A week in Generative AI: AI, Dream Machine & Mistral
News for the week ending 16th June 2024
With the exception of Apple’s WWDC and the announcement of Apple Intelligence, which I wrote about extensively here, it’s been a quieter news week this week. There’s the release of Dream Machine, the first publicly available Sora-like video generator, Mistral raised another €600m at a valuation of €6bn and we have a weird JohnnyCab like humanoid robot that can drive a car.
Apple announces Apple Intelligence
Apple’s ’One More Thing’ moment at WWDC on Monday was the announcement of Apple Intelligence, Apple’s branded take on artificial intelligence across their ecosystem and devices. Apple have been in the AI game for a long time, but have rarely talked much about the technology directly, preferring to let the features powered by AI do all the talking for them. WWDC this year saw that change in a big way with half of their 90-minute+ keynote presentation dedicated to introducing Apple Intelligence.
Apple focused on personal intelligence, user privacy, and showed how it is building towards Siri becoming a true AI-powered personal assistant. Below is a link to the website for Apple Intelligence and here is my take on all of the Apple Intelligence announcements with commentary on the big new innovations they've shared and what this means for the future of consumer-facing AI.
Luma Labs releases Dream Machine
Dream Machine is a ‘Sora-level’ video generation tool that is the first of its generation to be available to the public, for better or for worse. It’s free to try, doesn’t have a waitlist and their website went down under the huge volume of traffic when they first announced it.
I’m not sure Dream Machine is quite at the level of OpenAI’s Sora, but it’s hard to compare when Sora isn’t available to the public yet. However, there are already some really interesting example flying around the internet, like bringing famous paintings to life, and bringing famous memes to life.
Mistral secures €600mn funding as valuation soars to almost €6bn
It’s so good to see a Europe-based AI startup see the same kind of funding many American startups benefit from. Mistral have been doing some great work on smaller models that are starting to challenge the large frontier models in terms of capability, at a fraction of the size, cost, and environmental impact.
This humanoid robot can drive cars — sort of
This is a really interesting proof of concept and requires some tricky innovations to pull off, but I’m not really sure why we’d want a humanoid robot that can drive a car instead of a car that can drive itself. Maybe it will be very comforting to having something drive a car as opposed to it driving itself, but I can’t help thinking this could just end up like the JohnnyCab.
AI Ethics News
AI is poised to drive 160% increase in data center power demand
Buzzy AI Search Engine Perplexity Is Directly Ripping Off Content From News Outlets
AI discovers new rare-earth-free magnet at 200 times the speed of man
AI Unearths Nearly a Million Potential Antibiotics to Take Out Superbugs
OpenAI appoints Retired U.S. Army General Paul M. Nakasone to Board of Directors
Long Reads
Stratechery - Apple Intelligence is Right On Time
Benedict Evans - Building AI Products
“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“
William Gibson