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By Tom Davenport —

AI posts you missed this week (and last) - 19th July 2024

My company DMS celebrated its 10th anniversary last week! We flew the international team in to London and had a great time planning the year (and indeed decade) ahead.

Apologies for missing the post last week while I was out, let's catch up on the fortnight in AI nerd news. There's a LOT of tool links this week.

Creative

Who says prompts have to be in text? Blend images to create a new meta image with AI:

Making games was a dream when I was young, and the hurdles of learning code or design with an under-specced PC was a dealbreaker at the time. Imagine being able to invent worlds with simple prompts. Prompt-to-experience is the inevitable future of entertainment:

Live Portrait demos are everywhere this week. Map your facial expressions to any image, and I think I've even seen it applied to video somewhere. What does this mean for acting in the future? Will visual overdubs become the norm? Perhaps not even performed by the original actor?

A full AI-enabled open source video editor in the browser. We're getting closer by the day when most people will even need desktop apps and local compute:

This is technically creative: running a 7B model on a god damn calculator:

Tools

Claude Artifacts launching a next-gen app store is the most democratising thing in the world right now. If you want to build and host independently, here's a workflow:

Love Claude Artifacts and wish it were open source?

Get it from the e2b github repo here:

GitHub - e2b-dev/ai-artifacts: Hackable open-source version of Anthropic’s AI Artifacts chat
Hackable open-source version of Anthropic’s AI Artifacts chat - e2b-dev/ai-artifacts
GitHube2b-dev

All the benefits of micro-management and pressure to perform, only 40 years later than 1984:

AutoGPT was one of the first agent frameworks alongside BabyAGI in spring '23. Exciting at the time, but equally aimless and brainless. AutoGPT is back with a next gen approach to solve those headaches:

Talking of BabyAGI, its creator Yohei made a tool for generating domain ideas and checking availability, one of several tools he's whipped up in Claude with hosting on replit recently:

Here's another he made, a simple one-shot message board concept:

Google DeepMind has a method for distributed AI model training; this open source tool replicates the approach:

Julius AI is one of those wrappers that is fighting to win mindshare around a totally standard AI function with a brand and dedicated interface, in this case data analysis. This approach is essentially the land grab opportunity of this age, even when it uses the same models as anyone else under the hood. The moat builds with that proprietary interface, here's their latest step:

Firecrawl turns any website into an API with AI:

Rename files on your computer with local AI:

GitHub - ozgrozer/ai-renamer: A Node.js CLI that uses Ollama and LM Studio models (Llava, Gemma, Llama etc.) to intelligently rename files by their contents
A Node.js CLI that uses Ollama and LM Studio models (Llava, Gemma, Llama etc.) to intelligently rename files by their contents - ozgrozer/ai-renamer
GitHubozgrozer

Models

OpenAI releases GPT-4o mini, claiming high performance and drastically lower token cost:

Just as I'm going to press, Apple released a tight little 7B model - and it's fully open source! Hello Ollama 😊

ExaAI got funding! I love this tool, it's like the live-data layer for LLMs that are inherently out of date with training cutoffs:

On a similar note, Mem0 positions itself as the memory layer for LLMs. Clearly, there's an emerging ecosystem for bricks to bolt on to LLM foundations. The months ahead are fight-night for them to secure a place in the standard stack for AI development:

Research

Political bias is a real risk in models, yet this research suggests a different phenomenon might wrap people in their own personalised political echo chamber. Scott Adams says the world is often watching two different movies on the same screen; what does it mean when personal AI tells us different realities?:

Google/DeepMind is one of those orgs doing so many interesting things that it ends up washing together and going under the radar. Shoutout for this work that innovated on speed and energy required for training models. Can you feel the curve getting steeper yet?

Some theorise that the temperature of a model (where 0 is akin to auto-complete and 1 is like tequila mode) affects its abilities. Surely there's some dimension that changes, otherwise it's the same output, but this research says reasoning is steady:

Opinion

Nancy Pelosi has an amazing knack for picking stocks, this time making a fortunate and timely investment in Broadcom before OpenAI started talks about developing a new chip with them:

Trump's new choice in running mate has ruffled a few feathers. Whatever you make of his views, this one is a positive view for the white house to potentially hold for open source AI:

A so-called AI twitter bot, trained on sh*tposters, convinced Andreessen to donate $50k in bitcoin to fund its efforts:

The bot appears to be manually posted by its owner and therefore doesn't have the autonomy it claims. Which means the first AI Pliny couldn't hack was the one with a human gatekeeper, after they blocked this attempt to sweep the bitcoin:

Ilya with the wisdom. I agree, and psychology was a core theme of our company meeting this week:

If you're in any doubt that change is coming, just remember: we've been here before:

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