Welcome back to The Prompt,
World co-founder Sam Altman
Getty Images
Sam Altman’s cryptocurrency venture Worldcoin, which scans the irises of people around the world in exchange for a cryptocurrency payment, is rebranding itself as “World.” The company has shifted its strategic focus away from crypto and into human identification in a world where AI is omnipresent. People can now scan their eyes to verify that they are actually human and not robots, my colleague Rich Nieva reported.
Now let’s get into the headlines.
THE BIG GAMES
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once described the AI scammer’s relationship with Microsoft as “The best bromance in tech.” A new report from New York Times suggests that the relationship between the two companies is getting worse. For example, employees at the two companies are at odds over how much computing power OpenAI should be given to build the most advanced technologies. Additionally, Microsoft has forged ties with OpenAI competitors such as Inflection, whose CEO Mustafa Suleyman now leads Microsoft’s consumer AI efforts.
ETHICS + LAW
Dow Jones, the parent company of Wall Street JournalAND New York Post ARE suing AI research startup Perplexityclaiming “massive” copyright infringement, Variety reported. According to the lawsuit, the news companies sent a letter to Perplexity in July 2024 outlining the legal implications of removing its articles without consent and offered a licensing agreement, but the company never responded. The lawsuit states Perplexity helps people “skip the links” to the original sources of information, diverting customers and revenue to its search platform by copying copyrighted information.
The lawsuit comes next Forbes revealed in June that the buzzing startup, now said to be raising funding at an $8 billion valuation, had republished entire sections of articles with paywalls and released them to its users as a podcast, blog and a YouTube video.
THAT DEAL OF THE WEEK
Billionaire-backed nonprofit Earth Species Project has raised $17 million to build an AI system to help decipher animal communication, Forbes reported. The organization is supported by entities such as Linkedin co-founder Reid Hoffman and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation and is building a model that analyzes patterns in vocalizations of animals such as belugas, crows and zebras finches. His ultimate goal is to be able to communicate with animals – or at least understand what they are saying.
deep dive
Genmo co-founder Ajay Jain and Paras Jain
Genmo
If you look at AI-generated videos today, most of them look like live photos rather than real videos, said Paras Jain, CEO of Launch videos with AI Genmo. This is partly because AI video generation models do not understand the laws of physics and are not trained on examples of different real-world actions and complex movements.
An example of a movement that is particularly challenging for AI to duplicate is gymnastics: “We know what gymnastics should look like conceptually. But then the model has to understand a lot of physics to get it right. It should be known that a swinging person is like a double pendulum,” said Genmo co-founder Ajay Jain.
Brothers and UC Berkeley PhD graduates Ajay Jain and Paras Jain hope their new open-source video generation model, called Mochi 1, can change that. With about $29 million in funding from backers like the NEA, the pair are building AI models that can generate high-definition best quality motion video— ones that make different scenes in a video look more fluid.
Genmo is operating in an extremely cluttered space with companies both large (like Meta, which recently launched Meta Gen, a family of video generation models) and small (like Pika Labs, whose latest model can crush, melt and turn anything into a cake). “I think there is a future Cambrian explosion of AI video applications. But my hope is that we will empower developers to take our designs, build products on top of them, and then share the innovations with the community,” Jain said. Forbes in an interview.
The startup, valued at $160 million and with about 2 million users, also hopes its new models will be able to better keep up with the demands it feeds into, Jain said. “I was looking at artists’ early experiences with Sora, and one aspect the artist pointed out was that it was difficult to induce,” he said.
WEEKLY DEMO
Writing generated by AI tools is often wordy, robotic and not well structured, Forbes writes contributor Laura Brown. “While using GenAI may save you time, it’s likely to lose your readership as well,” she writes. Instead, she suggests writing conversationally and simply, and also recommends considering whether using an AI tool – which may need to be prompted several times to get the best result – is even necessary at all. first order.
INDEX IT
Hugging Face, an online library of hundreds of thousands of open source AI models, has hosted thousands of malicious patterns with code that can poison data and steal information, security researchers said Forbes. Fake account profiles pretending to be companies like Meta, Visa and SapeX are also flooding the platform.
3000
Malicious patterns researchers have found in Hugging Face this year.
Quiz
it The tech giant is being sued by a movie production company for allegedly feeding images from the sci-fi movie Blade Runner 2049 into an AI generator to create similar images to promote its product.
- Tesla
- Apple
- Microsoft
Check if you got it right.
MODEL BEHAVIOR
One of the world’s largest book publishersPenguin Random House, has has changed the wording of the copyright printed in every book for him stop someone from using the book or any part thereof to him train artificial intelligence systems, The bookseller reported. The change comes after a group of authors, artists and content creators sued AI companies for using their copyrighted works without permission to train their models.