Performance Max + AI = 🪄

Performance Max + AI = 🪄

The actors’ strike is over, after a – shall we say – tentative agreement was reached between SAG-AFTRA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

Why are we interested in this particular strike?

One of the main problems was the use of AI to “scan” actors in order to recreate and reuse their image, without their consent and of course without additional payment.

In fact, in one of the initial proposals made by the production studios, they wanted the scans to be able to be used after the actors’ deaths, without their written consent. SAG-AFTRA did not accept this proposal and the production studios amended their proposal to include restrictions on the use of AI and appropriate compensation.

We don’t know all the details yet, as they haven’t shared the deal, but the terms are certainly much more favorable for the actors.

However, with AI constantly evolving we can expect more ups and downs around it in Hollywood.

Fun Fact:

This strike has lasted 118 days and is the longest strike by SAG-AFTRA in the history of Hollywood.

Resources

AI Insider 📰

1. More news from OpenAI:
   • The outages in its products appear to have been caused by a DDoS attack.
   • Apparently OpenAI is trying to “steal” AI researchers from Google. The former’s recruiters are approaching senior AI researchers working on Google’s Gemini family of AI models and offering them annual salaries ranging from $5 to $10 million, mostly in stock.
   • OpenAI announced its new Data Partnerships program, aiming to create new AI training datasets in partnership with companies. Data on any topic, in any language and format are accepted.
   • According to an interview with Sam Altman, OpenAI plans to seek further funding from Microsoft so that it can build AGI.

1. The Galaxy S24 will include Samsung’s AI model, Gauss.
   
2. Amazon is planning a new AI model, ,Olympus, in its attempt to catch-up with OpenAI and Google.
3. Eleven Labs announced Turbo v2, its new AI text-to-speech model. This one doesn’t do very well with Greek unfortunately, unlike the plain v2.
4. YouTube has announced that it will update its Community Guidelines to require creators to disclose if their content is AI-generated. This is what the label will look like:
   
   
5. There is talk that Google intends to invest in Character.AI. Given that they are only 6 months since launch and already have 100M monthly visitors, we are not surprised by Google’s interest.
   
6. Runway announced the new feature of Gen 2, the Motion Brush. It allows you to animate photos with just a few clicks, making any part of the image move.
   
7. A very interesting and quick follow up to Humane’s AI Pin which we told you about in “Meta + AI = L.F.E “. There was an official launch of the product and we learned that for just $699 + $24 a month (the monthly subscription is for the phone number and data usage required to operate the device) we can all wear it. We recommend watching the video of the presentation because it’s terribly interesting.
   

Learning Bytes 🧐

1. For our devs friends → GPU Survival Toolkit for the AI age.

2. Research paper that we found interesting. It’s from the DeepMind team at Google and has to do with AGI performance levels.
3. Developer used AI to send his resume to about 5,000 job ads and ended up with 20 interviews.
   

Cool Finds 🤯

See you next week! 💚

#TogetherWeAI