Content Armageddon Continues

Enter Sora

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Friends,

The magic continues.

This week OpenAI introduced us to Sora, a new AI model capable of generating high-definition videos up to one minute long from text prompts. Unlike previous models, Sora will not be immediately accessible to the public but will be evaluated by a select group of academics and researchers for potential risks and misuse.

Sora stands out for its ability to create complex scenes with detailed character actions, backgrounds, and realistic effects. It feels like this model represents a significant advancement in text-to-video technology, generating videos in a single process rather than frame by frame.

From Wired:

Other companies, from giants like Google to startups like Runway, have already revealed text-to-video AI projects. But OpenAI says that Sora is distinguished by its striking photorealism—something I haven’t seen in its competitors—and its ability to produce longer clips than the brief snippets other models typically do, up to one minute. The researchers I spoke to won’t say how long it takes to render all that video, but when pressed, they described it as more in the “going out for a burrito” ballpark than “taking a few days off.” If the hand-picked examples I saw are to be believed, the effort is worth it.

I remember back to previous eras - when text to speech - or speech to text were exciting steps forward.

If we play forward what might happen, we will see our thoughts generated into video:

- thoughts to text to video (to advertisement to purchase) -

Of course, this is still some years off - but the brain-to-computer interface is being solved by Neuralink and others. Take the text that comes from your thoughts and link it to OpenAI’s Sora and you’ll be able to see your thoughts visually. No-one is really talking about this use case. It’s Minority Report-esque.

But imagine if that happened quicker? Or if you could turn those videos into something else. Could you even imagine a feature film?

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

“It will be a very long time, if ever, before text-to-video threatens actual filmmaking. No, you can’t make coherent movies by stitching together 120 of the minute-long Sora clips, since the model won’t respond to prompts in the exact same way—continuity isn’t possible. But the time limit is no barrier for Sora and programs like it to transform TikTok, Reels, and other social platforms. “In order to make a professional movie, you need so much expensive equipment,” says Peebles. “This model is going to empower the average person making videos on social media to make very high-quality content.””

Despite its potential, the advent of such technology raises concerns regarding the creation of realistic fake content and its implications for misinformation, as well as the impact on jobs in creative fields. Because of these concerns, OpenAI is addressing these issues by collaborating with experts to assess the tool and developing detection mechanisms to identify videos generated by Sora.

The content Armageddon continues.

Rahim

Here are my recommendations for this week:

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Now

1. Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center: This is the best thing I have read all week - and a murmuring sign of our times. - “We take for granted that our romantic lives involve vulnerability and rejection. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we need to accept some of those same risks if we want to find the full richness that’s possible in our platonic relationships.” Also: We’re facing a 'fringe friend' crisis, Why we Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out,

2. Artificial Intelligence, Real Anxiety: How should educators use AI to prepare students for the future? There are signs that high school and college students around the world are anxious about AI and this uncertain future. While educators fret about plagiarism, cheating, and how to use AI to improve instruction, students are wrestling with more fundamental questions about what they are learning and why. They are looking at the fast-changing world and wondering if their coursework is properly preparing them for the workplaces of tomorrow. Also GSV 150: The Most Transformational Growth Companies In Digital Learning and Workforce Skills in 2024

3. 200 cats, 200 dogs, one lab: the secrets of the pet food industry - One of the world centres for pet food innovation is located on an old horse farm, deep in the rolling green fields of the British Midlands. The Waltham Petcare Science Institute in Melton Mowbray is the science arm of Mars Petcare, a leading company in the pet food industry. The research that takes place there determines the future products of dozens of pet food brands: Iams, Cesar, Whiskas, Sheba, James Wellbeloved, Pedigree, Eukanuba and more. - I don’t have pets because inevitably it would be me looking after them and I just don’t have the time - much as my kids nag me - That said, this operation was a real eye-opener.

4. ‘AI Girlfriends’ Are a Privacy Nightmare: Romantic chatbots collect huge amounts of data, provide vague information about how they use it, use weak password protections, and aren’t transparent, new research says. “These apps are designed to collect a ton of personal information,” says Jen Caltrider, the project lead for Mozilla’s Privacy Not Included team, which conducted the analysis. “They push you toward role-playing, a lot of sex, a lot of intimacy, a lot of sharing.” For instance, screenshots from the EVA AI chatbot show text saying “I love it when you send me your photos and voice,” and asking whether someone is “ready to share all your secrets and desires.” Related: The rise of virtual influencers

5. Stop Basing Your Self-Worth on Other People’s Opinions: The desire to know that we are okay shows up in every area of life where uncertainty lurks. The delivery room. The boardroom. The bedroom. The classroom. When we are scared, unsettled, and confused, we either look inside ourselves for the answer, or we look outside ourselves to the perceived authority, to the opinions of others.

   Self-worth is our set of core beliefs about our value as a human being. It’s how we see ourselves and who we perceive ourselves to be. People differ in what they believe they must be or do to have worth or value. You simply need to recognize that you are worthy exactly as you. You are not your grade — whether it’s an A or an F. You are not your job, your age, your marathon time, your place on the org chart, your relationship status, your gold bars, or your prison bars. You have inherent value, and it’s not conditioned on anything you do or have done. It’s not conditioned by how virtuous you have been or how many mistakes you’ve made. Your virtue and your failures are not factored into the calculus of your value as a human being. Your value stems from your being, not your doing.

Next

1. Tech Strikes Back: Effective “Accelerationism” (E/acc) is an overdue corrective to years of doom and gloom in Silicon Valley: There is a groundswell of excitement in tech, still rising, that feels like a palate cleanser to the doom and gloom of the post-backlash era. E/acc may not offer the roadmap that definite optimists need, but it signals a shift in tech culture that is long overdue.

2. After trying the Vision Pro, Mark Zuckerberg says Quest 3 ‘is the better product, period’: Zuckerberg highlights the tradeoffs Apple made to get the fanciest display possible into something that can be worn on your head in an acceptable form factor. He says the Quest 3 weighs 120 grams less, making it more comfortable to wear for longer. He also says it allows for greater motion due to its lack of a wired battery pack and wider field of view than the Vision Pro. Also: Period?, All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Pro, The VR race is back on , Why walking around in public with Vision Pro makes no sense

3. Dude, where’s my self-driving car? The many, many missed deadlines for a fully autonomous vehicular future. - I had to buy a new car this week. Went all electric. I didn’t need a new car - but Sadiq made me do it. I was hoping that I wondn’t have to drive my next car but it seems we are way off this. Maybe when I retire?

4. OpenAI experiments with giving ChatGPT a long-term conversation memory: On Tuesday, OpenAI announced that it is experimenting with adding a form of long-term memory to ChatGPT that will allow it to remember details between conversations. You can ask ChatGPT to remember something, see what it remembers, and ask it to forget. ChatGPT’s new personalization feature could save users a lot of time. So far, large language models have typically used two types of memory: one baked into the AI model during the training process (before deployment) and an in-context memory (the conversation history) that persists for the duration of your session. Usually, ChatGPT forgets what you have told it during a conversation once you start a new session. Related: OpenAI's next AI product could be after your job (again)

5. Gemini 1.5 is Google’s next-gen AI model — and it’s already almost ready: There are a lot of improvements in Gemini 1.5: Gemini 1.5 Pro, the general-purpose model in Google’s system, is apparently on par with the high-end Gemini Ultra that the company only recently launched. [It] should make the model both faster for you to use and more efficient for Google to run. Gemini 1.5 has an enormous context window, which means it can handle much larger queries and look at much more information at once. “It’s about 10 or 11 hours of video, tens of thousands of lines of code.” The context window means you can ask the AI bot about all of that content at once.

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