The Future of AI is Fast

Welcome to edition #5 of the ‘No Longer a Nincompoop with Nofil’ newsletter. Let’s try something different today. One of these photos is taken from a modelling agency, the other is AI generated. Take a guess which you think is real. Answers at the end 👇

Here’s the tea ☕

• AI is growing up - fast ⚡

• Hollywood will bleed 🩸

• Robots are coming 🫣

AI is about to get a whole lot better

Last week Microsoft Germany’s CTO announced GPT-4, the next iteration of the GPT model family which powers the fastest growing user app ever, ChatGPT. This in itself is a pretty exciting announcement considering how much better AI tech has gotten since the release of ChatGPT towards the end of last year. But we’ve got a glimpse of what it might look like and let me just tell you; we are not ready.

Why? Because GPT-4 will be multimodal. What does that mean? Currently you can only use ChatGPT to generate some text for you. But what if it could read and understand images? Edit them? Watch entire videos? Or even “talk” to you through speech? With the release of ChatGPT, it became clear that the possibilities on how it could change our lives were essentially limitless. We are still exploring and we’ve barely scratched the surface. When GPT-4 rolls around this week those limitless possibilities will grow exponentially once again, and what we thought previously impossible will become possible. In fact it’s quite likely we haven’t even thought of a fraction of the possible use cases for these technologies.

Just as we look back on the creation of the internet or the iPhone, these are the moments in history humanity will look back on as the dawn of a new age, and we are witnessing it before our very eyes.

Hollywood is not ready

In 1977 ‘Star Wars - A New Hope’ was released to the world and it was one of the most technologically advanced movies of its time. The world has come a long, long way since then. CGI (graphics) and VFX (visual effects) in movies nowadays can look incredibly realistic thanks to decades of innovation in both hardware and software.

Take Marvel as an example. It costs Marvel anywhere between $100 Million to $400 Million to do the CGI effects for one of its superhero movies. They release around 2-3 movies a year so in some years they’ll spend upwards of a billion dollars on editing their movies. But what does this have to do with the general person and AI? It’s not like any one of us could afford to make a movie like that? Right!? Just a few days ago I shared a segment in my newsletter talking about the worlds first video-to-anime workflow and how it will change the content creation space entirely. Well, lo and behold one of the most significant advancements in AI has already been produced and its creation is going to be felt across dozens of industries.

The folks over at Wonder Dynamics have created a tool that will give you a full movie studio in your pocket. It automatically creates animations, corrects lighting and composes CGI characters into a live scene without the need for 3D software or production hardware.

This is the stuff of dreams. Want to make a short film look as good as a Hollywood film? Now you can. Want to create your own universe? Now you can. Didn’t like the latest superhero movie? Just download it and edit it however you like. The possibilities are limitless. What it means to produce, to create characters and worlds will change. The meaning of the word creative will change. The implications of having entire animation, graphics, VFX studios in your pocket are astronomical. But as with every significant technological advancement there are winners and losers; this is no different.

Have you ever sat through a movies credits? They can be really long. It may not occur to us then but those are real people who’s livelihoods depend on creating those movies. What happens when an AI can do their work plus more for absolutely anyone? What happens when ordinary people start creating films that rival Hollywood cinema? What happens when cinemas are no longer full of Hollywood movies, but movies made by your neighbour? Hollywood bleeds. Never in the history of film has this kind of competition existed, it’s never been a possibility. Will we get better movies? Almost certainly yes. But the inevitable restructuring of studios and shift to AI powered editing will decimate the creative industry. Of course the human touch will always be necessary, after all movies are made for us humans and AI can’t replicate us perfectly at all. Not yet anyway.

Asimov is rolling in his grave

Way back in 1950 Isaac Asimov wrote a series of short novels which were later adapted into the movie we know today as “I, Robot”. Known as one of the fathers of modern sci-fi, Asimov imagined a world where ‘positronic’ (humanlike) robots were integrated into society, and explores the moral and ethical implications of the technology. It’s only taken 73 years but we’re finally seeing what those robots could look like. For years not only was our hardware lacking, but we had no way to realistically simulate artificial intelligence. That all changed a few months ago when ChatGPT was released, and the world is already changing at an unprecedented rate since then. Now that we have the software, all we need to do is combine the two. Let’s take a look at what that looks like.

Google released footage of robots being powered by their PaLM-E model which is the largest AI model to exist with 562 Billion parameters. Researchers working on the model have observed “emergent capabilities like multimodal chain of thought reasoning and multi-image inference”. What do these mean? Simply put the model is able to read images or videos and understand what it can or should do with the information. For example, lets say the robot is in the kitchen. Here’s what it can do.

• Go through all the drawers or cupboards and list all observed ingredients

• Compile all the ingredients into a list

• Given a food - create a recipe using the available ingredients

• Use the ingredients to cook a meal

This is a very realistic use case of AI software + hardware. But I know what you’re thinking. Where are the actual robots, the ones from the movies, the ones that are going to fight our wars and take all our jobs. Don’t worry, they’re coming too.

The Answer

They’re both AI generated! It’s pretty crazy how good AI image generation has become. These images were taken from the worlds first AI modelling agency. You can check it out here.

As always, thanks for reading ❤️

Written by a human named Nofil