Riding the AI Wave 🤖🏄‍♂️

👀 TLDR:

In this week’s What’s Appening, we report on Nvidia’s annual conference, GTC 2024. The chipmaker has been responsible for powering (literally) the AI revolution, so all eyes were on the five-day event, by far the biggest in the company’s history. We got new ultra-powerful chips, supercomputers, and software, as well as predictions on an AI-led future from CEO Jensen Huang. Also this week, we have news on more legal woes for Apple – coming from both sides of the Atlantic. We have a stat from Reddit’s long-awaited IPO, a new Google Search integration for ENS is in our web3 section, and our GPT of the Week makes text-to-video a cinch.

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Our Top Take 🎬

🤖🏗️ GTC – A Glimpse of the Future of AI at Nvidia’s Annual Conference

Nvidia’s GTC 2024 wrapped up on Friday, marking five days of new product announcements, key insights, and little teases of an AI-centric future. It included the announcement of Blackwell B200, the “world’s most powerful chip”, a new AI supercomputer, the AI factory concept (a new breed of data center), updates to Nvidia’s Omniverse, humanoid robots, and something we are very excited about, NIM (Nvidia Inference Microservices), a new software platform that will deploy containers of AI microservices to enterprises. In simple terms, NIM gives the building blocks for regular companies to become AI companies. There were other intriguing highlights from GTC, not least CEO Jensen Huang’s speculation on a future of accelerated computing leading to AI advances – five years until artificial general intelligence (AGI), he claims – but what blew us away overall was that GTC 2024 felt monumental. GTC 2009 was held in a hotel room: the 2024 event was on a level with WWDC or Google I/O. Fitting for the company largely responsible for powering the AI revolution. Forget the stock price: This felt like the moment when Nvidia arrived as one of the world’s biggest companies. #GTC2024 Read more here.

🦾 GPT of the Week: VideoGPT by Veed

This week’s Custom GPT is VideoGPT by Veed. This one caught our eye as text-to-video is something that OpenAI itself is currently trying to master with Sora. Like Sora, VideoGPT will create videos based on a text prompt: Simply give it a topic for a video, respond to any questions the GPT has for tailoring purposes, and it will generate the video within a few seconds. You can ask the GPT to edit out parts you don’t like and add new stuff with further prompts. It’s not going to create a Hollywood movie, but we can, for example, see this being used by businesses to create short product demos on their websites. A demonstration of VideoGPT can be found here. And you can check out the GPT itself here.

Other Stories 🗞️

🍏🧑‍⚖️ Apple – Legal Battles Emerge on Both Sides of the Atlantic

News broke last week of the Department of Justice launching a major lawsuit against Apple. It can be summed up in two words used by the DoJ, “exclusionary conduct”, meaning the US government believes Apple has made it more difficult for consumers to switch products and for third-party companies with competing apps to thrive. We have touched on the pros and cons of Apple’s practices many times in the past on What’s Appening, so we won’t go over old ground. However, some in the tech media have argued that the DoJ may be confusing the concepts of a monopoly and a tightly controlled ecosystem while underappreciating the benefits of what the latter brings to consumers. If the DoJ case wasn’t enough on Tim Cook’s legal menu, he must also deal with renewed legal action from the EU. On Monday, the Bloc announced it was pursuing violations of the Digital Markets Act by Apple, Google, and Meta, and it may fine them up to 10% of global turnover. Ouch. #AppleSuit Read more here.

🙋‍♂️Stability AI CEO Quits. “Not going to beat centralized AI with more centralized AI.” were the words used by Emad Mostaque on quitting his post as Stability AI CEO. The company behind the Stable Diffusion AI image generator has faced upheaval of late with key developers leaving the project. There are also strong rumors that Getty Images is going to hit it with a massive lawsuit on copyright for its training data. Story is here.

🪙 Worldcoin Gets Another European Ban. Fresh off its (temporary) banning in Spain, Sam Altman’s Worldcoin project is now facing similar problems next door in Portugal. Who’s next? The details are here.

♟️First Neuralink Implant Patient Plays Chess. We love to pile on Elon Musk, but credit where credit is due: The paralyzed man who received the first Neuralink brain implant has been filmed playing online chess, moving a cursor with nothing but his thoughts. Amazing. Full story is here.

🧐 Stat of the Week: 70%

📈📝 Reddit – IPO a Huge Success, But Can the Company Evolve?

Reddit’s long-awaited IPO was clearly successful, with the stock rising by 70% on the first day of trading, valuing the company at around $6.5 billion. Yet, questions were asked about the gusto shown by investors for a company that has made a loss every single year since its founding in 2005. Reddit has about 270 million users, and as we have discussed before, it is a treasure trove of sellable data, but some have warned that the company’s attempts to monetize those users will impact the culture of the platform, removing the punk-rocking attitude that made it so unique in the first place. #RedditIPO Read more here.

🕸️ What’s dAppening?

🔎🪙 Ethereum – Google Integrates ENS Data into Search

Google has taken another step toward integrating cryptocurrency functionality into Search by allowing Ethereum Name Service (ENS) data to be viewed in search results. An ENS name, such as joe.eth or danny.eth, is a shorthand version of a crypto wallet address. Google now allows that data – transactions, holdings, wallet data – to be viewed by searching with the ENS name. We’ve tried it ourselves and can see it’s not fully rolled out (some of us could see our data, others couldn’t), so it remains to be seen how and when Google will expand the initiative. It comes after a big week for the Ethereum ecosystem. It got a huge boost when BlackRock announced it was sending $100 million to the platform to embark on its tokenized assets initiatives. But there was also some bad news for the Ethereum Foundation, which is reportedly under investigation by an unnamed state authority. #ENSSearch Read more here.

Meanwhile at 3Advance...

This week we’re going to give you a little insight into how our design team thinks and works. Kieran and Jingdi recently took on the responsibility of providing activation support for one of our clients as they showcased at SXSW. Darren loves to repeat “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” and this is why we’re fluid with our design (and development tools). Canva was the tool of choice for designing a big-screen presie to advertise the activation (at ATX airport, and outside the venue). To get the inside scoop of this initiative — and to get a sense of what life’s like as a 3A designer, allow Jingdi to share her perspective. As usual, we’d love to hear what you think.

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