More from From ChatGPT to Gemini: how AI is rewriting the internet
A piece of artwork called “A.I. God. Portrait of Alan Turing,” created in part by AI-equipped robot Ai-Da, went for almost $1.1 million at auction, writes The New York Times.
There was a lot of human involvement, starting with combining the bot’s paintings of parts of Turing’s face:
The works were then photographed and uploaded to a computer that used Ai-Da’s language model to decide on the assembly of a single painting, which was then completed using a 3-D textured printer; studio assistants helped to create a more realistic finished product on the canvas. Ai-Da then added marks and textures to the portrait to complete it.
[The New York Times]
On Google’s Q3 earnings call, Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski asked:
Why doesn’t it make sense to have two completely different search experiences? One, an agent-like answers engine and then, two, a links-based more traditional search engine? You could innovate on both and let the consumer decide.
Sundar replied: “I do think having two surfaces for us allows us to experiment more.”
But Google rep Chris Pappas tells us he’s referring to two different AI surfaces — AI Overviews and the Gemini App — not good ol’ link-based search.
WABetaInfo spotted the feature in a recent beta for the Android version of the app, though it’s not yet accessible to normal beta testers.
The chatbot will reportedly be able to remember things when users ask and will apply that when giving things like food recommendations, say, by avoiding foods the user says they’re allergic to.
Murati is seeking venture capital funds for a new AI startup with its own proprietary models, Reuters reported Friday.
Barret Zoph, an OpenAI researcher who left the same day as Murati may join the venture, according to unnamed sources cited by the outlet.
Google News surfaced a (now corrected) Hoodline article for TechDirt’s Mike Masnick with a headline reading, in part, “San Mateo County DA charged with murder,” and a tiny “AI” badge next to the author’s name.
The headline was false. A BlueSky user speculated that the AI chatbot being used had just poorly parsed a post from the DA’s office and hallucinated the news.
After announcing it last month, Google seems to have rolled out Google TV’s AI wallpapers, 9to5Google reports.
According to a Google TV support page, the option lives under Settings > System > Ambient Mode > Custom AI Art. Click on “Create new...” and then describe the image you want, use a template, or choose “Inspire me” and Google TV makes one for you.
As a reminder that AI image generators’ training data tends to include peoples’ regular smartphone photos, try entering an iPhone-like picture file name into the prompt field for Flux1.1 Pro, as this person did.
I got some similar results when I tried prompts like “IMG_4001.JPG” with its predecessor, Flux.1, a model that drives xAI’s Grok-2 image generation.
If you signed up for Google’s waitlisted feature that lets you ask Gemini questions to surface photos and videos, you might be getting it soon, as 9to5Google reports that the feature seems to be going live for some who’ve joined the list.
If you’re not already on the waitlist, you can jump in the queue by signing up on Google’s site.
Here’s an idea for a Sunday afternoon project: A Reddit user managed to generate a podcast using NotebookLM — Google’s generative AI notes software — in which the fake hosts’ cheerful “banter” is about learning they’re not real and are being shut off, apparently using a prompt like the one from this thread.
You can hear more about NotebookLM in a recent Vergecast interview with one of the Google folks building it.
The New York Times reports that documents shown to potential investors in just another tech company have an interesting detail:
Roughly 10 million ChatGPT users pay the company a $20 monthly fee, according to the documents. OpenAI expects to raise that price by two dollars by the end of the year, and will aggressively raise it to $44 over the next five years, the documents said.
The proposed investment could value the company at $150 billion and give it two years to convert to a for-profit business before the funding becomes debt.
[The New York Times]
Sam Altman published some thoughts today about what artificial intelligence will mean in a couple of decades.
Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace.
[ia.samaltman.com]
CEO Sam Altman told employees in a company-wide meeting that OpenAI’s complicated corporate structure as a for-profit endeavor under the umbrella of a non-profit is set to change, “likely sometime next year,” reports Fortune.
The reconfiguring, which has been rumored before, would reportedly shift the company “away from being controlled by a non-profit.” OpenAI told the outlet that the “non-profit is core to our mission and will continue to exist.”
The update will start impacting Facebook and Instagram users in the UK over the coming months, meaning any public posts, comments, and photos on adult accounts (including those featuring children) will be scraped.
Meta says this will bring its generative AI products to the UK “much sooner,” and help them to reflect “British culture, history, and idiom” ...whatever that bloody means.
