Microsoft, OpenAI in Talks to Fund Figure AI’s Humanoid Robots
Artificial Intelligence news-Microsoft and OpenAI discuss investing up to $500 million in Figure AI Inc. The deal could value Figure AI at $1.9 billion.
Earlier this month, 1X Technologies AS, a Norwegian AI robotics startup backed by OpenAI, raised $100 million. Now, Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI are discussing a potential investment of up to $500 million with Figure AI Inc., reflecting the increasing focus on humanoid robots.
In a proposed arrangement, Microsoft is expected to contribute approximately $95 million, while OpenAI plans to invest $5 million. The deal, if finalized, could value Figure AI at about $1.9 billion before the funding. This valuation does not include the new funds. Depending on the final amount raised, Figure AI’s value after the investment could rise significantly, potentially doubling its status as a unicorn.
However, it’s important to note that the funding round is still in progress, and details like investment amounts may change. Figure AI is developing an AI-powered robot, named Figure 01, designed to resemble and move like a human. The company’s aim for this robot is to undertake hazardous jobs not suitable for humans, addressing labor shortages.
Last May, Figure AI raised $70 million in a round led by Parkway Venture Capital. Brett Adcock, the CEO, expressed ambitions for the company to be among the pioneers in launching useful, commercially viable humanoid robots.
Figure AI, developed the Figure 01 humanoid robot to be a general-purpose robot with the ability to think, learn, and interact with its environment. It is intended to support the supply chain on a global scale and address labor shortages by performing structured and repetitive tasks. It is designed for initial deployment into the workforce, with the potential for use in various industries such as manufacturing, warehousing, and retail. SOURCE
FCC moves to outlaw AI-generated robocalls
Artificial Intelligence news-No one likes robocalls to begin with, but using AI-generated voices of people like President Biden makes them even worse. As such the FCC is proposing that using voice cloning tech in robocalls be ruled fundamentally illegal, making it easier to charge the operators of these frauds.
You may ask why it’s necessary if robocalls are illegal to begin with. In fact some automated calls are necessary and even desirable, and it’s only when a call operation is found to be breaking the law in some way that it becomes the business of the authorities.
For example, regarding the recent fake Biden calls in New Hampshire telling people not to vote, the attorney general there can (and did) say with confidence that the messages “appear to be an unlawful attempt to disrupt the New Hampshire Presidential Primary Election and to suppress New Hampshire voters.”
Under the law there, voter suppression is illegal and so, when they track down the perpetrators (and I’m emailing them constantly to find out if they have, by the way) that will be what they are charged with, likely among other things. But it remains that a crime must be committed, or reasonably suspected to have been committed, for the authorities to step in.
If employing voice cloning tech in automated calls, like what was obviously used on Biden, is itself illegal, that makes charging robocallers that much easier.
“That’s why the FCC is taking steps to recognize this emerging technology as illegal under existing law, giving our partners at State Attorneys General offices across the country new tools they can use to crack down on these scams and protect consumers,” said FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel in a news release. They previously announced that they were looking into this back when the problem was relatively fresh.
The FCC already uses the Telephone Consumer Protection Act as the basis for charging robocallers and other telephone scammers. The TCPA already prohibits “artificial” voices, but it is not clear that cloned voices fall under that category. It’s arguable, for instance, that a company could use the generated voice of its CEO for legitimate business purposes.
But the fact is that legal applications of the tech are fewer in number and less immediately important than the illegal applications. Therefore the FCC proposes to issue a Declaratory Ruling that AI-powered voice cloning causes a call to fall under the “artificial” heading.
The law here is being rapidly iterated as telephone, messaging and generative voice tech all evolve. So don’t be surprised if it isn’t entirely clear what is and isn’t illegal, or why despite being obviously illegal, some calls or scams seem to operate with impunity. It’s a work in progress. SOURCE
How Guns N’ Roses Used AI to Create Wild New Music Video ‘The General’
Artificial Intelligence news-Design studio Creative Works London turned to Stable Diffusion to create the Guns N’ Roses video’s unsettling, dreamlike visuals. Music videos have long served as testbeds for new technology, from the 3D characters populating Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” to the pioneering CGI morphing techniques employed in Michael Jackson’s “Black or White.”Now, iconic hard rock band Guns N’ Roses has brought generative AI into the mix for their latest video to accompany new track “The General.”The band turned to Creative Works London, the studio that’s produced everything from animations for their live shows to music videos, for the video.
The General” follows a young boy down the streets of an unsettling, magenta-toned cityscape as he’s menaced by childhood toys that take on a threatening aspect.
The video was originally conceived as a fully animated video in Unreal Engine, Creative Works London creative director Dan Potter told Decrypt. About six weeks into production, the band’s manager sent him a link to Peter Gabriel’s DiffuseTogether generative AI competition.
“I’d been tracking that,” he said, adding that he’d been “playing” with generative AI platform Stable Diffusion since its launch in 2022. “So when he sent that to me, it was like, ‘Oh, I’m already there—I already know what it takes to pull that sort of work off.”
Where generative AI comes into its own is in creating the uncanny, dreamlike imagery seen throughout the video. As the camera pans and tilts, the AI “dreams” each frame separately, with background elements flickering and morphing. Teddy bears disintegrate and reform as chairs, windows reform as doors and hallways, and biomechanical creatures straight out of Hieronymus Bosch paintings flicker into existence in the background before dissolving into their constituent parts.
“Inputting Unreal Engine renders, and then having it dream over the top of those—that for me was a really interesting use,” Potter said. “Because that was six or seven humans making those renders, and then we were just giving it instantly a different vibe.”
Elsewhere, Potter used Stable Diffusion prompts to turn live-action footage of the band into AI-generated imagery, cutting back and forth between the two. “I’d fed a prompt into it, like, ‘futuristic, psychotic rock star,’” he said, pointing to an image of Axl Rose rendered as, well, a futuristic, psychotic rock star.
Potter went to pains to point out that Creative Works used generative AI to augment the studio’s output, rather than replacing the work of artists. “I did want to make it as much of a hand-drawn, human-intervened process as I could,” he said.
Potter said that he envisions AI as a “creative tool” rather than a replacement for artists.“I think the problem a lot of artists have with AI is that it almost says, ‘Ta-da! There’s your finished image,’ he explained. “And it’s a really dangerous place for a creative to be, where you think, ‘Well, we can just put a prompt in and you get the result.’”With the video for “The General,” he added, “I was in the unique position that it was only something I was able to do.”
o that end, the imagery generated by Stable Diffusion is based on the work of the studio’s artists, while the video also includes plenty of hand-crafted touches—such as graffiti overlaid on top of the image, transitions through a manhole emblazoned with the Guns N’ Roses logo, and the logo for “The General” that appears on a crushed drinks can at the outset.
“What I wanted to do with AI was to go, ‘If you’re entrusting me with such a controversial thing, then who better than Guns N’ Roses, the most dangerous band in the world, to go, ‘Let’s try AI’?” he said. “Because it is a creative tool at the end of the day, I wanted to make it something that came in every sense from within the band.”
Following “The General,” Creative Works London is looking at other ways to integrate AI into Guns N’ Roses’ output, including combining AI with iMAG, the large-scale video projection system used in live performances. “What we’ve been doing with Guns’ show—we haven’t really pulled it off, because the teams aren’t ready for it—is to drop real time content in the iMAG,” he said.
The idea, he explained, is to “have Axl interacting with content that’s being fed from content in the main screen, but in the iMAG,” with augmented reality elements appearing in front of him and behind him. “What we’re trying to do there is some kind of halfway house, so if you’re in a show and you put goggles on, you can see all this real-time content flowing around the band.”
He suggested that in future, live performances could incorporate augmented reality elements, “where people can just wear those glasses and then see the content explode beyond the stage and around them, in this kind of DMT-like hallucination.”
As for the future of artists in a world of generative AI, Potter said, “We felt like we owed it to everyone to just say, ‘A significant team of artists was behind this—no artist died making this.’” He added that AI is “not going to kill the artist, it’s just going to amplify and augment what we already do. I’d say the future is about us being more like guides.” SOURCE
The idea, he explained, is to “have Axl interacting with content that’s being fed from content in the main screen, but in the iMAG,” with augmented reality elements appearing in front of him and behind him. “What we’re trying to do there is some kind of halfway house, so if you’re in a show and you put goggles on, you can see all this real-time content flowing around the band.”
He suggested that in future, live performances could incorporate augmented reality elements, “where people can just wear those glasses and then see the content explode beyond the stage and around them, in this kind of DMT-like hallucination.”
As for the future of artists in a world of generative AI, Potter said, “We felt like we owed it to everyone to just say, ‘A significant team of artists was behind this—no artist died making this.’” He added that AI is “not going to kill the artist, it’s just going to amplify and augment what we already do. I’d say the future is about us being more like guides.” SOURCE
Mistral CEO confirms ‘leak’ of new open source AI model nearing GPT-4 performance
Artificial Intelligence news-The past few days have been a wild ride for the growing open source AI community — even by its fast-moving and freewheeling standards.
Here’s the quick chronology: on or about January 28, a user with the handle “Miqu Dev” posted a set of files on HuggingFace, the leading open source AI model and code sharing platform, that together comprised a seemingly new open source large language model (LLM) labeled “miqu-1-70b.” The HuggingFace entry, which is still up at the time of this article’s posting, noted that new LLM’s “Prompt format,” how users interact with it, was the same as Mistral, the well-funded open source Parisian AI company behind Mixtral 8x7b, viewed by many to be the top performing open source LLM presently available, a fine-tuned and retrained version of Meta’s Llama 2.
The same day, an anonymous user on 4chan (possibly “Miqu Dev”) posted a link to the miqu-1-70b files on 4chan, the notoriously longstanding haven of online memes and toxicity, where users began to notice it.
Mistral quantized?
Artificial Intelligence news-Machine learning (ML) researchers took notice on LinkedIn, as well. “Does ‘miqu’ stand for MIstral QUantized? We don’t know for sure, but this quickly became one of, if not the best open-source LLM,” wrote Maxime Labonne, an ML scientist at JP Morgan & Chase, one of the world’s largest banking and financial companies. “Thanks to @152334H, we also now have a good unquantized version of miqu here: The investigation continues. Meanwhile, we might see fine-tuned versions of miqu outperforming GPT-4 pretty soon.“
Quantization in ML refers to a technique used to make it possible to run certain AI models on less powerful computers and chips by replacing specific long numeric sequences in a model’s architecture with shorter ones.
Well, today it appears we finally have confirmation of the latter of those possibilities: Mistral co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch took to X to clarify: “An over-enthusiastic employee of one of our early access customers leaked a quantised (and watermarked) version of an old model we trained and distributed quite openly…To quickly start working with a few selected customers, we retrained this model from Llama 2 the minute we got access to our entire cluster — the pretraining finished on the day of Mistral 7B release. We’ve made good progress since — stay tuned!“Hilariously, Mensch also appears to have taken to the illicit HuggingFace post not to demand a takedown, but leaving a comment that the poster “might consider attribution.”
A pivotal moment in open source AI and beyond?
Artificial Intelligence news-That would be a watershed moment not just for open source generative AI but the entire field of AI and computer science: since its release back in March 2023, GPT-4 has remained the most powerful and highest performing LLM in the world by most benchmarks. Not even any of Google’s presently available, long-rumored Gemini models have been able to eclipse it — yet (according to some measures, the current Gemini models are actually worse than the older OpenAI GPT-3.5 model).
The release of an open source GPT-4 class model, which would presumably be functionally free to use, would likely place enormous competitive pressure on OpenAI and its subscription tiers, especially as more enterprises look to open source models, or a mixture of open source and closed source, to power their applications, as VentureBeat’s founder and CEO Matt Marshall recently reported. OpenAI may retain the edge with its faster GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-4V (vision), but the writing on the wall is pretty clear: the open source AI community is catching up fast. Will OpenAI have enough of a head start, and a metaphorical “moat” with its GPT Store and other features, to remain in the top spot for LLMs? SOURCE
The Pixel 8 is getting Google’s new AI search feature today
Artificial Intelligence news-Google’s new AI-first approach to search is rolling out to Pixel 8 and 8 Pro phones today.
Google is rolling out its “Circle to Search” feature to Pixel 8 phones today, bringing new ideas about how to gather information on the internet using AI. The feature, which is also available on Samsung Galaxy S24 phones, builds on Google’s multisearch tool that lets you combine image searches with words in the Google app. Now you can simply circle, scribble, or highlight things in other apps and learn more about them in place.
The big change here is leveraging generative AI for on-the-fly searches within other apps in Android. Instead of taking an image or screenshot over to the Google app, you can long-press on the home button or the navigation bar from wherever you are to initiate the search, then highlight whatever you want to know more about and modify the search using a text prompt. By way of example, Google mentions that if you see a bunch of social media posts about corn dogs and you’re feeling out of the loop, you can use Circle to Search to grab the corn dog and ask in the text prompt why they’re so popular right now. Or as our own Allison Johnson said before, you could figure out those Stanley cups.
Other examples the search giant proposes include looking for info about a building you see in a YouTube video by scribbling over it and adding it to your travel plans or, while in a text thread, highlighting a restaurant suggestion from a friend and checking out things like its menu or customer reviews. The feature had already started rolling out to some Pixel 8 phones prior to Google’s announcement, including those of some Verge staffers, so you may have already been able to use it today. SOURCE
Conclusion
Artificial Intelligence news-The recent developments in technology and artificial intelligence, as outlined in the articles, highlight a transformative period in various sectors, from robotics and telecommunications to entertainment and consumer electronics. Microsoft and OpenAI’s potential investment in Figure AI underscores the growing interest and financial commitment to advancing humanoid robotics, signaling a leap towards integrating AI more deeply into daily life and work, particularly in roles that are hazardous or suffer from labor shortages. The FCC’s move to regulate AI-generated robocalls reflects an increasing need to adapt legal frameworks to address the challenges posed by sophisticated AI technologies in protecting consumers. The innovative use of AI by Guns N’ Roses for their music video production illustrates the creative potential of AI, blending technology with art to push the boundaries of traditional media. The leak of a new open-source AI model nearing GPT-4’s performance by Mistral CEO introduces a significant moment for the open-source community, promising to democratize access to powerful AI tools. Lastly, Google’s roll-out of a new AI search feature on Pixel 8 devices showcases the ongoing integration of AI into consumer technology, enhancing the user experience with more intuitive and interactive search capabilities. These developments collectively signify a pivotal moment in the evolution of AI, where its applications are becoming increasingly diverse, sophisticated, and integrated into the fabric of society.
For more insights and artificial intelligence updates on the ever-evolving world of artificial intelligence, stay informed with Arcot Group, your reliable source for the latest in artificial intelligence news and developments.
Further Reading & References
AI Daily News: Charting New Territories in Education and Predictive Technologies
Navigating the AI Revolution: The Dawn of the Galaxy S24 and BeyondThe Future Unveiled:
AI’s Role in Reshaping Conflict & Climate StrategiesRevolutionizing Tomorrow:
