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Reddit's database sold for $60M to AI

Plus: Google's ScreenAI

Author

Lavena Xu-Johnson
February 22, 2024

Welcome to another edition of AI Creator, where we decode the world of AI, one byte-sized insight at a time.

Here’s the roundup for today:

  • Say hello to Google’s ScreenAI

  • Reddit’s database sold for $60M to AI giants

  • ElevenLabs is generating Sora for audio effects

  • 7 latest developments in AI

  • 5 interesting AI tools for you to experiment

  • AI art for the day…(hint: celestial)

Let’s get into it!

Google researchers introduce ScreenAI

 A Vision-Language Model for User Interfaces (UI) and Infographics Understanding.

Ever wished your phone could understand the charts in that confusing report, or navigate you through a complex app? Well, Google AI introduced ScreenAI, trained to tackle infographics and user interfaces!

Think of ScreenAI as your visual decoder ring. It can answer your questions about charts, and diagrams, and even navigate apps based on your instructions.

Here's the cool stuff:

  • Even though it's compact (only 4.6 billion parameters!), ScreenAI outperforms bigger models on infographic tasks.

  • ScreenAI is a special type of AI called a Vision-Language Model (VLM). It can understand both pictures and words. This allows ScreenAI to "see" the information in UIs and infographics and then use its language skills to answer your questions or summarize the content.

  • ScreenAI can even generate training data for itself, making it smarter and more helpful over time.

This is just the beginning for ScreenAI, and it has the potential to revolutionize how we interact with visual information on our devices. Stay tuned for future updates.

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Reddit’s UGC sells for $60M

Reddit just signed a whopping $60 million deal with a mysterious AI company (either OpenAI or Google) to use its user-generated content for training their fancy new models. 

This means your witty comments and hilarious threads could be shaping the future of AI, whether you like it or not.

Here's the twist: Reddit users don't get any compensation for their content being used. This has sparked some serious backlash, with many questioning the ethics of using user-generated data for commercial gain without any form of compensation.

Moreover, Reddit reportedly considered blocking Google search crawlers if they couldn't find a buyer for their data. Talk about taking drastic measures!

Will AI replace Reddit mods?

One interesting angle to note is that Reddit is infamous for its mods because they ensure the guidelines are compliant. Now that AI is taking over Reddit’s database, it’s to be seen if Reddit mods can be cloned as well…leaving no space for human jobs as moderators.

So, what does this all mean? 

As AI continues to evolve, social media platforms like Reddit are sitting on a goldmine of data that's valuable for training new models. This deal could set a precedent for how social media platforms handle their data in the future. Imagine other platforms like Meta or X selling access to their user-generated content for AI training. The possibilities (and potential controversies) are endless!

ElevenLabs is launching AI for the creation of unique sound effects

If you’re blown away by the announcement of Sora, imagine if you could just describe an audio and it’s generated in seconds.

It’s a match made heaven for adding sound effects to Sora’s AI-generated videos.

Here's the scoop:

  • ElevenLabs used text prompts like "waves crashing" and "birds chirping" to generate sounds that perfectly matched scenes from Sora videos.

  • This update comes after the January closing of an $80 million Series B round, which means they're well on their way to becoming the ultimate AI audio powerhouse.

No public release date has been announced yet but you can sign up to be notified when AI sound effects are ready.

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Latest AI hits:

  • Musk said X is exploring a partnership with Midjourney, with speculation that the image generator will be integrated into X’s Grok chatbot. (link)

  • Adobe just launched an AI chatbot in beta for its Acrobat software, aiming to make navigating long documents easier with auto-generated summaries and insights. (link)

  • OpenAI has an official TikTok account now. New Sora videos attracted 128k followers. (link)

  • UofL researchers develop AI-powered tool to diagnose autism earlier  (link)

  • Groq’s $20,000 LPU chip breaks AI performance records to rival GPU-led industry (link)

  • Qloo raises $25M to predict your favorite movies, TV shows, and more. (link)

  • Google launches two new open LLMs. Barely a week after launching the latest iteration of its Gemini models, Google announced the launch of Gemma. (link)

New AI tools to experiment:

*Sponsored

AI art to sip your coffee with…

Prompt: a stage suspended in space between galaxies, there is a space opera taking place, on the stage there is the chandelier of Phantom of the Opera is crashed

-Midjourney

AI deep dives: Food for thought

Still hungry for more? Here are some curated AI deep dives for you:

Stay tuned for more. We’ll see you after the weekend..👋