A week in Generative AI: Apple, Showrunner & Eve
A week in Generative AI: Apple, Showrunner & Eve
News for the week ending 9th June 2024
It’s a big day tomorrow (Monday) for Apple at WWDC, with expectations of a large number of AI-related announcements. Their deal with OpenAI will be front and centre and power many new AI-features both online and on device.
This week saw an open-letter from many ex. OpenAI scientists/engineers calling for better accountability in frontier AI companies, the launch of Showrunner, a series of shows created with generative AI that allow viewers to interact and customise episodes in new and exciting ways, the launch of Google’s AI-powered note taking app, NotebookLM outside of the US and task-chaining shown off on X1’s Eve humanoid robotics platform.
Enjoy!
What to expect from Apple’s AI-powered iOS 18 at WWDC 2024
Tomorrow (Monday) will be a big day for Apple with the kickoff of WWDC and high expectations that they will ‘join the AI-race’. There’s been plenty of reporting around their deal with OpenAI, powering new Siri capabilities, and there have been plenty of rumours about other AI-enabled features that are likely to be announced in the keynote presentation.
TechCrunch have a good write up of what to expect from Apple and iOS 18, some of which sounds gimmicky, but others sounds really interesting. I’m excited for Siri to actually be able to take actions in apps and notes injected with AI, both of which I think will be genuinely useful. How good many of the other AI-related features are any good really depends on the implementation, which we’ll see much more of tomorrow!
OpenAI Insiders Warn of a ‘Reckless’ Race for Dominance
Seems there is still ongoing fallout from Sam Altman’s ousting as CEO last year, with this open letter signed by 13 AI scientists/engineers, 11 of which are former OpenAI employees. Because of this, it’s hard not to take this as something aimed directly at OpenAI, Sam Altman and their approach to safety and employee contracts.
Great to see this also backed by two of the big three ‘Godfathers’ of AI, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio.
New Streaming Service Lets Viewers Create Their Own Shows Using AI
Last year I included an example in many of my talks of something called ‘The Simulation’ which created an episode of South Park using generative AI (you can find it on this page of The Blueprint). It pointed towards a potential future where viewers could create their own episodes through simple prompting.
This is the next step in that direction and it’s going to be very interested to see how not only the technology progresses but how consumers react. I suspect this will be something that fans of specific franchises would really embrace, but may be not something that consumers embrace for new, unestablished franchises.
Time will tell!
Google makes its note-taking AI NotebookLM more useful
On the theme of AI-enhanced note-taking, I was really pleased to see Google open up its NotebookLM platform outside of the US this week. I think note-taking is one of the areas where I can see immediate and obvious benefits from embedding generative AI and I’m looking forward to trying out NotebookLM to see how useful it really is.
1X’s Eve humanoid robot masters task chaining, nears autonomous work
Although I’m sure this is slightly scripted and staged, its is an impressive demonstration of large language models driving the actions and decision making of humanoid robots. There’s still a long way to go, but this is the first time I’ve seen robots able to chain tasks together, which its a vital part of being able to autonomously navigate the complexity of human-made environments.
AI Ethics News
Guardian CEO Bateson ready to ‘do a deal’ with AI companies ‘on the right terms’
Groundbreaking AI heart attack scans could soon be rolled out across UK
Sam Altman Admits That OpenAI Doesn't Actually Understand How Its AI Works
Superfast Microsoft AI is first to predict air pollution for the whole world
Long Reads
Situational Awareness - The Decade Ahead
Antipope - Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
Allen Pike - LLMs Aren’t Just “Trained On the Internet” Anymore
The Washington Post - What AI thinks a beautiful woman looks like
Forbes - Vinod Khosla, Marc Andreessen And The Billionaire Battle For AI's Future
“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“
William Gibson