S⁷³ubscribe⁷³ | Ben’s Bites Pro⁵ | Ben’s Bites News⁵⁵
Daily Digest #380

Want to get in front of 100k AI enthusiasts? Work with us here^80†

Hello folks, here’s what we have today;

PICKS

1. OpenAI is testing our patience with another tease.⁵⁵⁴ We are moving beyond text, images, and even videos to talk about audio. OpenAI is previewing a model called Voice Engine that creates custom voices in a snap. It’s just a preview and we won’t get to use it anytime soon. 🍿 Our Summary¹⁵ (also below)

2. Microsoft and OpenAI are secretly plotting one of the most ambitious computing projects ever conceived—a $100 billion AI supercomputer called "Stargate".⁵⁴⁵ It's part of a 5-phase plan, with Stargate as the final phase 5. 🍿 Our Summary²⁰ (also below)

3. AI companies are hot on their heels but founders make or break companies. Forbes covered the story of Emad Mostaque, Stability AI’s founder and ex-CEO and how “he tanked the billion-dollar startup”⁷²¹. Another founder, Demis Hassabis (Deepmind) just got knighted, but “can he save Google?³¹⁵”

👀from our sponsor

Meet Hoory¹⁴⁶ 🤖 - your AI assistant for customer support automation!

Starting at just $6/month, Hoory AI comes to streamline your customer support processes at scale 🌟 With multilingual support 🌍 and an omni-channel inbox 📥, we ensure your service sparkles 24/7.

And guess what? We're now live on Product Hunt⁶⁷! An upvote from you could skyrocket our journey 🚀 Hoory up, a special discount⁵⁴ awaits! 🤫

TOP TOOLS

• Elicit Notebooks⁶¹⁷ - Take your research broader & deeper, all on one page.

• Jaiqu³⁵⁹ - Automatically reformat any JSON into any schema with AI.

• Semantic PDF⁴⁹⁷ - Instant semantic search across all your files.

• Lumona^393† - Discover skincare products reviewed by Reddit and YouTube.

• AI Regex³³⁴ - Get AI to create regular expressions for your data.

• Arbor^492† - Understand news quickly with multiple sources but no duplicates.

• Agenthost²⁷⁸ - Storefront for your AI chatbot.

View more →²¹⁸

NEWS

Frontier:

• Simulating one-way door⁴¹⁰ decisions with AI.

• How will Nvidia’s new GPU Blackwell²⁶⁶ affect the AI ecosystem?

• The necessity of a sin - Why treating AI like a person^364† is the future.

• Benchmarking LLMs against human expert-curated biomedical knowledge¹⁹³ graphs.

• Generative AI to quantify uncertainty in weather forecasting.¹⁴⁰

Companies:

• Scale AI nears $13B valuation¹⁷⁵ in Accel-led round.

• Cognition Labs, the company behind Devin, is now looking for a $2B valuation.¹⁶⁴

• AI Engineer announces Microsoft as the presenting sponsor for their World's Fair.⁹³

• Amazon is building Olympus²⁴⁴ to compete with Claude by mid-2024.

AI x Society:

• AI creates conflicting choices for video game actors¹²¹: premium rates and voice theft.

• New York City’s AI chatbot is giving illegal advice²⁸⁷ to its users.

• Companies are likely to be liable for statements¹⁷¹ by their chatbots.

View more →⁸²

Unclassifieds - short, sponsored links

• Auto Gmail²³⁵ - An AI trained on your email data that drafts emails for you while you sleep.

  Five day free trial - install the ²³⁵Chrome extension²³⁵

QUICK BITES

OpenAI is testing our patience with another tease. We are moving beyond text, images, and even videos to talk about audio. OpenAI is previewing a model that creates custom voices in a snap.⁵⁵⁴ It’s just a preview and we won’t get to use it anytime soon.

What is going on here?

OpenAI shows a trailer of their custom voice creation tool called Voice Engine.

What does this mean?

This new model, named Voice Engine, can recreate anyone’s voice from just a 15s audio sample. And the generated speech sounds like the real deal. Wild, right? OpenAI is testing multiple use cases of Voice Engine with select partners, including

• Age of Learning⁸⁷ to provide reading assistance and personalised lessons to children.

• HeyGen⁷² to translate videos/podcasts into multiple languages with the original speaker's accent.

• Dimagi⁵³ to improve the training of healthcare workers in their native languages.

• Livox⁵⁰ to create unique and customised synthetic voices for non-verbal individuals.

• Norman Prince Neurosciences Institute⁴⁷ to help patients recover their voices.

We’re kinda used to OpenAI dropping bangers now but here’s the truly insane detail: OpenAI developed this model in late 2022. They’ve been sitting on it for a year and a half, testing with these partners.

They have used Voice Engine to build the preset voices in their TTS API and ChatGPT’s Read Aloud feature. They've implemented some safeguards like watermarking the audio to track its origins. But voice impersonation is a serious risk, so they're being cautious about a wider release where users could create new voices on their own.

Why should I care?

As impressive as cloning someone's voice from a short clip is, it opens a whole can of worms we need to be ready for. Just think—voice authentication for banking could be easily bypassed if someone has a realistic synthetic version of your voice. AI voice models will only get more convincing, so we also need to train ourselves to not believe everything we hear.

OpenAI isn’t alone in creating realistic voices though. Play.ht^59† and ElevenLabs⁴⁵ are two leading startups that have voice-cloning tech available for use. Their results are already good (similar to OpenAI’s samples) but often need more data and tuning to get that match. OpenAI’s claim is doing the same but with just 15 seconds of sample audio. Do you take OpenAI at its word?

Share this story¹⁵

QUICK BITES

Microsoft and OpenAI are secretly plotting one of the most ambitious computing projects ever conceived—a $100 billion AI supercomputer called "Stargate".⁵⁴⁵

What is going on here?

Stargate is part of a five-phase project to create the infrastructure for advanced AI models.

What does this mean?

The proposed Stargate supercomputer could cost over $100 billion and require 5 gigawatts of power by 2030—the equivalent of several large data centres. It's part of a 5-phase plan, with Stargate as the final phase 5.

In the near term, Microsoft is working on a $10 billion "phase 4" supercomputer for OpenAI using Nvidia AI chips, targeted for the 2026 launch. We're currently in phase 3, with Microsoft providing hundreds of thousands of GPUs to OpenAI this year and next.

The total multi-phase plan could exceed $115 billion in costs for Microsoft - over 3x of their capital expenditure last year. Key goals are packing way more GPUs per server rack and using non-Nvidia networking tech like Ethernet instead of InfiniBand.

Why should I care?

It’s hard to imagine what OpenAI and Microsoft are plotting. Microsoft keeps investing in OpenAI rivals, but then you see numbers like this which make a few hundred million seem like chump change.

Is Stargate a part of Sam Altman’s plans of raising $7T for building AI infrastructure? Sam is vocal about the need for more powerful computers for AI’s bidding i.e. training the models and serving them to the public.

Building this supercomputer isn’t just about money though. It also relies on OpenAI delivering quality upgrades in its models way beyond GPT-4. Both Microsoft and OpenAI are betting that stupidly high compute will unlock self-improving AI models that can learn from synthetic data.

Share this story²⁰

Ben’s Bites Insights

We have 2 databases that are updated daily which you can access by sharing Ben’s Bites using the link below;

• All 10k+ links we’ve covered, easily filterable (1 referral)

• 6k+ AI company funding rounds from Jan 2022, including investors, amounts, stage etc (3 referrals)