Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 07/13 – Elon Launches An AI Company

Episode Date: July 13, 2023

Elon has launched his own AI company with some pretty big names involved. The FTC will appeal! Roblox is coming to Zuckerberg’s metaverse. Meta does plan to commercialize LLaMA. And a cool new “do a napkin sketch and have AI turn it into an actual work of art” tool. Links: Musk Unveils xAI in New Bid to Rival Startup OpenAI (Bloomberg) FTC appeals its loss to Microsoft in Activision Blizzard case (The Verge) Ex-Celsius CEO Mashinsky Charged in Latest DOJ Crypto Case (Bloomberg) Roblox is coming to Meta’s Quest VR headsets (The Verge) macOS Sonoma Brings Apple Password Manager to Third-Party Browsers (MacRumors) Meta to release commercial AI model in effort to catch rivals (FT) Stability AI releases Stable Doodle, a sketch-to-image tool (TechCrunch) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the time. Check meme right home for Thursday, July 13th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. Elon has launched his own AI company with some pretty big names involved. The FTC will appeal. Roblox is coming to Zuckerberg's Metaverse. Meta does plan to commercialize Lama and a cool new do a napkin sketch and have AI turn it into an actual work of art tool. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. He's got another one. Elon Musk has announced the founding of XAI, a startup he will lead to, quote, understand the true nature of the universe, end quote.

The staff he has assembled, worked previously at Google, Microsoft, Tesla, Open AI, and more, and as that quote suggests, has some ambitions. Quoting Bloomberg, Elon Musk, who has hinted for months that he wants to build an alternative to the popular chatGPT, artificial intelligence chatbot, announced the formation of what he's calling XAI, a company with a mission to, quote, understand the true nature of the universe. On a website unveiled Wednesday, XAI said its team will be led by Musk and staffed by executives who have worked at a broad range of companies at the forefront of artificial intelligence, including Google's Deep Mind, Microsoft and Tesla, as well as academic institutions such as the University of Toronto. Musk was involved in the creation of OpenAI, the highest profile AI startup and developer of ChatGPT, but he has frequently and publicly criticized OpenAI since he left the board in 2018, especially after it created a for-profit arm the following year.

He has said he believes it to be, quote, effectively controlled by Microsoft. Microsoft has invested some $13 billion into OpenAI. Of the 12 men, including Musk, listed on the website Wednesday morning, a majority previously worked at Google in some capacity or at its London-based artificial intelligence unit, Deep Mind. One, Christian Zedjidi spent years as a research scientist at the company. Other former Googlers are Iger Babushkin, Zihag Dai, Tony Wu, and Toby Poland. Musk's startup has also added two academics from the University of Toronto, Goudong Zhang and Jimmy Ba, an assistant professor who studied under AI pioneer Jeffrey Hinton. Both Ba and Zhang list Deep Mine internships on their CVs.

Ba is one of the best-known hires announced by XAI Wednesday. He is the co-author with Diedrich Kigma of a 2014 paper on optimization in deep learning known as the atom paper. It is the most cited paper in artificial intelligence with 19. 95,460 citations, according to the scientific networking site Research Gate. Though Musk is a frequent critic of San Francisco, the XAI website says the company is, quote, actively recruiting experienced engineers and researchers to work in the Bay Area. So far, most AI development has been concentrated in Silicon Valley. Musk and Jared Birchall, who operates Musk's family office, incorporated a business called X.a.I. in March, according to a Nevada state filing with the

Secretary of State. In April, the Financial Times reported that Musk was holding discussions with investors of his other companies, Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, about helping fund an AI startup, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. The billionaire has acquired thousands of processors from Nvidia for the new project, the paper said. The XAI website said the company is being advised by Dan Hendricks, who is the director of the Center for AI Safety, a group that is warned about what it sees as existential dangers of developing AI quickly. This spring, it released. a letter of caution signed by chief executive officers of some of the leading companies in AI,

including Alphabet's Deep Mind and OpenAI. Musk, 52, now oversees six companies. Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, Neurrelink, boring company, and now XAI, end quote. The FTC has indeed filed to appeal that U.S. court ruling that cleared the way for Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard. The existing TRO expires at 1159 p.m. Pacific Time tomorrow. Quoting the Verge. Now that the FTC is choosing to appeal Judge Corley's decision, the regulator needs the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to issue an emergency stay to extend the existing temporary restraining

order or TRO that is set to expire at 1159 p.m. Pacific Time on Friday, July 14th. It's not clear if the appeals court will even rule before the deal deadline on July 18th, potentially leaving the door open for Microsoft to close the Activision Blizzard deal on Monday or Tuesday without a restraining order in place. The facts haven't changed. tweeted Lulu Cheng Miservi, Activision Blizzard's CCO and EVP of corporate affairs. We're confident the U.S. will remain among the 39 countries where the merger can close.

We look forward to reinforcing the strength of our case in court again, end quote. Mike Ybarra, the president of Blizzard Entertainment, quipped about the appeal on Twitter, quote, your tax dollars at work, Yabara said. Microsoft still needs to resolve the issues of the UK's competition and markets authority or CMA with its acquisition before it can close after the regulator blocked the deal on cloud concerns earlier this year. Both Microsoft and the CMA almost instantly announced they had agreed to pause their legal battles to negotiate after Judge Cordley's ruling on Tuesday. But in a surprise statement on Wednesday, the CMA then warned Microsoft's opportunity to restructure its deal

could, quote, lead to a new merger investigation, end quote, and that talks between the regulator and Microsoft were still at an, quote, early stage, end quote. The Securities and Exchange commission is suing ex-Celsius CEO Alex Machinsky and the company over alleged fraud in the sale of sell tokens. A source says Machinsky was arrested on Thursday. Quoting Bloomberg, the former chief executive officer of bankrupt crypto lender Celsius Network was charged with fraud and sued by three regulatory agencies over the company's collapse. Alex Machinsky 57 was also charged with attempting to manipulate cryptocurrencies in federal court in New York Thursday. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodities Futures

Trading Commission and the Federal Trade Commission also filed lawsuits against Mishinsky and the company. Prosecutors claimed that from 2018 through June 2020, Mishinsky, quote, orchestrated a scheme to defraud customers of Celsius Network LLC and its related entities, according to the indictment unsealed on Thursday. Celsius was one of several high-profile crypto firms that imploded last year. The company gained popularity paying high interest rates on digital asset deposits, but following the collapse of the Terry U.S.D. stable coin and a downturn in the digital

asset markets, the company was left with a giant hole in its balance sheet and unable to meet an influx of customer withdrawals. Mishinsky's lawyer didn't immediately reply to an email-seeking comment. A second company official, Chief Revenue Officer Roney Cohen-Pavan, was also arrested, prosecutor said. The SEC alleged that Mishinsky and his company made misleading statements to encourage investors to purchase its tokens sell and to put money into the firm's earn interest program that promised returns as high as 17% on users' crypto deposits. The regulator also accused Mishinsky of misrepresenters. representing Celsius's financial success to make it appear more profitable than it really was.

For instance, the SEC said he falsely claimed the firm made $50 million from an initial coin offering, when in actuality it raised less than 65% of its goal, something Mishinsky took steps to hide from the public, end quote. Meta says Roblox is coming to Meta's Quest 2, Quest Pro, and Quest 3, starting with an open beta on App Lab in the coming weeks with cross-platform support. Quoting the verge. Roblox is automatically publishing some experiences that use default player scripts to support VR devices MetaRites. They found that those experiences typically run well in VR without modification, so they're seating the Roblox VR library with great content from day one, end quote.

There should be a lot of experiences to choose from. The platform has more than 15 million active experiences right now, Roblox says, and this Quest version of Roblox will support cross-platform play, so you'll be able to jump into experiences with players on Xbox, mobile, and desktop. Roblox has supported VR through PC-based headsets for some time, letting you play on devices like the Oculus Rift, HTCVive, and Valve Index. You can even play Roblox on the Quest 2 right now by linking the headset to your computer. But this new Quest-optimized version should be easier to get up and running. It will eventually just be an app you can download from the MetaQuest store, which could mean a lot more players will be jumping into Roblox in virtual reality, end

quote. Apple has updated MacOS Sonoma to bring ICloud keychain passwords to non-safari browsers for the very first time, expanding on a Chrome extension, quoting Mac rumors. Developers and beta testers running macOS Sonoma can use their ICloud keychain passwords with non-safari browsers at this time, auto-filling passwords and one-time codes. Third-party browsers can also save new passwords. Apple has made an ICloud password's Chrome extension available for MacOS Sonoma users, and it can be downloaded and installed to actually. access Apple's passwords on the Chrome browser or any chromium-based browser. Apple has also provided an extension for Microsoft Edge users. Google and other browser developers are also working on

implementing support for pass keys, the password alternative that Apple introduced last year, end quote. Sources are telling the Financial Times that Meta plans to release a commercial version of Lama imminently and will make the AI model more widely available and customizable by companies. Quote, the move will allow meta to compete with Microsoft-backed OpenA.S. and Google, which are surging ahead in the race to develop generative AI. The software which can create text, images, and code is powered by large language models that are trained on huge amounts of data and require vast computing power. Meta released its own language model known as LAMA to researchers and academics earlier this year, but the new version will be more widely available and customizable

by companies, three people familiar with the plan said. The release is expected imminently, one of the people said. Meta says its LLMs are open source by which it means details of the new model will be released publicly. This contrasts with the approach of competitors such as OpenAI, whose latest model, GPT4, is a so-called black box in which the data and code used to build the model are not available to third parties. The competitive landscape of AI is going to completely change in the coming months, in the coming weeks maybe, when there will be open source platforms that are actually as good as the ones that are not. Vice President and Chief AI scientists at Meta Jan Lecun said at a conference in France last Saturday. Meta has been working

on AI research and development for more than a decade but has appeared to be on the back foot after OpenAI's ChatGPT, a conversational chatbot was released in November, spurring other big tech groups to launch similar products. The goal is to diminish the current dominance of OpenAI, said one person with knowledge of high-level strategy at Meta. While Meta's technology is open-source and currently free, two people familiar with the matter said the company had been exploring charging enterprise customers for the ability to fine-tune the model to their needs by using their own proprietary data. One person said there were no current plans to charge, and META would not do so in the upcoming release. Joelle Pino, Meta's vice president of AI research, declined to comment

on the development of the new AI model and how it might be monetized, but said, quote, at the end of the day, because you release something open source, you don't completely give up on the intellectual property of that work. We haven't been shy about the fact that we do want to be using these models in our products, she added, end quote. By the way, I got to credit Nicholas Thompson of the Atlantic for turning me on to this, in retrospect, obvious insight. You know what meta gains by suddenly having its own Twitter clone? A ton of content to train its AI on, which makes you think, why don't they try their hand at a Reddit clone too? In a world where you need tons of content to train your LLMs

on, meta is suddenly in the unique position of not only being the king of social platforms, with tons of data for that training, but also a leader in AI technology as well. Well, talk about synergy. Another day, another one of these, Stability AI, has released Stable Doodle, a sketch-to-image tool on ClipDrop that uses the stable-diffusion model to generate visually-pleasing artistic renditions. Quoting TechCrunch, the sketch-to-image service Stable Doodle leverages the latest Stable-Difusion model to analyze the outline of a sketch and generate a, quote, visually pleasing artistic rendition of it. It's available starting today through ClipDrop, a platform stability acquired in March through its purchase of at ML, an AI startup founded by ex-Gouglers. StableDoodle is geared toward both professionals and novices, regardless of their familiarity with AI tools. Stability AI writes and a blog post

shared with TechCrunch via email. With StableDoodle, anyone with basic drawing skills and online access can generate high-quality original images in seconds. There's plenty of sketch-to-image AI tools out there, including open-source projects and ad-supported apps, but Stable Doodle is unique in that it allows for more precise control over the image generation. Stability AI contends. Under the hood, powering Stable Doodle is a stable diffusion model, stable diffusion XL, paired with a, quote, conditional control solution developed by one of Tencent's R&D divisions, the Applied Research Center, called T21 adapter. The control solution both allows stable diffusion XL to accept sketches as input and guides the model to enable

better fine-tuning of the output artwork. T-21 adapter enabled. stable doodle to understand the outlines of sketches and generate images based on prompts combined with the outlines defined by the model, Stability AI explains in the blog post. This writer didn't have the opportunity to test Stable Doodle prior to its release, but the cherry-picked images Stability AI sent me looked quite good, at least in comparison to the doodle that inspired them. In addition to a sketch, Stable Doodle accepts a prompt to guide the image generation process such as a comfy chair, isometric style or cat with jeans jacket digital art style. There's a limit to the customization, though, at launch, StableDoodle only supports 14 styles of art. Stability AI envisions Stable

oodle serving as a tool for designers, illustrators, and other professionals to free up valuable time and maximize efficiency in their work. At the same time, the company cautions that the quality of output images is dependent on the detail of the initial drawing and the descriptiveness of the prompt, as well as the complexity of the scene being depicted. Ideas drawn as sketches can be immediately implemented into works to create designs for clients, material for presentation decks, and websites or even create logos, the company proposes. Moving forward, StableDoodle will enable users to import a sketch. Further, we will include use cases for specific verticals, including real estate applications, for example, end quote. With tools like Stable Doodle, Stability AI is chasing

after new sources of revenue following a lull in its commercial endeavors. Stable Doodle is free, but subject to limits. In April, Semaphore reported that Stability AI was burning through cash, leading to an executive hunt to help ramp up sales. Last month, Stability AI raised $25 million through a convertible note, i.e. debt that converts to equity, bringing its total raised to over $125 million, but it hasn't closed new funding at a higher valuation. The startup was last valued at $1 billion. Reportedly, Stability was seeking to quadruple that within the next few months, end quote. Hey, hive mind out there. I've got a quick question for you, some quick advice to ask for. My AI side project is getting close to launching, and I want to find an email marketing

provider I can use. Basically, the product will be freemium where you sign up to test the AI for free, but then have to subscribe monthly to use it continuously. Thus, I need an email marketing firm that I can do segmentation with, i.e. emailing people who have signed up but haven't yet paid for the subscription, basically, you know, nudging them to subscribe. Who should I go with? MailChimp seems to be the simplest right, and I don't have very complicated needs beyond what I just described. So MailChimp, Clavio, HubSpot Marketing Hub, Constant Contact, let me know what you all like to use. I don't imagine this is something enterprise scale, but I could imagine someday maybe needing to send five figures of email nudges a month, perhaps. Thanks in advance.