OpenAI’s holiday surprise

Welcome, AI enthusiasts.

The vacations are approaching, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman is prepping some shiny recent AI presents for under the tree.

With a ‘12 Days of OpenAI’ event and recent insights on AGI, Elon Musk, and more from Altman, the AI leader might be able to finish 2024 with a bang. Let’s get into it…

In today’s AI rundown:

• Altman’s DealBook insights, 12 Days of OpenAI

• DeepMind’s Genie 2 turns images into playable worlds

• Create skilled thumbnails with Recraft

• AI forecasting model crushes traditional weather systems

• 5 recent AI tools & 5 recent AI jobs

• More AI & tech news

Read time: 4 minutes

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🎄 Altman’s DealBook insights, 12 Days of OpenAI

The Rundown: In an interview on the NYT DealBook Summit, Sam Altman touched on topics including Elon Musk, AGI, and Microsoft tension — with the OpenAI CEO also announcing a ‘12 Days of OpenAI’ stream of launches starting tomorrow.

The small print:

• Altman provided recent numbers on ChatGPT’s adoption, including 300M weekly energetic users, 1B each day messages, and 1.3M U.S. developers on the platform.

• The CEO also believes that AGI will arrive ‘lots earlier than anyone expects,’ with the potential first glimpses coming in 2025.

• While AGI may arrive sooner, Altman said the immediate impact might be subtle — but long-term changes and transition to superintelligence might be more intense.

• Altman also admitted to some tension between OpenAI and Microsoft but said the businesses are aligned overall on priorities.

• He called the situation with Elon Musk “tremendously sad” but doesn’t imagine Musk will use his recent political power to harm AI competitors.

• Altman revealed that OpenAI might be live-streaming recent launches and demos over the following 12 days, including some ‘big ones’ and a few ‘stocking stuffers.’

Why it matters: While it still looks like AI still has loads of room to run on the adoption curve, those are some staggering numbers — and Altman interviews are at all times a must-watch (full interview here). With ‘12 Days of OpenAI’, the AI leader could set us up for fireworks to finish an already wild 12 months of AI progress on an excellent greater note.

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GOOGLE DEEPMIND

🎮 DeepMind’s Genie 2 turns images into playable worlds

The Rundown: Google DeepMind just introduced Genie 2, a large-scale, multimodal foundation world AI model that converts single images into interactive, playable 3D environments with real-time physics, lighting effects, and player controls.

The small print:

• The model creates playable 3D environments from easy image prompts, complete with physics, lighting, and character controls that last as long as a minute.

• Genie 2 maintains spatial memory, remembering areas players have visited even once they’re off-screen.

• The system works with keyboard and mouse inputs, supporting first and third-person perspectives with 720p resolution output.

• In testing, DeepMind’s SIMA AI agent successfully navigated these generated environments, following natural language commands like “go to the red door.”

• The model can generate worlds from various image types, equivalent to concept art and real-world photos, potentially accelerating game design prototyping.

Why it matters: Just days after World Labs’ release, DeepMind joins the world-generating party. Genie 2 offers the potential for unlimited, diverse training environments, a vital step for developing more capable embodied AI agents —not to say the large implications for game prototyping and artistic enhancements.

AI TRAINING

🎨 Create skilled thumbnails with Recraft

The Rundown: Recraft permits you to transform your basic layouts into skilled thumbnails by combining images, text, and AI-generated elements multi functional place.

Step-by-step:

1. Create a free account at Recraft and click on “Frame” in the highest bar.

2. Select your aspect ratio and draw your frame.

3. Add your image and text elements exactly where you wish them to look.

4. Select the whole frame to incorporate all elements within the generation.

5. Write your style prompt and click on “Recraft” to rework your layout.

Pro tip: For higher results, keep your text concise (3-5 words) and use specific style descriptions in your prompt.

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GOOGLE DEEPMIND

🌦️ AI forecasting model crushes traditional weather systems

The Rundown: DeepMind just unveiled GenCast, an AI weather forecasting system that surpasses the accuracy of the world’s leading forecasting model, producing reliable predictions for 15-day forecasts in minutes relatively than hours.

The small print:

• GenCast outperformed the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts model (ENS) on 97% of evaluation metrics for 15-day forecasts.

• GenCast processes forecasts in only 8 minutes using a single AI chip, in comparison with the hours required by traditional supercomputers.

• The model also accurately predicted extreme weather events, including tropical cyclones, heat waves, and wind conditions.

• The system was trained on 40 years of historical weather data (1979-2018), and DeepMind open-sourced its full code for non-commercial research use.

Why it matters: AI’s prediction and data-crunching powers are being set loose on the weather — and the result’s an absolute leap in how scientists will forecast each global weather and extreme events going forward. Like medicine and other data-heavy sectors, weather forecasting feels perfectly suited to be revolutionized within the AI era.

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Amazon and Anthropic unveiled plans for Project Rainer, an enormous AI supercomputer powered by a whole lot of 1000’s of Trainium2 chips (5x larger than Anthropic’s current top model) that guarantees to be the world’s largest AI system.

OpenAI announced that it’s hiring three outstanding Google DeepMind computer vision experts, with Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai set to work on multimodal AI and construct out the corporate’s recent Zurich, Switzerland office.

Luma AI revealed Ray 2, a next-gen video model capable of manufacturing minute-long videos in only seconds, which was announced during Amazon’s AWS event alongside a brand new partnership to bring the model to the Amazon Bedrock platform.

Defense tech firm Anduril announced a brand new strategic partnership with OpenAI to develop AI-powered aerial defense systems to guard U.S. and allied forces from drone threats.

Spotify launched its annual viral ‘Wrapped’ user listening recap, featuring a further AI-powered podcast feature using Google’s NotebookLM tool with music commentary from the 2 AI hosts.

EvolutionaryScale introduced ESM Cambrian, a strong recent protein language model family trained on Earth’s protein sequences, achieving breakthrough performance in protein structure prediction.

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THAT’S A WRAP

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, and Alvaro—aka The Rundown Team