A note on format. My goal with The AI Breakdown newsletter is not to repeat the excellent newsletters out that try to publish everything that happened every day in AI. Instead, my goal is to share the most important news and discussions, and to give it context. But, this is issue #1 and I’ve never seen anything as fast moving as AI is right now, so who knows.

Surf or Sink

The music industry loves being at the forefront of disruption. Napster lives large in internet lore not just because it shows how utterly and completely technology could upend an established industry's business model, but also how utterly and completely lawyers could still crush innovation.

This time, I'm not sure even the RIAA lawyers can win.

AI music using unlicensed artist voices has been percolating for a minute, but Ghostwriter977 on TikTok blew the f**king doors open last weekend when he dropped "Heart on My Sleeve" by "Drake" and "The Weeknd." It wasn't just a cool demonstration of the potential. Tens of millions of streams within hours of it being released certified its status as an absolute banger.

Of course, like Cthulu called from the blind eternities, the Legion of entertainment lawyers stormed into action, getting "Heart" ripped off every platform it had flooded to. And yet, the music folks were still shooketh. It didn't feel like a one-off. It felt like the start of something. And, as Shakespeare wrote no amount of legal whack-a-mole can stifle an art that's found its moment.

While the music industry rallied the troops, Product Hunt's Ryan Hoover speculated about an AI Spotify idea that, as he said, would "likely get you sued." The idea was effectively to silo off AI-generated music featuring artists and let them be cut into the revenue. Any artist who didn't want to participate could opt out.

Exactly a week after he posted that idea, Grimes tonight tweeted "I'll split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice. Same deal as I would with any artist i collab with. Feel free to use my voice without penalty. I have no label and no legal bindings."

In a world where everything changes, it's surf or sink. Grimes is surfing.

The Week In AI

Text-To-Video Explosion

• Adobe integrated Firefly with video editing - aka turn a movie shot during the day into a sunset scene with a few words.

• NVIDIA also dropped some pretty amazing research.

• Runway starts rolling out Gen2 text-to-video and it’s honestly another 0-to-1 moment

Open Source Battles

• Together announces open source LLaMA called (where my parents at?) Red Pajama

• Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion, releases StableLM as one of the most significant open source LLM projects to date

Data wars

• Google’s plans for a chat-transformed search experience called Magi revealed

• Snapchat releases an AI chatbot

• Elon joined Tucker Carlson talking about TruthGPT as well as threatening to sue Microsoft/OpenAI in a Twitter comment

• Reddit and Stack Overflow both start charging for companies who want to train AI on their data

Safety talk

The couple hundred million new AI industry participants are just starting to think about the safety questions and a lot of them are probably landing in a similarly confused place as Paul.

Inspiration

Where to find us

The AI Breakdown podcast - https://pod.link/1680633614

The AI Breakdown YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@theaibreakdown