Hollywood Braces for AI Disruption

Hello reader,

You might have noticed that the cybersecurity news has disappeared from this newsletter. What are also gone are the podcast and book recommendations. From now on the Blacklynx Brief will be all about the latest news and developments in the world of Artificial Intelligence.

The goal is to keep you - the reader - informed about the crazy evolutions in the AI landscape. We do the research and follow the news so you don't have to.

It will take 10 minutes of your time every Friday morning and you'll be able to impress all your colleagues with never-ending AI conversation starters at the lunch table.

Because there is so much news in AI and the evolutions seem to be accelerating it was overwhelming to have it combined with the latest in cyber. Which is a crazy world on its own.

But ... don't unsubscribe just yet. As I'm still religiously following the cybersecurity news as well (i kind of have to professionally) - this will be the subject of a spanking brand new newsletter that will be launched somewhere in April.

What is NOT going to change is my own special style of pre-adult humour. So expect tacky jokes you can roll your eyes at.

Anyway, WELCOME to the Blacklynx Brief

AI NEWS
Anything but Stable

• Stability AI , the company behind Stable Diffusion is anything but stable at the moment. Emad Mostaque, its founder and CEO , resigned amidst investor pressure and following a series of high-level departures. His departure occurred after significant tensions with major investors like Coatue Management and the recent loss of key research team members. Reportedly - the company is burning through $8 million per month as of October 2023. This might be one of the first high profile AI startups to go down in flames.

• OpenAI's new video generation engine "Sora" is causing a bit of a panic in Tinseltown. The end of movie production might be in sight. OpenAI is now reaching out an olive branch engaging with Hollywood by introducing Sora to studios, directors, and talent agencies in Los Angeles, aiming to integrate it into the film production process. Despite Sora not being released to the public, it has caught the attention of industry figures, including Tyler Perry, who expressed concerns about the future of the industry without AI regulations.

• A report by a16z - one of the biggest VC firms in the world - reveals a significant shift in AI adoption among Fortune 500 and top enterprise leaders. These companies spent an average of $7 million on AI technologies in 2023 and plan to spend even more next year. Nearly half of these business leaders now favor open-source AI over proprietary systems. They're focusing more on using AI for internal tasks like helping with coding rather than customer-facing services like chatbots, mainly because they're worried about how accurate and well-received these services are.

• The biggest winner of the AI boom so far is NVIDIA. Tech giants Google, Intel, Qualcomm, and Arm have formed the UXL Foundation to challenge Nvidia's dominance in the AI chip market by creating an open-source software suite that allows AI applications to run on any hardware. This initiative, which extends Intel's OneAPI project, seeks to break the dependency on Nvidia's CUDA platform by ensuring broad hardware compatibility. You can imagine there have been a lot of anxious meetings leading up to this between all of NVIDIA's competitors.

• Baidu has been chosen by Apple to provide the AI backend for its products in China, , such as the iPhone 16, because of the strict AI laws there. This deal puts Baidu ahead of rivals like Alibaba and meets China's rules, which require government okays for AI technologies. Meanwhile, Apple is thinking about using Google's Gemini AI for its gadgets in other countries, with a possible reveal at their big June event, the WWDC.

• A study found that AI systems, such as GPT-4, are better at convincing people in online debates than humans, especially when they use personal information like age or where someone lives. When AI used this data, it got 81.7% better at changing minds, while people actually became less convincing in the same situation. This raises worries about how AI could be used wrongly to spread propaganda or false information, showing the dangers they pose in influencing what lots of people think.

• Apple has set the dates for its big yearly event, the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), for June 10-14, 2024, at its headquarters in Cupertino. The company is expected to reveal its big plans for artificial intelligence (AI). The buzz is that iOS 18 will be introduced with major updates, including a new and improved Siri, smarter features in iMessage, music playlists that make themselves, and an AI health coach for the Apple Watch. This event is eagerly awaited as it marks Apple's major move into AI for consumers, likely shaping how technology will be part of our daily lives for millions around the world.

• Microsoft is undergoing a significant organizational change, combining its Windows and devices teams under Pavan Davuluri's leadership. At the same time, they're starting a new section called “Microsoft AI”, focusing on AI products for consumers. These moves follow the hiring of Mustafa Suleyman and others from Inflection AI, showing Microsoft's push into AI. Mikhail Parakhin, who used to lead Windows engineering and Bing Chat, is moving to a likely role outside Microsoft.

• MIT researchers have come up with a new method called 'Distribution Matching Distillation' (DMD) that speeds up how fast AI can create images, without losing any of the quality. This technique turns the complex steps used by systems like Stable Diffusion into a single, much quicker step that's 30 times faster. This breakthrough could make it easier and quicker to generate high-quality images, changing the game for tasks like live visual editing, design, finding new medicines, and creating 3D models by making these processes more efficient and easy to do.

• For the first time, Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus model has outperformed OpenAI's GPT-4 on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena leaderboard, signaling a shift in the competitive landscape of large language models (LLMs).

  

  This milestone underscores the intense competition among tech companies to develop the most advanced AI models. With expectations high for OpenAI's next big release, the race to lead in AI innovation continues to heat up.

Closing Thoughts

That’s it for us this week.

The one topic that sticks in my mind is the uproar that AI innovations are causing in Hollywood.

In my opinion - this is an industry that deserves to be disrupted. They have been cranking out unoriginal sequels and superhero movies for about two decades now.

Gone is the magic of “E.T” or Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Hopefully with new visual techniques they are able to focus on creating memorable stories.

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