AI News in July 2023: SDXL, Worldcoin, and Biological Computing

In this July 2023 roundup, I look at another eventful week in AI: Google’s Gemini work, new Stability AI models, Twitter’s rebrand, ChatGPT updates, biometric identity, image-to-video generation, and a biological computing experiment. The products and comparisons discussed here reflect that moment in time.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has reportedly returned to more active work at the company, with a focus on Gemini, Google’s response to OpenAI’s GPT-4. The reporting describes concern that Google was falling behind OpenAI and Microsoft. Brin had previously been skeptical about whether Google could crack AI, but his view reportedly shifted as the technology advanced.

I wonder whether Brin’s return could give Google a push, as Steve Jobs’s return once did for Apple. I see the moment as an existential challenge for Google and believe the company is trying to move faster, including by changing its approach to AI safeguards. Whether those changes help it catch up is an open question.

Stability AI had two major releases. FreeWilly 1 is based on Llama 1, while FreeWilly 2 uses Llama 2. At the time, I said FreeWilly 2 had reached the top of an open-model leaderboard and performed strongly on some measures against ChatGPT; those historical benchmark comparisons depend on the tests and versions used.

Stability AI also released Stable Diffusion XL 1.0, or SDXL, an openly available image-generation model. In my judgment at the time, the quality of images from models like SDXL was approaching Midjourney’s. That is a subjective comparison, not a guarantee that the models perform equally on every prompt.

Twitter has been renamed X, replacing the familiar bird and leaving me puzzled about what happens to the word “tweet.” The company’s stated ambition is an everything app, comparable in breadth to WeChat, spanning audio, video, messaging, payments, and other services. I am skeptical of the pitch and of abandoning such a strong brand.

Elon Musk had also recently launched xAI and has a long association with the X name and the x.com domain. Given the $44 billion Twitter acquisition and the strength of its old identity, I find the rebrand hard to understand. I am curious whether others see a compelling reason for the change.

ChatGPT received custom instructions, a feature for giving it persistent context and preferences instead of starting each conversation entirely from scratch. Users can specify how they want it to respond. Sam Altman has said he wants it to be less excessively nice; I would also like fewer apologies when it makes mistakes.

Worldcoin, a separate project associated with Sam Altman, aims to provide proof of personhood. Its Orb device scans a person’s irises to support a digital identity, an idea meant to help distinguish people in a world with increasingly capable AI. I am not sure I would be comfortable giving the project my biometric data.

Worldcoin’s white paper presents wider ambitions for a global identity and financial network, including increased economic opportunity and the possibility of AI-funded universal basic income. These are the project’s goals rather than outcomes established by the launch. The trade-off between identity verification and biometric privacy is what stands out to me.

Runway, known for text-to-video generation, introduced an image-to-video feature in Gen-2. The idea is to upload a still image and generate a moving video from it. I show examples and find the results impressive; availability and capabilities described here are those of the product in July 2023.

The last story concerns a biological computing experiment and military funding. Berman cites reporting on DishBrain, a system using roughly 800,000 cultured human and mouse brain cells interfaced with electrodes, which researchers reported adapted to a simplified Pong-like task within minutes. The article describes this as “something like sentience,” but the observed response does not establish consciousness or sentience.

The possibility that biological cells and AI could someday contribute to computing is fascinating, although surpassing conventional silicon hardware remains speculation. I feel both excited and a little frightened by so many technologies advancing at once. Will AI help create abundance, or could it lead to our downfall? That is the question I leave with viewers.