Computerspeak by Alexandru Voica

Computerspeak by Alexandru Voica

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Computerspeak by Alexandru Voica
Computerspeak by Alexandru Voica
The era of personalized content with AI is here; music labels take on AI startups; wonky consultants are the new stars of generative AI; DeepMind is building knowledge of how genes work

The era of personalized content with AI is here; music labels take on AI startups; wonky consultants are the new stars of generative AI; DeepMind is building knowledge of how genes work

Chatbots struggle to cite sources; 10% of research may be co-authored by AI; Aramco is betting big on AI; the AI we could've had; OpenAI wants AI to help humans train AI

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Alexandru Voica
Jun 28, 2024
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Computerspeak by Alexandru Voica
Computerspeak by Alexandru Voica
The era of personalized content with AI is here; music labels take on AI startups; wonky consultants are the new stars of generative AI; DeepMind is building knowledge of how genes work
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This week, Synthesia introduced a suite of products and features designed to help companies create and distribute AI videos at scale. Most of the press coverage focused on the creation part of the product bundle—and it’s easy to understand why: the new AI avatars are faster to make and perform better than the previous generation tech while products like the AI Video Assistant and AI Screen Recorder will turn anyone into a skilled video creator.

In this newsletter, I want to focus instead on the role that generative AI will play in the distribution and consumption of media, and why we’re entering a new era of the internet where hyper-personalized content could reshape how we access information and entertainment.

The video below offers a summary of this article, generated with my AI avatar in Synthesia, though I encourage you to read the entire article:

Today, the main interface for accessing content online is the personalized social feed. It started in 2006 when Facebook replaced the chronological home page with a new feature called the News Feed. Powered by a ranking system, the News Feed used predictive AI-driven algorithms to curate existing content made up largely of posts shared by your friends, Facebook Pages you liked or Groups you joined (alongside a healthy sprinkle of personalized ads).

How News Feed ranking system works
How AI powers Facebook’s News Feed ranking algorithm

TikTok perfected the concept of a personalized feed by building a recommendation system that delivers content not just from your social graph but also based on your interests. While effective, TikTok’s approach still has one limitation: it can only rearrange pre-existing content. So whereas my For You feed might be different to yours, our feeds are picking from the same pool of standout videos.

That’s because traditional video is, at the end of the day, a one-to-many broadcast medium: you make it with a camera, you edit it with an app, and you upload it to TikTok or YouTube in the hopes of reaching millions of people.

Introduction to the TikTok recommendation system | TikTok

Generative AI is set to introduce a new paradigm of personalization by allowing you to create multiple versions of the same core content, each tailored to individual preferences, demographics, or cultural contexts. For instance, a company could generate one version of a product advertisement for a viewer in the United States and another for someone watching in France. The core message would remain the same, but elements such as language, cultural references, and even visual aesthetics or actors could be automatically adjusted to resonate with each specific audience.

This level of customization extends beyond just geographical differences. Generative AI could potentially create hundreds or even thousands of variations of a single piece of content, each fine-tuned to an individual's interests, viewing history, or even current mood.

The potential for increasing user engagement is enormous. Imagine an educational video that adjusts its tone and depth based on the viewer's expertise level, or that adapts its examples to align with the student's personal interests.

But in order to do that, we first need to rebuild the entire video delivery infrastructure to support these hyper-personalized and interactive experiences—and I’m excited to see Synthesia is doing exactly that. The most obvious place to start with generative AI and hyper-personalization is language: if I want to learn something new or watch an entertaining video, it’s easier to do it in my preferred language.

Click on the button below and you can watch an example video delivered by a new web player built by Synthesia. The video player allows you to easily switch between different versions of the same video through the language button in the bottom right corner. With just one click, you can toggle between the three versions I’ve generated and therefore watch variations of the same video in English, German, Romanian and Japanese. I’ve selected just four languages but Synthesia supports over 130.

Click to watch the video

Look closely and you’ll notice other subtle tweaks I’ve made beyond translating them. Generative AI allows you to fully localize videos right down to the varieties of a given language—in my example, I’ve created American and British English versions. Or you can even toggle between several AI avatars that are targeted for a specific audience. For example, in the Romanian version I’ve replaced the stock AI avatars with my own.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t recognize that this new level of personalization will bring new challenges or amplify existing ones. When misused, hyper-personalization could drive further fragmentation of shared experiences and the amplification of echo chambers. There are also concerns about data privacy and the ethical implications of such granular content targeting. The good news is that policymakers are already thinking about these issues. Under the EU AI Act for example, there are provisions related to transparency for AI generated content, including the disclosures that the content has been artificially generated or manipulated in a clearly visible manner. Meanwhile, Synthesia has implemented robust content moderation policies and systems to ensure that harmful or disagreeable content isn’t being generated with its platform.

For creators of content, the ability to reach audiences with precisely tailored messages could dramatically increase effectiveness. However, it also means rethinking content strategies to accommodate a much more diverse and granular approach to creation.

For consumers of content, the age of one-size-fits-all media is coming to an end, replaced by a world where every piece of content could be as unique as the person consuming it.

And now, here are the week’s news:

❤️Computer loves

Our top news picks for the week - your essential reading from the world of AI

  • MIT Technology Review: Synthesia’s hyperrealistic deepfakes will soon have full bodies

  • WSJ: Music Labels Take On AI Startups With New Lawsuits

  • Fast Company: Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas responds to plagiarism and infringement accusations

  • The Economist: Non-white American parents are embracing AI faster than white ones

  • FT: The AI we could have had

  • The Atlantic: Generative AI Can’t Cite Its Sources

  • The Economist: At least 10% of research may already be co-authored by AI

  • WSJ: AI Work Assistants Need a Lot of Handholding

  • Wired: OpenAI Wants AI to Help Humans Train AI

  • Bloomberg: AI Wreaks Havoc on Global Power Systems

  • Fortune: The knowledge economy is being eroded by AI. Welcome to the ‘relationship economy’, LinkedIn’s chief economist says

  • New York Times: The A.I. Boom Has an Unlikely Early Winner: Wonky Consultants

  • Wired: With AI Tools, Scientists Can Crack the Code of Life

  • Fortune: Energy giant Saudi Aramco is betting on AI to thrive after the ‘peak oil’ era

  • WSJ: No One Wants to Sound Clueless About AI. Especially Your Boss.

⚙️Computer does

AI in the wild: how artificial intelligence is used across industry, from the internet, social media, and retail to transportation, healthcare, banking, and more

  • WSJ: Amazon Leans Into Generative AI to Manage Its Finances

  • Business Insider: A Sam's Club worker used to worry a robot might take his job — instead, AI replaced his most tiresome task

  • TechCrunch: Video editing app Captions releases AI edit feature that automatically adds effects to your video

  • Reuters: Italy's Consob tests AI for market supervision, insider trading detection

  • TechCrunch: How Jobright uses AI to help foreign workers navigate the US job market

  • The Verge: Gmail’s Gemini AI sidebar and email summaries are rolling out now

  • Business Insider: "We've been using AI all along." How LinkedIn is using AI, according to VP of Marketing Minjae Ormes.

  • WSJ: Spotting Potholes—and Other Ways San Jose Hopes to Use AI to Improve Public Services

  • TechCrunch: Mixhalo’s latest feature uses AI to beam real-time translation to phones at events

  • The Telegraph: How I used AI to ace my job interview with HMRC

  • Fortune: AI is touching your food—maybe most of it—by solving the food industry’s unique supply-chain challenges

🧑‍🎓Computer learns

Interesting trends and developments from various AI fields, companies and people

  • Business Insider: Tech has transformed in-person art-viewing experiences. AI is changing them even more.

  • Wired: He Helped Invent Generative AI. Now He Wants to Save It

  • Fortune: Slack’s AI is saving users 97 minutes a week. But its CEO worries they don’t know what to do with their extra time

  • VentureBeat: Google partners with Thomson Reuters, Moody’s and more to give AI real-world data

  • Wired: French AI Startups Felt Unstoppable. Then Came the Election

  • CNBC: AI pioneer Illia Polosukhin, one of Google’s ‘Transformer 8,’ wants to democratize artificial intelligence

  • CNN: The rise of the AI beauty pageant and its complicated quest for the ‘perfect’ woman

  • TechCrunch: Meta starts testing user-created AI chatbots on Instagram

  • The Verge: Google touts ‘enterprise-ready’ AI with more facts and less make-believe

  • Fortune: China’s AI companies are reportedly rationing the use of their services because they don’t have enough chips

  • The Information: In a Surprise, OpenAI Is Selling More of Its AI Models Than Microsoft Is

  • WSJ: Goldman Sachs Deploys Its First Generative AI Tool Across the Firm

  • VentureBeat: Meta's LLM Compiler is the latest AI breakthrough to change the way we code

  • Wired: Deepfakes Are Evolving. This Company Wants to Catch Them All

  • TechCrunch: MagicSchool thinks AI in the classroom is inevitable, so it’s aiming to help teachers and students use it properly

  • Maginative: TIME Partners with ElevenLabs to Narrate Articles With AI

  • Axios: AI makes inroads in the oil patch

  • TechCrunch: Zuckerberg disses closed-source AI competitors as trying to ‘create God’

  • VentureBeat: Google opens up Gemini 1.5 Flash, Pro with 2M tokens to the public

  • Reuters: AI chatbot startup Character.AI launches new calls feature

  • Fortune: SoftBank’s billionaire CEO says he was put on Earth to create artificial superintelligence that’s 10,000 times smarter than a human—’I am super serious about it’

  • VentureBeat: Hugging Face’s updated leaderboard shakes up the AI evaluation game

  • Business Insider: Airbnb CEO says AI hasn't really changed our daily lives — but that moment is coming

  • The Economist: A new lab and a new paper reignite an old AI debate

  • Reuters: Time, OpenAI sign multi-year content deal

  • Fortune: Cybersecurity is now a ‘team sport’ amid a wave of generative AI–based attacks, say tech experts

  • Business Insider: There's a raucous debate in Silicon Valley over the use of AI chatbots in tech job interviews

  • Business Insider: Why Twitch's CEO says AI will be a 'boon' for livestreaming creators

  • Business Insider: Microsoft's new AI chief explains what's at the top of his to-do list

  • Axios: AI holds promises, risks for biosecurity

  • TechCrunch: Dappier is building a marketplace for publishers to sell their content to LLM builders

  • TechCrunch: Sonia’s AI chatbot steps in for therapists

  • New York Times: When the Terms of Service Change to Make Way for A.I. Training

  • CNN: Oil-rich Abu Dhabi wants to be an AI leader. Aligning with the US is just the start

  • TechCrunch: Unbabel among the first AI startups to win millions of GPU training hours on EU supercomputers

  • New York Times: Now Narrating the Olympics: A.I.-Al Michaels

  • CNBC: Britain looks to upstage France with play for world’s third major AI hub after U.S., China

  • Bloomberg: OpenAI’s China Block to Reshape AI Scene as Big Players Pounce

  • Reuters: Hollywood workers union reaches pay, AI-use deal with top studios

  • FT: YouTube in talks with record labels over AI music deal

  • Reuters: AI dataset licensing companies form trade group

  • VentureBeat: Figma unveils AI-powered design tools, challenges Adobe’s dominance

  • VentureBeat: OpenAI delays release of new ChatGPT Voice Mode by at least one month

  • Reuters: Israel to build supercomputer to keep pace in global AI race

  • Fortune: The former CFO of Salesforce—a 40-year finance veteran—on how to sell a corporate board on AI

  • BBC: AI can beat university students, study suggests

  • MIT Technology Review: My colleagues turned me into an AI-powered NPC. I hate him.

  • CNN: Toys ‘R’ Us uses OpenAI’s Sora in a promo

  • TechCrunch: Tengo untangles the messy world of public sector procurement with AI

  • The Verge: Google announces surprise Pixel hardware and AI event in August

  • TechCrunch: Smashing, from Goodreads’ co-founder, curates the best of the web using AI and human recommendations

  • The Information: Google Develops Challenger to Meta’s Chatbots and Character.AI

  • The Information: Businesses Want Slower AI Models—And That Might Hurt Nvidia

  • Washington Post: AI isn’t dumb, but it might be dumber than you think

  • VentureBeat: ElevenLabs launches iOS app that turns 'any' text into audio narration with AI

  • VentureBeat: Roblox reveals more details about its work on 4D generative AI

  • Reuters: 'Great Resignation' enters third year as workers embrace AI, upskilling, PwC says

  • Reuters: Chinese AI firms woo OpenAI users as US company plans API restrictions

  • FT: Central banks urged to keep pace with ‘game changer’ AI

  • Fortune: Fed governor Lisa Cook says AI is ‘not going to replace us’

  • Fortune: Half of global workers believe AI will actually boost their salaries and increase job security as fears begin to fizzle

  • Business Insider: DeepMind researchers realize AI is really, really unfunny. That's a problem.

  • CNBC: Nvidia-backed AI startup Synthesia now lets you make multilingual video presentations using just your phone or webcam

  • TechCrunch: Meta makes its AI chatbot available to all users in India

  • Wired: My Memories Are Just Meta's Training Data Now

  • Business Insider: Anthropic CEO says we need to think bigger than a universal basic income if we want to solve the AI inequality problem

  • Axios: Leopold Aschenbrenner's "Situational Awareness": AI from now to 2034

  • Reuters: Shopify expands access to its AI-powered features to attract more businesses

  • CNBC: OpenAI walks back controversial stock sale policies, will treat current and former employees the same

  • Bloomberg: Apple Spurned Idea of iPhone AI Partnership With Meta Months Ago

  • VentureBeat: How Gradient created an open LLM with a million-token context window

  • Reuters: China's ByteDance working with Broadcom to develop advanced AI chip

  • Fortune: Forget STEM. The head of Paris’s top tech university says the secret to France’s AI boom is a focus on the humanities

  • Fortune: Amazon’s money-bleeding Alexa division could face more cuts if a paid version of its AI-enabled voice assistant flops, BofA says

  • Business Insider: Amazon is secretly working on a ChatGPT killer

  • Business Insider: McKinsey says it needs to reinvent itself and that AI is the answer: 'It's going to be most of what we do in the future'

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