A Wild Week in AI 🤯🦾

👀 TLDR:

In this week’s What’s Appening, we cover more AI stories than you can shake your fist at. We have found it hard to keep up with all the new developments and products coming out of OpenAI, Meta, and Amazon, so we have curated them all in a kind of AI super thread for your reading pleasure. We still have room for our Stat of the Week, though, which looks at the huge success of T-Series on YouTube. And a solemn What’s dAppening wonders when folks will get answers as the Crypto King Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial begins today.

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Takes 🎬️

🤖🆕 OpenAI – New AI Developments and Hints of Future Hardware

There was definitely a lull over the summer in AI news and trends, something we highlighted in the decline of ChatGPT MAUs. However, the early fall has seen 3Advance Slack channels constantly buzzing with AI updates, particularly surrounding OpenAI and Meta. But there was so much AI stuff ‘appening’ that we have decided to break it down into bite-sized chunks. Let’s dive in:

• ChatGPT can now search the web in real time again. A huge leap forward for those using ChatGPT for research, as the application was previously only able to provide access to information from 2021 and earlier. The new GPT-4 feature, Browse with Bing, is only available for Plus and Enterprise subscribers.

• GPT-4 with Vision allows users to instruct the model to analyze images. GPT-4V went live on September 24, and it could have use cases as varied as front-end development by providing alt text for images to decipher ancient manuscripts. You can probably also use it to make sense of your doctor’s handwriting.

• An AI iPhone? OpenAI and Jony Ive, the former Head of Design at Apple who had input into everything from the iPod & iPhone (great) to the Power Mac G4 Cube (hmmm, not so great), are in talks to secure $1 billion funding to create the “iPhone of artificial intelligence”. No firm deal is in place yet, but we might not be far away from the first mainstream AI physical consumer device.

• Meta Announces ChatGPT Rival, Meta AI. Meta Connect 2023 was fairly exciting this year, but the main takeaway was the arrival of Meta AI, which will power chatbots for Instagram and Facebook and will power Meta’s hardware, including smart glasses (see below). However, questions are being asked as to how the company trained Meta AI using data from Insta and Facebook. A trial version of Meta AI will be available to US users soon.

• Meta’s Second-Gen Ray Ban Smart Glasses Now Have AI. Meta’s new smart glasses look great, but we are more interested that they will be powered by Meta AI, allowing the user to ask for information about what they are looking at, for example. Meta has added a bigger LED light to the glasses to allow people to know they are being recorded – will that get rid of the creepiness? We think not.

• Amazon Is Getting Serious About Generative AI. Yes, more AI, but this is too important not to share. On Thursday, AWS announced that Amazon Bedrock was on general release, empowering businesses to build and scale generative AI applications. This is a big move for AWS, aiming to become the leading platform for businesses wanting to build their own AI apps and services.

• Toy Story Funday Football Blows Our Minds. Pixar and ESPN also came up with some AI magic at the weekend, providing an alternative telecast of the Jaguars vs. Falcons game from “Andy’s room”, complete with real-time reenactments of every run, pass, and score as they happened.

It’s been a wild week in AI, one that should give the sector a bump as new use cases and the prospect of hardware come to light. #AIWeek Read more here.

🧐 Stat of the Week: 1.61T Views

🎺🕺YouTube – T-Series Channel Hits Major Milestone of 250M Subscribers

T-Series, the Indian record label, has long been the King of YouTube, and it has now surpassed a record 250 million subscribers for the channel. Incredibly, its view count has surpassed the 1.61 trillion mark in recent days. Our back-of-a-napkin math tells us that’s 2,000 views for every single person on the planet😮 #Trill-Series Read more here.

🕸️ What’s dAppening?

🚓⚖️ Crypto – SBF Trial Begins as Investors Still Looking for Answers

Sam Bankman-Fried, the man dubbed the Crypto King and former CEO of the collapsed FTX, will begin his trial in Manhattan today. He faces seven counts of wire fraud and securities fraud, as well as the ire of millions of customers who lost assets on his platform. While the trial is sure to be engrossing and ‘memeable’, we should not forget that the collapse left many honest investors in ruins. Moreover, there are many questions that have yet to be answered, not least SBF’s connections with politicians, how he was able to get away with it for so long, and whether folks will get any of their money back. #SamBankmanTrial Read more here.

Meanwhile at 3Advance…

DC Startup Week happens in two short weeks! We’re super proud to announce that we are title sponsors. Having enjoyed and appreciated DC Startup Week so much since it’s inception, this year we decided to make an investment in our hometown’s startup scene. 3Advance is joining the impressive group of sponsors that includes, among others, NEXT and JP Morgan. Our CEO Paul will also be speaking at DC Startup Week (more to come on that next week) so please join us and get your tickets at https://www.dcstartupweek.org/. Try using the code “3Advance” to score some free tickets. 💝 There are just a few free passes left for that promo code so better make it quick! 💨 Can’t wait to see you there!

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