Ben’s Bites is a roundup of what’s going on in AI. Not subscribed? Do that here.Link overload? Refer 1 friend with this link and get access to the filterable+searchable database.

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Welcome to the 131 new folks getting updated with the latest and greatest in AI.

Let's get into it.

Prompt: List the topics in today’s email:

🦾 Robot hands🌅 Shutterstock's partnership with OpenAI🔎 Identifying objects in images📝 Summarise video and audio with an API

🫦 BEN'S BITES

• Six data and AI startups had valuation multiples of 87.5X revenue or more - The Information published their 2022 most promising startups¹⁶⁹. The AI/Data startups included are; Runway²²⁸, Vic.ai²⁹¹, Hex²⁸⁹, StarTree²⁸³, Superconductive²⁶¹, Tabular^278† and Onehouse²⁸⁴.

• Shutterstock will not accept AI art¹⁰³ to be uploaded but will reward creators whose work was used to train them. It will also start selling AI-generated stock imagery with help from OpenAI.

• Robotic hands can basically solve a Rubik’s cube²²⁰. That makes one of us.

• An argument for why VCs are making a big mistake investing in Generative AI²⁰⁶. Will argues that the best implementation of AI is in the boring menial tasks everyone has to do, and AI is very good at. Rather than everyone becoming a digital Picasso.

• Related: A thread²³³ on the speed of advancement in AI & how much of an impact that is going to have on many jobs, soon.

• Identifying objects in images^192†. Google has released a simple and scalable approach for open-vocabulary object detection and image-conditioned detection. Using the demo is pretty fucking cool, in my opinion. Although, it struggled to find the cork...

• Is it possible to transform sensitive user data in a way that ²⁴⁸guarantees²⁴⁸ fairness²⁴⁸ while still being useful?

• A non-intimidating guide to getting into AI research¹⁷⁷, and what skills you need to contribute.

👋 Too many links?! I created a database for all links mentioned in these emails. Refer 1 friend using this link and I'll send over the link database.

• AI chip startup Axelera lands $27M in capital⁸³ to commercialize its hardware, to create a game-changing, user-friendly and scalable technology with superior performance and efficiency at a fraction of the cost.

• Meta is making progress in using AI to compress audio files¹³⁵ for quick and easy sharing.

• DALL-E 2 fails to reliably capture common syntactic processes¹²⁶

• Write meeting notes 20x faster³⁴⁸ with Supernormal. Here’s an example¹⁹⁶ from an hour-long call. But we're getting rid of hour-long calls right 🥹

• You can summarise videos, podcasts, and basically, any audio or video with a single API call.²⁴⁹

• Get 1 second cold boots for large ML models¹³⁸. WTF is a boot? Luckily Erik also wrote a short thread on this¹²⁴.

• Using ¹⁹⁹GPT-3 to help you write emails¹⁹⁹.¹⁹⁹ Not this one though! (yet_

• This sweater¹⁶⁶ developed by the University of Maryland is an invisibility cloak against AI. It uses "adversarial patterns" to stop AI from recognising the person wearing it. [insert Harry Potter reference]

• These brothers got rejected¹⁴⁰ by AI Grant, and I think it’s a pretty cool tool. Nutrify²⁷⁵ - Upload a photo of food and find out its macronutrients. Fun fact: Ben’s Bites was what I called my funny food reviews on Instagram.

• Compose AI³¹⁹ - a free Chrome extension that cuts your writing time by 40% with AI-powered autocompletion.

• Yesterday we learnt about NeRFs. Here’s another demo¹⁴¹ of creating "drone" shots from your phone footage, including the process too.

• A book written by GPT-3, illustrated by DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion¹⁵⁵. Cool, now I can read it with AI and get it summarised with AI. An AI circle of life.

• A demo¹⁷² showing how you can now generate ads from any URL in seconds with AI.

• Stable Diffusion v1-5 Gradio Demo is out on Hugging Face Spaces⁸⁵⁷ by Runway

• Mind-reading, from a distance¹³⁶! Scientists can now "decode" people's thoughts without even touching their heads.

• A state-of-the-art planner for self-driving²⁰⁹.

• Who’s building a next-gen search engine using LLM/generative AI¹⁸⁹? Will Google move fast enough vs other incumbents or startups? The economic opportunity here may be bigger than everything else, combined.

• Instantly summarise text^306†.

• What the Google Spam Update means for AI-generated articles¹⁵⁴.

• Announcing The Farama Foundation¹⁰³ - a new nonprofit organization designed in part to house major existing open source reinforcement learning (“RL”) libraries in a neutral nonprofit body.

• For the first time and in near-atomic detail, scientists at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) have revealed the structure of the key part of the inner ear responsible for hearing⁹⁸. And it immediately suggests mechanisms by which one might be able to compensate for those deficits.

• Our conscious experience of the world is but a memory, says new theory¹²⁵.

🖼 AI IMAGES OF THE DAY

A cat in a kayak

3D characters in Stable Diffusion

👋 SEE YA