The AI Breakdown First Five - Thursday June 8, 2023

5. Myst Creators Used AI In New Game; Community Pissed

Nostalgia, meet the future. When Cyan started a crowd-funding campaign for its new game Firmament in 2019, people who had grown up with Myst were thrilled and ended up funding the project to the tune of $1.4m. Recently people have discovered that AI was used to create many parts of the game and, gamers being gamers, they’re big mad.

"I wouldn't have given money if I'd known AI was going to be used, though in retrospect it certainly goes to explain why for how beautiful the worlds looked they felt as equally devoid of life" - Kickstarter Backer Lo Otter

4. Britain Plans AI Summit as Chinese AI Capacity Grows

British PM Rishi Sunak loves his new technology. 10 Downing Street has just announced an AI summit this fall and Sunak is hoping to recruit US President Joe Biden’s participation when they meet later today. Sunak said that the meeting is more about generally bringing nations together to discuss AI guardrails than to specifically counter advances from Russia and China, although with China advancing, we’ll see how true that is.

3. DeepMind’s AlphaDev Discovers Advanced Algorithms

Algorithms are the building blocks of computing. According to Google’s DeepMind, their new reinforcement learning based AI system AlphaDev is uncovering more advanced and enhanced algorithms for things like sorting and hashing. They’ve just presented the research in a new paper published by Nature.

2. Contextual, Glean and the Rise of Enterprise AI

You knew this was going to happen. LLMs and their chatbot interfaces have huge potential in the enterprise, but issues of compliance, data security, and hallucinations are even bigger in a business setting. A new wave of companies is retrofitting these AI tools for the enterprise. Contextual AI just launched out of stealth with $20m in funding, while recently minted unicorn Glean also just announced Glean Chat.

1. Runway Gen2 Opens Text-to-Video to All

For the last month or so, Runway has been rolling out beta access to its Gen 2 text-to-video model. As of yesterday, however, the tool is now open to everyone. Despite the 4-second limit, people are already creating some pretty incredible. In the future, can anyone be a director?

_{Bonus - A Cool Tool}

Prompter is an open source tool that can help you get creative with your prompting. Check it out!

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Signing off from the future’s past - NLW