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🤌 Ben's Picks

Apple's got a new audiobook service⁴³⁸. I forgot Apple Books was a thing, genuinely.

It uses AI to narrate the books instead of humans (of course).

It'll make it easier and cheaper for authors and publishers to make audiobooks. Say goodbye to expensive, time-consuming recording sessions.

Right now, it's only available for English-language romance and fiction books and only two voices, Madison and Jackson, are available.

The funny thing is, Apple is really specific about which kinds of romance and fiction books it will do. It's only literary, historical, and women's fiction right now. No mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, or fantasy. If you search for "AI narration" in the Books app, you'll find a bunch of romance novels narrated by Apple's AI.

As with any AI voice, they're perfectly understandable, but they don't have the warm, loving tone of a human voice. But I bet that'll change as AI voice technology improves. Try getting AI to whisper sweet nothings in your ear.

Apple was supposed to launch the service in November, but it got delayed because of all the drama with Elon Musk at Twitter and some layoffs at Meta. Apparently, Apple has been trying to get independent publishers to use its service and is willing to cover the production costs in exchange for royalties.

Unlike Apple, Amazon's Audible service only allows human narrators (at the moment). But I bet that changes soon.

Spotify is also trying to make audiobooks a big part of its streaming service, but it's been having some problems with Apple's rules about in-app payments.

Apple Books quietly launches AI-narrated audiobooks. (link²⁹⁶)

DoNotPay AI bot with deepfake voice calls Wells Fargo to negotiate wire fees overturn. (link⁴⁸²)

🛠️ Cool Tools

• Interpret age and personality from an image using GPT-3 and Everypixel. (link⁶⁴⁴)

• Prompt Box - Organise, edit, and save your AI prompts across different AI tools. (link⁶³⁹)

• ToWords - Transform your YouTube videos into engaging blog posts. (link⁵⁶⁰)

• Dreamlike Photoreal 2.0 - Generate a photorealistic image based on your prompt. (link⁷⁰³)

• Rationale - A decision-making tool with in-content learning powered by GPT3.x. (link⁶¹⁶)

• SlidesAI - Create professional, engaging slides from any text in no time. (link^1,261)

🤓 Miscellaneous

• 7 cool OpenAI milestones in games, agents & robotics. In a nod to OpenAI's 7th Birthday! 🎉 (link⁴⁹⁸)

• Can AI decentralise Hollywood? $1000 bounty for the best 140-second video on Satoshi Nakamoto. (link³⁰¹)

• The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI. Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content. (link²³⁹)

• Top AI newsletters of 2023. (link⁶⁶⁵)

• Contribute to a repository of ChatGPT/LLM errors across different models. (link¹²²)

• Government + AI = does not compute. What will happen when governments are confronted with sentience that can match or outpace humans? (link¹³³)

• 10x your VC productivity with ChatGPT. (link⁵¹³)

• List of AI projects built on NextJS and Vercel. (link²⁸⁸)

• NIA podcast - Bearly AI & top AI predictions for 2023. (link²¹⁸)

• The fourth age of programming. (link³³³)

• Nim game in which a human plays against a GPT-3.5 powered AI. (link¹⁵⁵)

• Democratisation of AI models and how AI will disrupt all industries with Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque. (link⁵⁶⁰)

• How AI can help with the loneliness epidemic. (link²⁷²)

• Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision - Where application-based research finds a home. (link¹¹⁵)

• Launchable: Foundation Models event with exceptional speakers, mentors, judges, and a chance to win $250K! Apply by 9th January. (link^147†)

• Could your marketing agency train an AI and bypass generic content? (link⁵⁰⁷)

🎓 Learn

• Create your own website with ChatGPT and Replit in 10 minutes. (link⁹⁶³)

• A quick intro to state-of-the-art semantic search in python. (link²⁴⁵)

• The hello world of deep learning! (link²¹⁷)

• Get started with ML and model hosting in under 30 minutes with Replit Explorer. (link²²⁸)

• Tutorial to train your own AI models. (link⁴³⁰)

• Basic facts about language model internals. (link¹⁷⁶)

👋 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.

🔬 Research

• Rethinking mobile block for efficient neural models. (link¹⁰⁸)

• Framework for diverse, semantically reasonable, and physically plausible scene synthesis based on human motion. (link⁹⁹)

• GIT by Microsoft - The first model that can do video captioning and QA besides image captioning (decoder only). (link¹⁶⁷)

• BLIP by Salesforce - A multimodal modelwith decoder and encoder both for image captioning, QA, and image-text retrieval. (link²⁰⁵)

🖼 AI images of the day

Mozart in Mario Kart