🤖 Rumor: Google lobbying DC to shut down other AI efforts

Greetings, fellow humans. 👋

This is Not A Bot - the newsletter about AI that was definitely not written by AI. I’m Haroon, founder of AI For Anyone, and I’ll be sharing with you the latest news, tools, and resources from the AI space.

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In today's edition:

• Rumor: Google lobbying DC to shut down other AI efforts

• Meta's chief AI scientist isn't impressed by ChatGPT

• ElevenLabs Raises, AI speech platform, raises $2M

🎉 To celebrate our rebrand, we're giving away 10 Google AIY Kits! Each kit gives you all the tools you need to build an AI-powered camera or an AI-powered speaker.

You can find more details on how to enter at the end of this email. Winners announced on Jan 31st on my Twitter.

Rumor: Google lobbying DC to shut down other AI efforts

Okay, so take this one with a (huge) grain of salt. According to entrepreneur-investor Balaji Srinivasan, Google is lobbying DC to shut down other AI efforts.

If true, this is yet another signal of a massive shift in the power dynamic between long-time rivals Microsoft and Google. Google would be taking a page straight out of Microsoft's playbook during the early 2000s when Google was out-innovating Microsoft.

How the tables have turned.

Meta's chief AI scientist isn't impressed by ChatGPT

Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist and ML legend, argues that OpenAI's ChatGPT is not innovative in terms of its underlying techniques and is nothing revolutionary.

Yann isn't the first AI expert to say this.

But my question is: even if ChatGPT is not so impressive to renowned AI experts, does it make it any less impressive to everyone else?

Meta and Google may have created similar tech years ago, but, in my opinion, their gatekeeping doesn't make ChatGPT any less impressive to those who haven't experienced similar tech before.

Here's a thought experiment: if a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? If an AI exists and no one uses it, is it unimpressive?

Read more: ZDNET (link)

ElevenLabs Raises, AI speech platform, raises $2M

ElevenLabs has raised $2 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Credo Ventures, with Concept Ventures and other individual investors also participating.

Similar to Apple's AI-narrated audiobooks program, the Beta platform allows creators and publishers to narrate long-form content and expand into the audio format, using an in-house developed deep learning model for speech synthesis and voice cloning.

The company is also developing a suite of tools for voice cloning and designing synthetic voices and is currently working on a dedicated workstation for voiceover editing. Their ultimate goal is to make on-demand multilingual audio support a reality, and they are focusing on educational initiatives.

Their AI dubbing tool, aimed for release later this year, will let users automatically re-voice any audio or video in a different language.

Read more: Eleven Labs (link)

🗞️ Byte size: Summaries of my favorite AI article

Disclaimer: AI is (partially) used to summarize these articles.

Scores of Stanford students used ChatGPT on final exams, survey suggests [Stanford Daily] - An informal poll by The Daily revealed that 17% of Stanford student respondents used ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot, on their final exams. When OpenAI released the tool, it quickly took off, prompting the University to monitor its usage and consider revising the Honor Code. Many professors have already amended their syllabi to caution against using ChatGPT, and some have switched to more traditional assessment methods.

Generative AI: how will the new era of machine learning affect you? [Financial Times] - Generative AI is a new wave of AI that can produce content to order and is gaining traction in the tech world. This article discusses the benefits and risks of such technology on individuals and society at large.

Will Chinese LLMs be much worse? [Tyler Cowen] - Tyler Cowen, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, discusses the potential challenges of developing Chinese-language language-learning machines (LLMs). He questions what texts the machines will be trained on and whether English-language sources, Japanese-language accounts of the war with Japan, economics blogs, JStor, and discussions of John Stuart Mill on free speech will be allowed. He also ponders the quality of the training data that passes censorship and the implications of the LLMs being so directly derived from the training data.

🔥 Trending tools & resources

• Drayk (link) - Make an AI Drake song about anything.

• Broadcast (link) - Use AI to draft weekly update emails.

• Layer AI (link) - Create game assets in your own style in seconds.

Have cool tools to share? Tweet me at @haroonchoudery if you'd like me to include it in a future issue of Not A Bot.

🐦 Tweet of the day

Everything Everywhere All At Once has 11 (!) Oscar nominations. What's even more mind-blowing is that the VFX team for the movie was just 7 people 🤯

How did they manage? By using AI video tools like Runway to work more efficiently.

And that does it for today's issue.

As always, thanks for reading, and see you next time. ✌️

- Haroon - (definitely) Not A Robot and @haroonchoudery on Twitter

🥳 Google AIY Kit Giveaway

Win one of 10 Google AIY Kits! All you have to do is refer 5 people to Not A Bot using the below link. I'll be announcing the winners on @haroonchoudery on January 31st.

(Tip: share your link on socials to get more referrals)