philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

TikTok is now on Apple Vision Pro, ready to take over your view and eat up your gestures

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In January, Ahmad Zahran, Product Leader at TikTok, revealed that a Vision Pro app was in the works, saying his team had “designed a new TikTok experience for the Apple Vision Pro”. Its reimagined interface takes you out of TikTok in Safari – which used to be the only way to access the platform on the Vision Pro – and into a new app version that’s designed for the Vision Pro’s visionOS platform and takes full advantage of the headset’s visual layout. 

Similar to the design of its iOS and Android apps, TikTok for visionOS has a vertical layout and includes the usual ‘Like’, ‘Comment’, ‘Share’, and ‘Favorite’ icons. What sets TikTok’s visionOS app apart from its iOS and Android versions is its expanded interface designed for the Vision Pro’s widescreen view. ...

When you tap the icons in the navigation bar they appear as floating panes to the right of your ‘For You’ page without interrupting the main video display, giving you a better view of comment sections and creator profiles. Better yet, the app is also compatible with Vision Pro’s Shared Space tool, allowing you to move TikTok to a different space in your headset view so that you can open other apps.  ...

There is one thing missing from the TikTok Vision Pro app: the ability to capture and create new videos. 

TikTok has also beaten Netflix and YouTube to the punch by arriving on the Vision Pro. While Netflix has no plans to launch a Vision Pro app right now, YouTube recently announced the app Juno – a service that lets you browse YouTube videos specifically for Apple’s ‘latest and greatest device’.  ...

See the full story here: https://www.techradar.com/computing/virtual-reality-augmented-reality/tiktok-is-now-on-apple-vision-pro-ready-to-take-over-your-view-and-eat-up-your-gestures

The AI insiders who want the controversial technology to be developed faster

"I don't know how to say this in a polite way, but Beff is evil," says German-American AI entrepreneur, Connor Leahy.

The long-haired 28-year-old is talking both about and to his opponent in a YouTube debate, who goes by the pseudonym Beff Jezos, or just "Beff".

He's the founder of a controversial movement known as "e/acc", short for "effective accelerationism".

They're wrestling for control of the AI steering wheel, and their stated goal is to hit the gas as hard as possible. In fact, their motto is "accelerate or die".

The e/acc movement is full of AI industry insiders — including top engineers, investors, and executives.

They're waging a war against the AI safety movement, and anyone arguing to slow down — the "doomers" and "decels" (short for decelerationists). Beff's debate opponent Connor Leahy is just one of them. ...

... they tend to have an unshakeable faith in free markets, and somewhat counterintuitively, a deep distrust of big tech companies.

Instead, they argue for decentralised control of important technology — especially AI. ...

A statement of e/acc's principles on its own website, states: "If every species in our evolutionary tree was scared of evolutionary forks from itself, our higher form of intelligence and civilisation as we know it would never have emerged."

"Stop fighting the thermodynamic will of the Universe."

E/acc sees itself as the antidote to an AI safety movement that's run amok. ...

It turned out the real Beff Jezos was a brilliant Quantum AI computing scientist.

He's only in his early 30s, but he'd already held leadership roles at two cutting-edge companies owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet. ...

"You get rewarded for polarisation … and so even though we started a movement that is literally trying to polarise the tech ecosystem, at the end of the day, it's so that we can have a conversation and find an optimum together." ...

"Part of e/acc is to appreciate this principle in a way that's not just centred on humanity, but kind of broader.

"Because we cherish this beautiful state of matter we're in, we kind of feel a responsibility to scale it in order to preserve it, because the options are to grow or die." ...

"If we play our cards right, maybe the future, even the near future, will be unimaginably good."

Delays to that future, for Haodong, constitute a special form of cruelty. ...

Both movements are full of people working in tech, who have always believed in it as a force for good.

The question that separates the e/accs from the doomers is whether AI might be a special case — the first exception to the rule within our lifetimes. ...

See the full story here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-18/ai-insiders-eacc-movement-speeding-up-tech/103464258

Forget Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – the big impact is already here and it’s called AI agents

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The Rabbit r1 was a big hit at the CES show this year. It’s affordably priced, it allowed direct access to an AI engine. But the focus on the device may have missed the real bombshell that Rabbit r1 dropped.

In the video, CEO Jesse Lyu teaches the AI to book a vacation, but he’s not visiting the web-sites, nor is he clicking on any web pages. The “controller” that oversees the interaction of agents and websites is doing all the work. More than that, it’s learning from this interaction how to do this series of tasks to achieve a particular result. After its first training, he is able to just say, “plan a trip” with a few comments and it executest the planning and comes back with appropriate options.

Think about that. There is no need for interfaces or APIs. There is no need for the user to have standalone apps. Once trained on a similar task, the AI system (not the device) is able to learn to do everything necessary – including operating a browser or even a computer – on its own, without intervention, to achieve a specific outcome. Once it’s learned that task, it can adapt it and even modify it. ...

You might remember the scandal that happened when a company called Cambridge Analytics collected Facebook data and claimed they could use likes and dislikes to predict everything from your voting preferences to your sexual preferences. That’s going to seem “so 2016” when you consider that we might all have an agent that no longer has to predict – it will know what you are going to do.

That creates a huge dilemma in terms of privacy. Where will that be stored? Who will “own” it and control it? ...

For those not familiar with it, Metcalfe’s law, simply stated, says that the value of a network is the square of its nodes. Or to put it simply, once you get a critical mass of users in any platform, it becomes really hard for anyone else to compete. ...

How strong is Metcalfe’s law. It is so strong that even Elon Musk has not been able to totally kill X/Twitter. Millions have left for other platforms, but even so, few have actually deleted their Twitter account and totally moved on. Despite many new startups trying to supplant Twitter, as of yet, no-one has. The value of their network is still dwarfed by Twitter.

X/Twitter may lose enough money to destroy itself, but it hasn’t lost enough people. That’s the power of Metcalfe’s law. ...

See the full story here: https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/forget-artificial-general-intelligence-agi-the-big-impact-is-already-here-and-its-called-ai-agents/558707

Meta’s new AI model learns by watching videos

Meta’s AI researchers have released a new model that’s trained in a similar way to today’s large language models, but instead of learning from written words, it learns from video. 

LLMs are normally trained on thousands of sentences or phrases where some of the words are masked, forcing the model to find the best words to fill in the blanks. In doing so they pick up a rudimentary sense of the world. Yann LeCun, who leads Meta’s FAIR (foundational AI research) group, has proposed that if AI models could use the same masking technique, but on video footage, they could learn more quickly. ...

The embodiment of LeCun’s theory is a research model called Video Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA). It learns by processing unlabeled video and figuring out what probably happened in a certain part of the screen during the few seconds it was blacked out.  ...

Meta’s next step after V-JEPA is to add audio to the video, which would give the model a whole new dimension of data to learn from—just like a child watching a muted TV then turning the sound up.  ...

See the full story here: https://www.fastcompany.com/91029951/meta-v-jepa-yann-lecun

HOW GENERATIVE AI COULD ENABLE A NEW ERA OF FILMMAKING

1. Video generation: Generative video tools, such as Runway’s Gen-2and Pika, that use video diffusion models are capable of synthesizing novel video, creating short, soundless animations from text prompts, images or video. 

2. Neural radiance fields (NeRFs): .... To create a NeRF, a neural network is trained on a simple recorded video from any camera or just a partial set of 2D images, meaning they don’t need to show all perspectives, sides or angles of the object or scene. The network is then able to generate a high-fidelity 3D representation of an object or scene by inferring unseen viewpoints, even those not captured in training data provided to the model. ...

3. Video avatars: Generative AI tools developed by Synthesia, Soul Machines and HeyGen can create entirely synthetic, photorealistic avatars that combine deepfake video and synthetic speech to precisely replicate a specific person’s appearance, voice, expressions and mannerisms. These unique personal AI avatars have been variously referred to as digital humans, twins, doubles or clones. ...

See the full story here: https://variety.com/vip/how-generative-ai-could-enable-a-new-era-filmmaking-1235898355/

Largest text-to-speech AI model yet shows ’emergent abilities’

Researchers at Amazon have trained the largest ever text-to-speech model yet, which they claim exhibits “emergent” qualities improving its ability to speak even complex sentences naturally. The breakthrough could be what the technology needs to escape the uncanny valley. ...

Here are examples of tricky text mentioned in the paper:

• Compound nouns: The Beckhams decided to rent a charming stone-built quaint countryside holiday cottage.
• Emotions: “Oh my gosh! Are we really going to the Maldives? That’s unbelievable!” Jennie squealed, bouncing on her toes with uncontained glee.
• Foreign words: “Mr. Henry, renowned for his mise en place, orchestrated a seven-course meal, each dish a pièce de résistance.
• Paralinguistics (i.e. readable non-words): “Shh, Lucy, shhh, we mustn’t wake your baby brother,” Tom whispered, as they tiptoed past the nursery.
• Punctuations: She received an odd text from her brother: ’Emergency @ home; call ASAP! Mom & Dad are worried…#familymatters.’
• Questions: But the Brexit question remains: After all the trials and tribulations, will the ministers find the answers in time?
• Syntactic complexities: The movie that De Moya who was recently awarded the lifetime achievement award starred in 2022 was a box-office hit, despite the mixed reviews.

PhilNote: in text-to-voice it also produces natural inflections.

See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/14/largest-text-to-speech-ai-model-yet-shows-emergent-abilities/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

OpenAI introduces SORA

Sora can create a video up to 1 minute in length. It is currently being tested by Red Teams. The link has more info and multiple videos.

https://openai.com/sora?fbclid=IwAR2RELh3nFGj3iFaFYgZoHhI0AqbgwS0LSxK5vXx8bsjkTBBebRertDFa-4#capabilities

OpenAI CEO says ‘very subtle’ misalignments could make AI wreak havoc

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday warned the “very subtle societal misalignments” within artificial intelligence (AI) could cause things to “go horribly wrong,” while still expressing optimism about the technology’s benefits. ...

“I’m much more interested in the very subtle societal misalignments where we just have these systems out in society and through no particular ill intention, things just go horribly wrong,” added Altman, whose company created ChatGPT. 

Altman, however, said he believes “things will go tremendously right,” if efforts are made to mitigate the downsides of AI technology. ...

See the full story here: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4464982-openai-ceo-subtle-misalignments-ai-wreak-havoc/

MoviePass – Profitability Milestone Underscores the Significant Impact that Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Enhancements Have had on Managing Its Cinematic MarketplaceMoviePass –

... The MoviePass Cinematic Marketplace is an aggregator for the industry that uses AI and machine learning engines to improve attendance and performance. The proprietary credit system helps drive exploration of titles looking to compete against movies with much larger budgets. Based on internal member testing, MoviePass found that on average, there is a 40 percent shift to theater location offering the same movie for fewer credits. Members increase midweek attendance by 50 percent and go to an average of 2.4 different theater locations while using their MoviePass subscription. ...

MoviePass has the largest theater footprint of any subscription service featuring over 3500 locations across America and covering all 50 states with a reach of over 97 percent of the market. ...

See the full PR here: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/02/13/2828293/0/en/MoviePass-Surpasses-One-Million-Movies-Seen-On-Its-New-Platform-and-Achieves-First-Profitable-Year-in-Company-History.html

Google and Anthropic Are Selling Generative AI to Businesses, Even as They Address Its Shortcomings

‘We’re not in a situation where you can just trust the model output,’ said Eli Collins, vice president of product management at Google DeepMind

... Jared Kaplan, co-founder and chief science officer of Anthropic, said the AI startup is working on a number of techniques that will reduce hallucinations, including building data sets where the model should respond to questions with, “I don’t know.” The idea is that the AI system can be trained to respond only when it has sufficient information, or will provide citations for its answers. ...

One solution is to make it easy for users to identify the sources of information that AI systems like its Gemini chatbot send back, said Eli Collins, vice president of product management at Google DeepMind. ...

Large language models, once they have been trained on certain data, can’t “delete” that information from what they have already learned, Kaplan said. ...

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-and-anthropic-are-selling-generative-ai-to-businesses-even-as-they-address-its-shortcomings-ff90d83d