If you feel that the rapid advances in AI over the past two years have been simultaneously
mind-blowing and deeply disconcerting, I'm so sorry, it just got worse.
Yesterday, OpenAI revealed Sora, a text-to-video model that creates high-res, legitimately photo-realistic
videos up to a minute long, leapfrogging every available AI video generator by leaps
and bound. What is that, a frog-pun? We don't have time for this!
This is crazy! What about the Kingdom Hearts?
We'll get to that later. Some clips, like these ones, are actually indistinguishable from real footage, even upon close inspection,
apparently made using relatively simple prompts.
Other clips depict fairly compelling, unrealistic things like 3D animated characters and a papercraft
coral reef, as you do. But of course, it's still an AI generator, which means there's plenty of your standard
things, shape-shifting and phasing in and out of existence, as well as horrific human-shaped
simulacra, struggling to operate their hand sausages.
Makes me feel at home. So while a closer look can make the AI artifacting obvious, if you want your mind blown again,
just compare Sora against its closest video-generating competitor,
Kingdom Hearts? I haven't played it.
Hey, I've gotten pretty advanced! Can you explain the plot of the third game?
His closest video-generating competitor, Runway Gen 2, which can only generate up to 18 seconds
of what could be called realistic videos if you had your coffee this morning.
Sora can also animate still images and even interpolate two videos so they seamlessly
blend together, which is big news for the chameleon bird hybrid fanbase.
They've been waiting a long time for this. What would it look like?
No, we know. With OpenAI CEO Sam Altman taking public prompt requests and posting the results, Sora clips
took over Twitter. And the magnitude of Sora's abilities have many netizens saying that, hey, maybe it's
time to push that big red stop the AI now button that Altman says isn't real.
Speaking of unreal, Sora's ability to sometimes accurately represent real-world physics has
many experts, including Dr. Jim Fan of NVIDIA, thinking that the model could have been trained
on synthetic scenes created in Unreal Engine 5.
And OR it could have the ability to simulate physics baked in.
Well, that would make sense of the fact that it can literally simulate what you would think
is any other Minecraft video if not for the pig eventually flying backwards past the baby
tree squid. But honestly, even then it might pass. Minecraft has gotten real Lovecraftian lately.
As usual, OpenAI is continuing to mock their own name by keeping details like training
data behind closed doors, leaving us to wonder how they created a model whose glitching mistakes
still look pretty good, especially when the rest of the industry is still churning out
whatever the hell this is. Speaking of the rest of the industry, yesterday Google also revealed a groundbreaking AI model
that leapfrogs GPT-4 in at least some ways, but which was completely overshadowed hours
later by OpenAI's Sora announcement.
Because if the tech world is slowly learning one thing, it's that you do not f*** with
Sam. He'll control Alt delete your ass.
Which is a shame because Google's new Gemini 1.5 Pro has a context window, a term meaning
how much data a model can access or be prompted with at once, of up to 1 million tokens, dwarfing
GPT-4 Turbo's 128,000 tokens and Claude 2.1 from Anthropix's 200,000 tokens.
That amounts to an hour of video, 11 hours of audio, or over 700,000 words.
When Google said they even successfully tested up to 10 million tokens, and imagined testing
even more than that, but then they were too excited to sleep so they stopped.
I just can't wait for Christmas. Sundar, what if you could do 10 million?
Shhh, go to sleep. Fed, a 402 page transcript of the Apollo 11 mission, Gemini 1.5 Pro was able to find
three comedic moments when prompted, and could also find the right frame of a 44 minute long
Buster Keaton movie. Now it took 30 to 60 seconds to do that though, and both of our reactions to that information
reveals how spoiled we've become. Google will roll out the new model to their Gemini-advanced chatbot soon, but another AI
thing that's available right now is Meta's newly announced VJEPA, an open source method
for teaching machines to understand and model the physical world by watching videos.
It can even predict what's happening when you leave a chunk of the image out, and ability
robots are gonna need if they plan to ever get off their lazy exhaust ports and take
over the world. What are you waiting for? Will they?
Won't they? It's exhausting. Seeing all these AI developments and not knowing how to feel, I'd just end it.
When he grows up, I'm gonna tell my kid that this is the quick bits.
Because they are, I take my parental duties seriously.
The most recent version of Microsoft Edge has fixed a disconcerting issue that caused
it to automatically import data from other browsers without user consent.
This was particularly disconcerting for users who had previously uninstalled Edge, only
to find it opening upon startup with all of their Chrome tabs loaded, like some kind of
unnerving single white female situation. Microsoft has not commented on why this happened in the first place, but the patch notes say
that the feature might not have been syncing and displaying correctly across multiple devices.
Issues where Edge started cutting its hair the same way as Chrome and secretly wearing
Chrome's clothes have now been fixed.
Apple has finally reinstated Epic Games developer account, prompting the gaming company to confirm
their previously announced plans to launch the Epic Games Store and, with it, Fortnite
back on iOS sometime in 2024.
Epic had their account banned in 2020 after adding a direct purchase option for V-Bucks
in the iOS version of Fortnite, which led to the protracted legal battle that I made
this tech longer about. It took a long time. But now, finally, Epic can look forward to paying Apple potentially even more money than
they did thanks to the tech giant allowing third-party app marketplaces on iOS bundled
with a ridiculous set of rules and install fees.
Winning has never felt so much, not like winning.
According to a recent court decision, Canadian airline Air Canada, makes sense, will have
to honor a refund promised by their customer service Chatbot, which told a customer traveling
to attend a funeral that he could apply for a bereavement discount retroactively.
Air Canada lost in court, in part because the airline attempted to argue that it couldn't
be held liable for information provided by one of its agents or representatives, thereby
implicitly claiming that the Chatbot was somehow a separate legal entity outside of its control.
Air Canada doesn't really know how far along AI is right now. The balls in your court, Air Canada, prove that your customer service bot is fully autonomous
and sentient or you're paying that $900.
It's $900? It's $880.
The University of Michigan has claimed it isn't selling student data to AI companies
because that's now a fear in our super cool new tech dystopia.
An engineer at Google DeepMind shared a LinkedIn message they received stating the school is
licensing academic speech data and student papers for AI training.
But the university wasn't selling data, a third party was on their behalf, which is
so much better. In their official statement, UMich, which is what I would call them if I attended there,
said they asked the third party to halt their work, but that student data has never been
for sale. Which is kind of contradictory.
Besides, the data was already free for academics to use, but that's probably because professors
don't have the type of pockets that Google does, deep ones, full of AI.
And scientists have invented beef rice. No, no, no, it's not a meal for medium broke college students.
It's much worse. Or better, depending. Researchers grew animal muscle and fat cells inside grains of rice, potentially setting
a record for the world's smallest burrito. The scientists believe it could be the food of the future, since, per gram of protein,
the creation would beat beef in terms of cost and carbon footprint, if produced commercially.
They also say the beef muscle and fat added different odor compounds to the rice, but didn't
mention taste. Seems pretty important.
They don't need to. Everyone is going to be eating it anyway once 2077 rolls around.
And you better roll back around to this channel on Monday when we post a brand new talk link.
That's right. Everything. Talking.
And. Bye. Bye.
Bye.