Open AI’s Massive Dev Day Announcements. When open AI announced its new app store, I heard the cries of hundreds of AI startups whose business models exploded like Alderan. OpenAI’s GPT Builder will a
Open AI’s Massive Dev Day Announcements. When open AI announced its new app store, I heard the cries of hundreds of AI startups whose business models exploded like Alderan. OpenAI’s GPT Builder will allow anyone to customize and share their own custom AI assistants (GPTs). You can add advanced custom instructions to your GPTs, including files, descriptions, and actions.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA - NOVEMBER 06: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the OpenAI DevDay event ... [+] on November 06, 2023 in San Francisco, California. Altman delivered the keynote address at the first ever Open AI DevDay conference. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Getty ImagesAlongside GPT Builder, OpenAI is launching a GPT Store, allowing regular people to make money selling their newly built GPTs. There was a lot more. GPT-4 Turbo, a new LLM with an upgraded 128K context window that allows it to read prompts as long as a 300-page book, was introduced. The company is lowering its API pricing. OpenAI has also introduced a new legal defense fund that will indemnify its users from copyright infringement claims.
The xAI Grok AI logo is seen in this photo illustration taken on 06 November, 2023. (Photo by Jaap ... [+] Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
NurPhoto via Getty ImagesGrokking Musk’s Take on AI. xAI opened the waitlist for its new ChatBot called Grok, a phrase coined by sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein in his 1961 bestseller, Stranger in a Strange Land. To grok is to deeply understand and empathize. In a post announcing Grok last Saturday, November 4th, the company explained how Grok will grok the world in real time with a LLM (Large Language Model) that includes X’s real time newsfeed, which means at times Grok may be incorrect, biased, and even malicious. According to the post, Grok will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other apps. The plan is to integrate it into X Premium+ so there’s a fee to grok with Grok.
In this image released on Monday, November, 6, 2023, from left to right, Dr. Utz-Uwe Haus, Head of ... [+] HPE HPC/AI EMEA Research Lab, Harald Christ, Chairman Christ&Company, Thomas Saueressig, Vorstandsmitglied der SAP, Dr. Tanja Rückert, Geschäftsführerin der Robert Bosch GmbH, Dr. Robert Habeck, Bundeswirtschaftsminister & Vizekanzler, Jonas Andrulis, CEO & Gründer Aleph Alpha, Rolf Schumann, CEO Schwarz Digits, and Dr. Florian Stegmann, Chef der Staatskanzlei. A broad consortium of new and existing investors collaborates for the series B round of Germany's leading developer of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) totalling more than half a billion US Dollars. HANDOUT IMAGE - please refer to special instructions. (Aleph Alpha/news aktuell via AP Images)
Mark BollhorstGerman’s Leading AI startup Aleph Alpha Raises $500 M. The startup, founded in 2019, gives businesses “full sovereignty” over the implementation of AI into their businesses. Techcrunch compares it to France’s Mistral ($112 million in funding), which works with large corporations to deploy LLMs internally. The round was co-led by Schwarz Group (the owners of the Lidl supermarket chain) and Bosch Ventures. Other new investors include Berlin-based Christ & Company Consulting, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, SAP, and Burda Principal Investments.
The AI Pin from Humane is thinking differently about a mobile screen.
Imran Chaudhri/HumaneThe AI Pin Is Here. It’s hard to tell at the moment if this is the new iPhone, but the battle of the personal AI Chatbots is on. The small, screenless, always on clip-on leaves the users heads up and hands free. The AI Pin’s voice operating system will read your email and give you unlimited access to ChatGPT. No smart phone is required, but will need a monthly $24 T-Mobile subscription.
HANGZHOU, CHINA - MAY 29 2023: A customer tries VR products at an outlet of PICO, the VR subsidiary ... [+] of Bytedance, TikTok's owner, in Hangzhou in east China's Zhejiang province. (Photo credit should read LONG WEI / Feature China/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
Future Publishing via Getty ImagesLayoffs At Pico Signal ByteDance Is Pivoting Away From Consumers. They always deny rumors that weeks later turn out to be true. And so over 1,000 people around the world, mostly on the content and marketing sides of the business, are looking for new jobs. Bytedance characterized it as normal restructuring. Most of the hardware team was left standing, leading to speculation the company is planning to pivot to MR as Meta has.
Samsung Will Release a Galaxy branded MR Headset in 2024. The joint venture between Google, Samsung, and Qualcomm reportedly has 2024 plans for 30,000 units of their mixed reality headset to rival Apple Vision Pro. According to new reports from the Korean newspaper The JoonAng, the Samsung, Google, and Qualcomm partnership will only release around 30,000 units in 2024. According to JoonAng, Samsung’s Galaxy MR will have 4K/per eye (8K) displays from Sony, the same as the Vision Pro.
Spatial Expands Into Games. The company is leveraging its integration with Unity to enable developers of existing and new games built on Unity to be directly imported onto Spatial, where it offers a 50% rev share on User Generated Content. Its first season of in-house games includes Punch Hero, Racing Empire, Infinite Ascent, Shooty Shooty, Mostly Only Up, Buddy Blitz, and Cyber Punk: Neon Ghost, and several titles from IzyPlay.
AI Lip Dubbing Puts Words In Your Mouth. Lipdub is a new free app from New York City based Captions, a two year old video startup serving social media content creators with text captioning bundled with other services, like editing and special effects. The app uses AI and voice cloning to make the lips match the translated word. Click the video above and behold the magic, or download the free app and see for yourself.
Inworld AI annouced a multi-year co-development partnership with Xbox to deliver new tools powered by AI for game developers. This partnership will bring together Inworld’s expertise in working with generative AI models for character development, Microsoft’s cutting-edge cloud-based AI solutions including Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Research’s technical insights into the future of play, and Team Xbox’s strengths in revolutionizing accessible and responsible creator tools for all developers.
Jeffrey Katzenberg: AI Will Drastically Cut Number of Workers It Takes to Make Animated Movies. “If you look at how media has been impacted in the last 10 years by the introduction of digital technology, what will happen in the next 10 years will be 10x as great — literally,” the former Dreamworks and Disney animation legend said at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum. “And I think AI as a creative tool — think of that as a new paintbrush or a new camera — has so much opportunity around it.” Katzenberg said his animated movies were made by 500 artists over five years. In just three years from now, “It won’t take 10 percent of that,” he said. “Literally, I don’t think it will take 10 percent of that.”
Rec Room Has Unleashed The Ninja Turtles The recent reboot has rekindled interest in the 90s icons. Rec Room users can style their avatars in the likeness of their favorite Turtles, or even the infamous Shredder. Rec Room also unveiled a four player version in which the team takes on the usual assortment of bad guys. Rec Room, and the Turtles are also on game consoles and tablets.
This Week in XR is also a podcast hosted by the author of this column, Ted Schilowitz, Futurist, Paramount Global, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap. This week our guest is Michael Beneville, Chief Creative Officer of Area 15 in Las Vegas, and soon, Orlando. We can be found on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.
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Snoop Dogg, sentient AI and the ‘Arrival Mind Paradox’ (Louis Rosenberg/VentureBeat)