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OpenAI's holiday surprise
PLUS: DeepMind's AI world-generator and weather forecasting expert
Rowan Cheung
December 05, 2024
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Welcome, AI enthusiasts.
The holidays are approaching, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman is prepping some shiny new AI presents for under the tree.
With a ‘12 Days of OpenAI’ event and new insights on AGI, Elon Musk, and more from Altman, the AI leader could be ready to finish 2024 with a bang. Let’s get into it…
In today’s AI rundown:
Altman’s DealBook insights, 12 Days of OpenAI
DeepMind’s Genie 2 turns images into playable worlds
Create professional thumbnails with Recraft
AI forecasting model crushes traditional weather systems
5 new AI tools & 5 new AI jobs
More AI & tech news
Read time: 4 minutes
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
OPENAI
Image source: NYT DealBook Summit
The Rundown: In an interview at the NYT DealBook Summit, Sam Altman touched on topics including Elon Musk, AGI, and Microsoft tension — with the OpenAI CEO also announcing a ‘12 Days of OpenAI’ stream of launches starting tomorrow.
The details:
Altman provided new numbers on ChatGPT’s adoption, including 300M weekly active users, 1B daily messages, and 1.3M U.S. developers on the platform.
The CEO also believes that AGI will arrive ‘a lot sooner than anyone expects,’ with the potential first glimpses coming in 2025.
While AGI may arrive sooner, Altman said the immediate impact will be subtle — but long-term changes and transition to superintelligence will be more intense.
Altman also admitted to some tension between OpenAI and Microsoft but said the companies are aligned overall on priorities.
He called the situation with Elon Musk “tremendously sad” but doesn’t believe Musk will use his new political power to harm AI competitors.
Altman revealed that OpenAI will be live-streaming new launches and demos over the next 12 days, including some ‘big ones’ and some ‘stocking stuffers.’
Why it matters: While it still feels like AI still has plenty of room to run on the adoption curve, those are some staggering numbers — and Altman interviews are always a must-watch (full interview here). With ‘12 Days of OpenAI’, the AI leader could set us up for fireworks to end an already wild year of AI progress on an even bigger note.
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GOOGLE DEEPMIND
Image source: Google DeepMind
The Rundown: Google DeepMind just introduced Genie 2, a large-scale, multimodal foundation world AI model that converts single images into interactive, playable 3D environments with real-time physics, lighting effects, and player controls.
The details:
The model creates playable 3D environments from simple image prompts, complete with physics, lighting, and character controls that last up to a minute.
Genie 2 maintains spatial memory, remembering areas players have visited even when they're off-screen.
The system works with keyboard and mouse inputs, supporting first and third-person perspectives with 720p resolution output.
In testing, DeepMind's SIMA AI agent successfully navigated these generated environments, following natural language commands like "go to the red door."
The model can generate worlds from various image types, such as concept art and real-world photos, potentially accelerating game design prototyping.
Why it matters: Just days after World Labs’ release, DeepMind joins the world-generating party. Genie 2 offers the potential for unlimited, diverse training environments, a crucial step for developing more capable embodied AI agents —not to mention the massive implications for game prototyping and creative enhancements.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: Recraft lets you transform your basic layouts into professional thumbnails by combining images, text, and AI-generated elements all in one place.
Step-by-step:
Create a free account at Recraft and click "Frame" in the top bar.
Select your aspect ratio and draw your frame.
Add your image and text elements exactly where you want them to appear.
Select the entire frame to include all elements in the generation.
Write your style prompt and click "Recraft" to transform your layout.
Pro tip: For better results, keep your text concise (3-5 words) and use specific style descriptions in your prompt.
PRESENTED BY INNOVATING WITH AI
The Rundown: Innovating with AI’s new program, AI Consultancy Project, equips AI enthusiasts with all the resources to capitalize on the rapidly growing AI consulting market – which is set to 8x to $54.7B by 2032.
The program offers:
Tools and framework to find clients and deliver top-notch services
A 6-month roadmap to build a 6-figure AI consulting business
Student landing their first AI client in as little as 3 days
GOOGLE DEEPMIND
Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown
The Rundown: DeepMind just unveiled GenCast, an AI weather forecasting system that surpasses the accuracy of the world's leading forecasting model, producing reliable predictions for 15-day forecasts in minutes rather than hours.
The details:
GenCast outperformed the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts model (ENS) on 97% of evaluation metrics for 15-day forecasts.
GenCast processes forecasts in just 8 minutes using a single AI chip, compared to the hours required by traditional supercomputers.
The model also accurately predicted extreme weather events, including tropical cyclones, heat waves, and wind conditions.
The system was trained on 40 years of historical weather data (1979-2018), and DeepMind open-sourced its full code for non-commercial research use.
Why it matters: AI’s prediction and data-crunching powers are being set loose on the weather — and the result is an absolute leap in how scientists will forecast both global weather and extreme events going forward. Like medicine and other data-heavy sectors, weather forecasting feels perfectly suited to be revolutionized in the AI era.
NEW TOOLS & JOBS
🗣️ Coval - Build reliable voice and chat agents faster with seamless simulation and evals
🎥 Pollo AI - Create videos from text prompts, images, or videos with high resolution and quality
📊 Plot - Unlock AI-powered consumer insights from social media videos
📓 Pearl - AI-powered journal that visualizes and synthesizes your life to reflect on you
🧠 Focu - Transform your relationship with work through AI-powered guidance, meaningful conversations, and periodic check-ins
QUICK HITS
Free event: Scott Galloway’s 2025 Predictions. Join 20,000+ for Scott’s highly anticipated unfiltered take on AI, business, and tech. RSVP for free.*
Amazon and Anthropic unveiled plans for Project Rainer, a massive AI supercomputer powered by hundreds of thousands of Trainium2 chips (5x larger than Anthropic’s current top model) that promises to be the world's largest AI system.
OpenAI announced that it’s hiring three prominent Google DeepMind computer vision experts, with Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai set to work on multimodal AI and build out the company’s new Zurich, Switzerland office.
Luma AI revealed Ray 2, a next-gen video model capable of producing minute-long videos in just seconds, which was announced during Amazon’s AWS event alongside a new partnership to bring the model to the Amazon Bedrock platform.
Defense tech firm Anduril announced a new strategic partnership with OpenAI to develop AI-powered aerial defense systems to protect U.S. and allied forces from drone threats.
Spotify launched its annual viral ‘Wrapped’ user listening recap, featuring an additional AI-powered podcast feature using Google’s NotebookLM tool with music commentary from the two AI hosts.
EvolutionaryScale introduced ESM Cambrian, a powerful new protein language model family trained on Earth's protein sequences, achieving breakthrough performance in protein structure prediction.
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THAT’S A WRAP
That's it for today!Before you go we’d love to know what you thought of today's newsletter to help us improve The Rundown experience for you. |
See you soon,
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