With one AI technology announcement tumbling over another in the past few weeks, it’s hard to keep track of them all. Below are the 18 AI technology announcements that stood out for me.  

For a deep dive into which current – and upcoming – announcements matter for different parts of the photo & video ecosystem, please join us at our May 17 Spotlight!

General AI announcements – yah and nah

Goldman Sachs says generative A.I. could impact 300 million jobs

• The use of AI technology could also boost labor productivity growth and boost global GDP by as much as 7% over time, according to this new Goldman Sachs analysis.

Elon Musk and others call for pause on A.I., citing ‘Profound Risks to Society’

• More than 1,000 tech leaders, researchers and others signed an open letter urging a moratorium on the development of the most powerful AI systems.
• Specifically, it said that AI labs should "immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”

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Adobe

Adobe announces Firefly, a family of generative AI tools. 

• Currently in public beta as two tools: a text-to-image generator and a text generator that creates word art effects. Firefly will be available as a web app for now, but eventually also be offered within Adobe’s family of creative apps. 
• Adobe’s model has been trained on images from Adobe Stock as well as images in the public domain or released under an open license. Adobe will also automatically attach credentials to content that was developed with Firefly to indicate that generative AI was used in its creation.

Microsoft

Microsoft Bing's AI chatbot now generates images and text

• Microsoft has given its Bing AI chatbot the ability to also generate images by simply describing the picture in a few words.
• The tool -- Bing Image Creator, can generate written and visual content in seconds. It’s free and available on desktop and mobile.

Bing’s showing ‘AI-generated stories’ in some search results

• Bing is said to now show “craft AI-generated stories” for some searches, giving you a small multimedia presentation about the thing you looked up. The company says it’s a way to let you “consume bite-sized information” while searching certain topics.

Runway

Runway has released Gen-1, an AI model that can transform existing videos into new ones by applying any style specified by a text prompt or reference image.

• In 2021, Runway collaborated with researchers at the University of Munich to build the first version of Stable Diffusion. Stability AI, a UK-based startup, then stepped in to pay the computing costs required to train the model on much more data. In 2022, Stability AI took Stable Diffusion mainstream, transforming it from a research project into a global phenomenon. But the two companies no longer collaborate.

OpenAI

OpenAI launches plugins for ChatGPT

• OpenAI’s plugins extend the chatbot’s functionality by granting it access to third-party online knowledge sources and databases. 
• The first batch of plugins extends ChatGPT into travel, shopping, dining, math and other realms by linking the bot to well-known services such as Expedia, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, OpenTable, as well as others connected through Zapier.

OpenAI released GPT 4, a multimodal AI that understands images

• This new technology accepts prompts – user input or instructions – both written and now also visual (such as photos, screenshots, diagrams, etc.) to generate text-only results. 
• In layman's terms, GPT 4 can identify and – even more important – analyze elements in an image to perform a task requested. 

FTC should stop OpenAI from launching new GPT models, says AI policy group. 

• The Center for AI and Digital Policy filed a complaint arguing that GPT-4 violates the FTC’s rules against unfair and deceptive practices.

Italy orders ChatGPT blocked citing data protection concerns

• Italy’s data protection authority (DPA) blocked ChatGPT, citing concerns that the tool breaches the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDRP). The DPA is reportedly opening an investigation into whether OpenAI unlawfully processed people’s data, as well as over the lack of any system to prevent minors from accessing the tech.
• It’s unclear what the outcome might be; OpenAI has 20 days to respond to the order. But the DPA’s move could have significant implications for companies deploying machine learning models not just in Italy, but anywhere within the European Union.

Google

Google CEO Sundar Pichai promises Bard AI chatbot upgrades soon: “We clearly have more capable models"

• Google released its AI chatbot Bard to rival ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, but comparisons have not been flattering to Bard. Sundar Pichai says upgrades are on the way.

Google updates Bard to better answer math and logic questions, coding coming soon

• To date, Bard has used LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), which is focused on conversational dialogue, and Google is now incorporating PaLM (Pathways Language Model) for improved math and logic capabilities, with “coding coming soon.”
• As a result, Google says Bard will “better understand and respond to your prompts for multistep word and math problems.” 

Google Workspace is about to put generative AI to work

• Google says it’s working on further AI features for Google Workspace, including summarization in Gmail, Docs, Meet, and Chat; translation for Meet, inbox organization for Gmail; image generation for Slides, and formula generation for Sheets. 
• All of these elements are built on the company’s PaLM large language model, which is also the basis of some new Google Cloud services that will help third-party developers leverage generative AI in their own creations. 

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Midjourney

Midjourney v5 creates photorealistic images and even does hands correctly

• Midjourney says its latest version “can generate much more realistic imagery than anything we’ve released before.” Therefore, the company has increased the number of moderators and say it “will be enforcing our community standards with increased strictness and rigor.”

Midjourney stops free trials, says influx of new users to blame

• Midjourney originally cited “extraordinary demand and trial abuse” as to why it stopped free trials, which many pundits initially interpreted as saying that the pause was linked to a spate of recent viral deepfake images created using Midjourney. Midjourney now says it’s the number of new users that compelled them to stop their free trial.

Picsart

Picsart has developed a new Text-to-Video generative AI model

• Picsart’s artificial intelligence research team (PAIR) has built a new generative model that can create entirely new video content from only text descriptions.
• The technology has been released as an open-source demonstration on Twitter and has been published on GitHub and Hugging Face. The team behind it has also published a research paper describing the methodology.
• Recent text-to-video generation approaches rely on computationally heavy training and require large-scale video datasets. Picsart developed a new method for zero-shot text-to-video generation, proposing a low-cost approach (without any training or optimization) by leveraging the power of existing text-to-image synthesis methods (e.g., Stable Diffusion), making them suitable for the video domain.

Nvidia

Nvidia launches new cloud services and partnerships to train generative AI 

• Nvidia announced a set of cloud services designed to help businesses build and run generative AI models trained on custom data and created for “domain-specific tasks,” like writing ad copy.
• Under the brand Nvidia AI Foundations, each individual cloud service — Nvidia NeMo for language models and Nvidia Picasso for image, video and 3D content generation — includes pretrained models, frameworks for data processing, APIs and support from Nvidia engineering staff. Once models are ready for deployment, enterprises can run them in Nvidia’s cloud or elsewhere.
• In a big customer win, Nvidia says that it’s working with Adobe to co-develop “the next generation of commercially viable generative AI models” on the Picasso platform. They’ll be brought to market through Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects, according to Nvidia, filling out Adobe’s recently-debuted Firefly family of generative AI products.

Stability AI

Stability AI launches Stable Diffusion Reimagine: A new Clipdrop tool that allows users to generate multiple variations of a single image without limits

• Early in March, Stability AI acquired Init ML, a startup that developed the Clipdrop ecosystem of AI-powered image applications, including Relight picture, Remove Background, Cleanup, etc., Init ML is currently operating as a standalone subsidiary of Stability AI.
• Stable Diffusion Reimagine is a brand-new Clipdrop tool that enables users to input a single image and generate numerous variations of the image with different themes without any restrictions. The tool uses Stable Diffusion to produce whole new images using image rather than text prompts. 

And a few more things...