The captain's log
Jeremy Rosenberg
Generative AI, Marketing, Brand & Communications Consultant, Trainer & Coach
Gen AI News Summary 04.11.24
A bracing sail through the seas of generative AI, handily mapped out under the following headings:
- AI and Content Creation
- AI Models and Tools
- AI and Search
- AI and Avartars
- AI and Agents
- AI Marketing and Sales
- AI and Retail
- AI Health and Education
- AI Adoption
- AI Regulation and Ethics
- And Finally…
AI and Content Creation
Midjourney ’s ‘Powerful’ AI image editor now lets you edit any image - including images from the web.
Stability AI has updated its image model with several new model variants, including Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large, Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large Turbo, and Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium.?These models are highly customisable, run on consumer hardware, and are free for both commercial and non-commercial use under the permissive Stability AI Community License.
Recraft 's newest image model - the mystery AI that beat Midjourney and DALL-E in anonymous evaluations? anonymous evaluations - can generate high-quality images with impressive details, quality, and prompt fidelity. And finally, there’s an image generator that also does text well!
Respected AI image start up Ideogram AI launches an ‘infinite canvas’ feature (not unlike the recently introduced GPT-4o with canvas). Ideogram canvas users can spread newly generated images out, compare them to older generations, resize and reorder them at will, and even combine multiple AI generated images into one new composite.
Since the Adobe Firefly Gen AI updates after last month’s Adobe MAX conference, some users have found that Adobe’s Gen AI tools in Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom, and Photoshop have become less accurate.
The “ 苹果 Intelligence” roll out may have underwhelmed so far, but is Apple’s AI photo “clean up” tool better than Adobe ’s? Some think so…
Canva launches Dream Lab, a powerful AI image generator for creatives, developed on top of the gen AI model Leonardo.Ai that Canva acquired earlier this year.
Meta ’s Gen AI image model is being lauded for being easy to use. One simple prompt can make AI images “come alive” in Facebook Messenger and Instagram, apparently.
ElevenLabs now lets you create your very own custom voiceover voices from text prompts.
Jacob Collier, a Grammy-winning musician, has teamed up with Google DeepMind and 谷歌 Labs to create MusicFX DJ, an AI-powered music tool. The interface has been redesigned to encourage creativity and help users easily enter a "flow state" of artistic inspiration. MusicFX DJ is available now, “offering intuitive controls for all skill levels”.
AI Models and Tools
Oh yes they will…
OpenAI plans to release its next big AI model by December. A report revealed that OpenAI would release its new ‘Orion’ frontier model (ie GPT-5, or whatever it will be called) by December, with 微软 and other huge companies getting access before individuals.
And, then another report citing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, said...
Oh no they won’t!
OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, responded directly to the report on X, posting “fake news out of control”.?An OpenAI spokesperson clarified that they have no plans for an "Orion" release this year but plan to release “a lot of other great technology.”
OpenAI introduces an open source “factuality benchmark” to measure the factual accuracy of language models (the likelihood that they won’t hallucinate). The new benchmark is called SimpleQA.
The Perplexity app for the 苹果 Mac desktop was released, making it more convenient to use the “Google search for research killer”, if you use a Mac…
Not to be outdone, Anthropic also release a desktop app for Claude, for both Mac and Windows.
Anthropic has also added PDF support to its Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI model in public beta, allowing it to process both the text and the images within PDF documents.
After reports that OpenAI is planning to launch the next version of its flagship AI model in December, there is now a possibility that 谷歌 may be planning to launch the latest version of Gemini - Gemini 2.0 - in the same month.
谷歌 is building controls into Gemini, so that Google smart home devices can be controlled with natural languages.
苹果 finally launches Apple Intelligence, with the release of iOS 18.1 if you have a new enough iPhone, iPad or Mac, and you’re happy to set it to US English, for the moment. This initial version introduced a more natural-sounding Siri, major upgrades for Apple’s Photos app, including a new “Clean Up” tool, and systemwide Writing Tools to help users rewrite, proofread, and summarise text in apps like Mail, Messages and Notes. But it currently lacks the conversational abilities we've come to expect from an AI assistant, the ChatGPT integration and user-created Genmoji features that many were expecting. Underwhelming, seems to be the general verdict. But, don’t bet against Apple, a latter day tortoise in the race against the hare…
Meta has struck a multi-year deal with Reuters to use its news content to provide real-time answers to user queries about news and current events in its AI chatbots.
Meta released new versions of its Llama 3.2 AI models that run up to four times faster and achieve a 56% reduction in model size compared to their original counterparts. These breakthroughs make it more feasible to run powerful AI features directly on a mobile phone.
Elon Musk-owned xAI has added image-understanding capabilities to its Grok AI model. This means that paid users on his social platform X, who have access to the AI chatbot, can upload an image and ask the AI questions about it.
AI and Search
OpenAI and search part I: OpenAI launches its web search engine, as a feature in ChatGPT, initially to premium users, and then to enterprise, education and free users in the coming weeks.
OpenAI and search part II: ChatGPT now lets you search your old chats in the web app. OpenAI says "Only you have access to your conversation history, and OpenAI doesn’t use these conversations for training unless you explicitly consent by opting in.".
Meta is reportedly developing its own search engine, to reduce its dependence on 谷歌 search and 微软 Bing.
AI and Avatars
HeyGen rolled out new “Interactive Avatars” to allow you to have personalised AI-driven, “immersive, real-time conversations”. Users can either select a template avatar or create their own avatar for a specific use by selecting the option “All Avatars”.
Meanwhile…. D-ID launched new high-quality avatars capable of real-time conversations.
领英推荐
AI and Agents
谷歌 is developing a computer-using agent - AI that can take over your web browser to complete tasks such as gathering research, purchasing a product or booking a flight. The product, code-named Project Jarvis, is thought to be similar to one Anthropic has just announced. Google plans to preview the product as early as December alongside the release of its next flagship Gemini large language model.
Move over Salesforce , Microsoft et al, Big Four accounting and consulting firm KPMG is developing AI agents and is interested in becoming a leader in the emerging?AI agent space.
AI agents will be at centre of our digital worlds, dancing across our devices from smart glasses to cars, providing a consistent experience and adapting the way technology interacts with us.
OpenAI is expected to launch agents in 2025. Salesforce ’s CEO announced AI agents are the third wave of AI. 微软 adding agent capabilities to Copilot. The message here is clear: AI agents are going to be big, and leaders need to begin strategising how to incorporate this powerful technology into their organisations.
AI Marketing and Sales
A look at how leaders can maximise AI-driven sales strategies.
Harvard Business Review asks: “Can startups thrive in an age of AI?”
亚马逊 announces new image, audio and video AI-powered tools for marketers making ads, as part of an?AI strategy, that drove up Amazon capital expenditures?81% year on year in Q3.
AI and Retail
Perplexity is quietly planning to take on 亚马逊 by building an AI-powered shopping experience. The new ‘Pro Shop’ feature allows users to shop on Perplexity without leaving the platform.
AI Health and Education
NHS England is to trial an AI tool that can predict patients’ risk of developing heart disease, and their risk of early death, using an electrocardiogram (ECG).
A new deep learning model, developed by the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, could lead to more timely and accurate cancer assessments, helping many patients avoid unnecessary surgery and improve outcomes.?
Biotech startup Iambic Therapeutics just revealed Enchant, an AI platform designed to predict how drug candidates perform in human trials before leaving the lab.
The parents of a high school senior in Massachusetts argued in court that their son was unfairly punished for using artificial intelligence while researching a history project, harming his prospects for acceptance to an elite college.
A new research report by Common Sense Media found that about two thirds of the parents of kids who are using AI are oblivious to that fact. And, nearly half said they hadn’t spoken with their teenage kids about AI.
The South Korea Ministry of Education plan to integrate AI into the public education system using digital textbooks that leverage AI to personalise learning experiences for each student.
AI Adoption
美国宾夕法尼亚大学 - 沃顿商学院 professor Ethan Mollick says companies must make organisational changes if they want to benefit from AI.
The Generative AI landscape shifted dramatically in 2024, according to a new research study. Nearly three in four executives, 72%, report using gen AI at least once a week, up from 37% in 2023, according to a new study?by AI at Wharton, a research centre at the The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, in collaboration with?GBK Collective, reveals a dramatic rise in Gen AI adoption across key business functions, as companies move from cautious exploration to rapid integration.
微软 Copilot AI use extends deep into corporate America, but companies are not 100% sold.
AI Regulation and Ethics
Elon Musk’s xAI uses all your Twitter/X posts to train its AI model Grok…
谷歌 open-sourced its watermarking tool for AI-generated text
谷歌 announced it will add a note to photos people edit with AI tools, such as Zoom Enhance,?Magic Eraser and Magic Editor, to aid transparency.
Several researchers raised concerns after finding that OpenAI 's Whisper transcription tool suffers from frequent hallucinations and invents text that never appears in recordings despite being deployed extensively in healthcare settings. Over 30,000 medical professionals use Whisper-based tools despite OpenAI's warnings against high-risk applications, according to a The Associated Press report.
Biden Administration issues first ever national security memorandum on artificial intelligence.
Chinese research institutions with ties to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army used Meta ’s open-source Llama artificial intelligence model to develop an AI tool with potential military applications, Reuters reported, raising further concerns over how China’s government uses open-source AI models from U.S.?companies to expand its military and intelligence capabilities.
Big Tech Is paving the way for a nuclear power breakthrough. Small modular reactors, made commercially viable by AI processing needs of AI, could eventually make the power source cheaper, safer and faster to build
And finally…
Perplexity announced a dedicated hub for U.S. general election information. Populated by data from The Associated Press and Democracy Works , the company described it in a blog as “an entry point for understanding key issues.”
Thank you for reading. As you know, feedback always welcome.
And, if you're interested in tailored training in generative AI, please contact me via my friends at Emarketeers:
Great summary and useful to see all in one place, by category. Disruption, disruption wherever we look ;-)