The next best AI image generator...

PLUS: How to create your own AI clone

Author

Rowan Cheung
August 22, 2024

Welcome, AI enthusiasts.

The next generation of AI image creation is here with Ideogram 2.0, and it’s more accessible than ever at 40 free images per day.

With better text generation, realistic hands, enhanced colors, and more — the practical use cases for AI image generation just expanded dramatically. Let’s get into it…

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Ideogram 2.0 launches with major upgrades

  • xAI releases Grok 2 in early beta

  • Create your own AI Clone

  • Disney AI brings robots to life

  • 6 new AI tools & 4 new AI jobs

  • More AI & tech news

Read time: 4 minutes

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

IDEOGRAM

Image source: Ideogram

The Rundown: Ideogram just released version 2.0 of its advanced text-to-image model with major upgrades and new features, including five new image styles, an iOS app, a beta API, and over 1 billion public Ideogram images.

The details:

  • Ideogram 2.0 offers five image styles: General, Realistic, Design, 3D, and Anime.

  • The Realistic style convincingly resembles photographs with dramatically improved textures for human features like hands and hair, a pain point for previous image generation models.

  • The Design style also significantly improves text rendering, allowing users to create greeting cards, t-shirt designs and more.

  • Ideogram offers a free tier that allows users to generate around 40 images, or 10 prompts a day at no charge.

Why it matters: Ideogram 2.0 consistently renders high-quality images with near perfect human hands and text — which is an instant ‘AI giveaway’ in other AI image generators. This makes the model the new gold standard for use cases like memes, newsletter images, YouTube thumbnails, posters, and more.

TOGETHER WITH TENSORWAVE

The Rundown: TensorWave cloud harnesses AMD’s Instinct MI300X to deliver unmatched price-to-performance for large language models, outpacing competitors like Nvidia’s H100B.

You’ll be able to:

  • Handle increasingly complex and memory-hungry LLMs with ease

  • Run massive models like Llama 3.1 405B on a single node

  • Leverage TensorWave’s inference caching for smoother enterprise-scale operations

  • Achieve superior performance at a fraction of the cost

Click here to learn more and supercharge your AI workloads.

XAI

Image source: The Rundown

The Rundown: xAI has begun rolling out early beta access for Grok 2, a powerful new AI model that leverages real-time data from X and uses Flux.1 to generate relatively unfiltered AI images.

The details:

  • Grok 2 is now available to a select group of premium X users in early beta mode.

  • The model can access and use real-time information from X, setting it apart from ChatGPT and other LLMs.

  • Grok 2 offers two modes: regular and “fun” mode, with the latter providing a more distinctive and entertaining personality.

  • When gathering and summarizing news, Grok 2 can reference specific tweets, a capability that cannot be found in ChatGPT or Claude.

Why it matters: Grok 2’s biggest advantage against other top-tier AI chatbots like ChatGPT is its ability to access real-time information from X and provide unfiltered responses. And with Grok 3 rumoured to be coming at the end of 2024, xAI has proven itself as a serious competitor in the LLM race — in a very short period of time.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: RenderNet's Narrator feature allows busy founders and creators to quickly create AI clones of themselves and create realistic videos narrating any script.

Step-by-step:

  1. Sign up for a free RenderNet account on their website.

  2. Select "Try Narrator" from the main dashboard and upload a video file of yourself speaking.

  3. Select an AI voice, and input your script. You can also upload a custom audio file with your own original voice directly.

  4. Click 'Generate' to generate your AI clone video 🎉

PRESENTED BY AI21

The Rundown: AI21’s Jamba Foundation Models offer unmatched speed and accuracy for building powerful AI apps.

With Jamba, you’ll unlock:

  • Superior latency performance, outpacing competitive models

  • A massive 256K content window, perfect for RAG and agentic workflows

  • Enhanced efficiency and cost-effectiveness with the innovative Mamba-Transformer architecture

  • Options for private deployments, customization, continuous pre-training, and fine-tuning

Try Jamba today and elevate your AI capabilities.

DISNEY

Image source: Disney Research

The Rundown: ETH Zurich and Disney Research scientists have developed an AI system that can generate realistic, physics-based movements for virtual characters and robots from simple text or image inputs.

The details:

  • The system uses a two-stage approach: first, it learns a latent representation of motion from a large dataset, then trains a control policy using reinforcement learning.

  • It can handle a diverse range of motions, from simple walking to complex acrobatics, outperforming previous methods in accuracy and generalization.

  • The AI adapts to physical constraints, allowing it to transfer motions to real robots while maintaining balance and style.

  • Disney released a video showcasing one robot trained on the new two-stage AI technique dancing and getting pushed around while staying on its feet.

Why it matters: This AI system bridges the gap between animation and robotics, helping humanoids move more naturally and adapt better to new situations. With personal robots coming as soon as 2025 and the rapid pace of AI and robotics advancements, we might be coexisting with robots sooner than most people realize.

NEW TOOLS & JOBS

  • 🎨 MolyPix - Generate easy-to-edit graphic designs from text

  • 🎬 LTX Studio Character Animation - Full character dialogue control and face motion capture for AI-enhanced filmmaking

  • 🤖 Hermes 3 - Open-sourced AI model optimized for reasoning

  • 👨‍💻 Zed - High-performance, multiplayer code editor

  • 🤝 micro1 - AI recruitment engine for meeting top engineers

  • ⚡sleekflow - Automate customer interactions with personalized conversational workflows

  • 🎯 C3 AI - AI Engagement Director, Federal

  • 🤝 Siena - Customer Success Manager

  • 🌐 OpenAI - Partner Solutions Architect

  • 📡 Waymo - Radar Software Engineer

QUICK HITS

Midjourney opened its web-based AI image editor and new tools to everyone with free trials for new users to test it out.

McAfee released AI-powered deepfake detection software for select Levono PCs to protect users from AI-generated scams.

Best Buy introduced AI-powered delivery tracking with minute-by-minute updates to meet rising customer expectations for transparency.

MIT CSAIL researchers developed an AI assistant that oversees teams to align roles and beliefs in an effort to improve collaboration.

Groq launched a new API for a distilled version of OpenAI’s Whisper text-to-speech model that is 240 times faster and significantly cheaper.

California and Google drafted a $300 million, 5-year partnership to fund in-state newsrooms and AI initiatives, including a $40 million annual “AI Innovation Accelerator”.

THAT’S A WRAP

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