Hi
Hope your weekends were excellent and that the week ahead is shaping up in similar form. A few headlines from the world of AI to kick off your Mondays:
World-Building AI – are you ready for the shift?
If your LinkedIn, Insta, or Twitter are anything like mine you’ll have seen a whole bunch of Sora videos over the last week or so – each one more spectacular than the last (e.g., see ”a tortoise whose body is made of glass, with cracks that have been repaired using kintsugi, is walking on a black sand beach at sunset” below).
But then Tim Brooks (Sora Research Lead at OpenAI) shared this extraordinary fly through tour of a museum with many painting and sculptures and beautiful works of art in all styles and I started to really understand the big step forward that experts are saying this is… because wow 😮
We covered how Sora is a qualitative shift from image generators like DALL-E or video generators like Runway in a previous post but it’s worth taking a moment to unpack what world models are – great layperson’s explanation from Allie K Miller here and a more technical definition from Yann LeCun (VP & Chief AI Scientist at Meta) here. This isn’t just theory either – Google recently introduced Genie (Generative Interactive Environments) – an AI model “that can generate an endless variety of playable (action-controllable) worlds from synthetic images, photographs, and even sketches … Genie introduces the era of being able to generate entire interactive worlds from images or text”. So not quite the Holodeck from Star Trek but definitely heading that way … or are we there already? 🖖
Our AI Advantage – (if we) act now on these opportunities
It’s been a minute since we’ve heard from Ethan Mollick but he’s clearly not been idle as he’s come out with a book titled Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. Mollick is always worth a listen in the AI x HE space so this will very much be worth a look – esp. given the title seems to have Mollick and Siemens aligning on the “co-intelligence” future relationship we will have with AI (covered in this post here). In a separate piece on his Substack, Strategies for an Accelerating Future, Mollick also offers an interesting call to action people can use start to grasp the full significance of AI and what it means for their industry. Four questions to ask about your organisation:
- What useful thing you do is no longer valuable?
- What impossible thing can you do now?
- What can you move to a wider market or democratise?
- What can you move upmarket or personalise?
I’d be genuinely interested to hear peoples thoughts on this… we are literally moving through the inflection point right now and things are only going to get more … something – and I’d argue it’s on us to make this “something” as positive as we can.
Democratising Analytics – the Generative BI revolution 📈
Interesting development – and the strapline “advanced analytics with zero learning curve” is very appealing. Being able to speak to data – to create graphs, dashboards, generate insights – all using natural language is wild to me. Generative BI also sounds like it can integrate safely into a wide range of other different systems making data wrangling and data-based decision-making as easy as chatting with a colleague #gamechanger 🤯
The AI Skills Race – how to upskill and stay ahead 🇸🇬 x 🇦🇺
Governments in the wider Asia-Pacific region are taking action to futureproof their citizens with scholarships and study subsidies. In Australia, CSIRO is offering AI scholarships for one million Aussies, “in a bid to increase literacy of a technology estimated to be worth $4trillion to the economy by the early 2030s”. A non-technical introduction designed for people at the beginning of their AI literacy journey, the course is accessible here. Singapore are taking it even further, with education subsidies for those aged 40+ to return and pursue another full-time diploma 🤑. Excellent and extremely timely moves – things are moving so fast, if you’re not actively working to upskill in this space, you are definitely falling behind.
Your AI Co-Creator Has Arrived – what will you make?
Sora rocked socks globally when it was released – and continues to do so with more amazing video releases coming out seemingly every other day. Incredible as all this is, one gap that was quickly identified was the lack of sound – but a range of different players are rushing to fill that gap:
- ElevenLabs asked the question “What if you could describe a sound and generate it with AI? The sneak peek at their answer – AI Sound Effects – looks pretty amazing;
- EMO (Emote Portrait Alive) is a groundbreaking AI that creates expressive portrait video from a reference image and audio – github page with overview and many, many samples here. We are stepping through the looking glass now – this thing captures facial expressions, head movements, the lot – truly incredible stuff; and
- Adobe has released previews of Project Music – an AI that allows creators to generate music from text prompts, and then have fine-grained control to edit that audio for their precise needs. See it in action here.
So yeah. That idea for a Pixar-style movie you’ve been carrying around in your head for years – the one about a grumpy, old lighthouse keeper and his young, enthusiastic seagull apprentice? How the seagull, eager to help, brings chaos with its unique way of seeing the world? And, how through their misadventures, the lighthouse keeper learns to be more open, and the seagull discovers true responsibility? There’s no longer any excuse – lock yourself away for a week or three and you could be in negotiations with Netflix before Easter! 🤩
The old man and the sea(gull) #workingtitle – Midjourney
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Have a great week ahead – and do please let us know what you think of those questions from the inimitable Ethan Mollick in the comments! I’d love to hear your thoughts.