AI-powered dating apps 💕, Niantic's AR pets 🐱, Robots at Paris Fashion week 👠, and more!

Hi and welcome to another week of Augmented Rarity! 👽 Let's catch up on what happened this week 👇

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🤖 Artificial Intelligence

• Microsoft will launch GPT-4 next week 🎉 (on March 16th). The new version will include video processing among other updates, but don’t get too hyped yet as the theme for the event seems to be around how AI will usher in a new way of working for every person and organisation.

• Snack, an AI-powered dating app 💕 that allows you to train your AI avatar so it can interact with other AI trained avatars and I guess it can avoid the awkward initial small talk? And if the AI avatars think they are a match then it allows you to start a real conversation. Wth, it's pretty cool.

  

  Picture: Snack

• Speaking of snacks, Google's new robot, PaLM-E, will bring you snacks 🍟 whenever there’s a your cat on your lap and you can't get up because there's a cat on your lap - iykyk. Yes, in the future we will be able to be even more lazy, among other useful tasks these smart robots will be able to do.

• And yes, as you can see from the title of this email, we've got robots at Paris Fashion Week 👠 for the first time ever. Specifically, Coperni, the guy who sprayed a dress on Bella Hadid, has now teamed up with Boston Dynamics to put on a show with his models and Spot, your friendly neighbourhood doggo robot.

  

  Picture: Getty images

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🥽 Extended Reality

• Since we were no longer restricted to our homes in 2022, the XR market fell by 21% in 2022 📉 compared to 2021. However, the XR market is still relatively new, so these figures aren't really dramatic. Even the wearables market dropped by 18% in the last quarter of 2022. Perhaps this is why prices for Meta's XR devices are dropping in the US.

• Niantic is trying to get us off the couch again with Peridot, their new AR game 🐱. From what the trailer shows, it's similar to Pokémon Go, but without the need to catch ‘em all, instead focusing on the social part of having a pet and exploring your surroundings. It will be available for free on the 9th of May.

  

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And that’s it for today 👀

I know, I know, my social media accounts are not getting any new content, we’ll get back! Meanwhile, remember to follow on Instagram, Twitter and Linkedin ✨ as well as sharing this email with like-minded cool people so we can grow this community faster 💚