A week in Generative AI: AGI, MidJourney & Apple
A week in Generative AI: AGI, MidJourney & Apple
News for the week ending 24th December 2023
The newsletter reached a big milestone this week with its 500th subscriber! Thank you to everyone for subscribing, I hope you continue to find these weekly roundups useful and interesting and hope you all have a great run in to the new year.
Ray Kurzweil is sticking to his long-held predictions: 2029 for AGI and 2045 for the singularity
2029 is inline with the general consensus amongst experts for AGI - I’m a little surprised that Ray’s doubling down on the 16 year gap between AGI and the singularity though. Seems to me things are going to get weird, unpredictable and accelerate rapidly once AGI is with us.
Midjourney v6: The Next Leap in AI Art Generation
Released in Alpha over the festive period, v6 is another big step forwards in image quality. It’s basically text-to-lifelike images now. Image courtesy of AI Explained.
AI cannot be named as patent ‘inventor’, UK supreme court rules
I see this as a continuation of the US ruling that copyright is only applicable for human-made content (as I reported on in August). However, I think this position will have to change in time as AI becomes more capable and self-sufficient.
Apple wants AI to run directly on its hardware instead of in the cloud
No surprises here, as Apple has always been a big proponent of on-device processing to guarantee privacy. Good to see Apple starting to make some noise in the generative AI space though, I think 2024 will be a big year for Siri!
Imran Khan deploys AI clone to campaign from behind bars in Pakistan
This is a double-edged sword. It’s great to see voices given to people that are being censored, but also generative AI is a very dangerous tool in politics, especially with so many elections next year.
AI Ethics News
OpenAI buffs safety team and gives board veto power on risky AI
ByteDance is secretly using OpenAI’s tech to build a competitor
Data poisoning: how artists are sabotaging AI to take revenge on image generators
Long Reads
Stratechery - Google’s True Moonshot
GatesNotes - The road ahead reaches a turning point in 2024
“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“
William Gibson