Meta cutting off 13% of its staff due to the Metaverse 💸 while the AI art industry is better than ever 🔥, and more!

Hi and welcome to another week of Augmented Rarity 💚

It seems that after Elon's reveal of his new humanoid robot back in September, and Zuck's release of the Meta Quest Pro headset, both industries have relaxed a bit. Let's take the opportunity to recap on all of that and bring back some of my favourite topics, AI art 🎨

Artificial Intelligence

This week I want to bring you some updates in the AI art industry, some are major updates, some are community related:

• Dalle API available in public beta, which means developers can now integrate DALL-E directly into their applications and products.

• Dalle is coming to Microsoft's Azure OpenAI service by invitation, allowing select Azure AI customers to generate custom images using text or images.

• Midjourney v4 is fire 🔥 the truth is that the quality that can be achieved improves incredibly with each update and far are the days when the AI was shocking at first glance, but then ignored. Now the quality and realism that is achieved goes far beyond.

• What people are building with Stable Diffusion lately:

  • Assets for video games

  • Create your own AI avatar, now also available for couples and pets. How? Adding 10 portrait pics, 5 pics from chest and up and 5 full body pics. Let me know if you are happy with the results!

  • I also just found an app for iPhone to run Stable Diffusion on the go. 100% offline and free, will give it a try!

• And if you wonder what’s possible with AI nowadays (spoiler alert: everything) here’s a 150+ list of cutting-edge AI tools to make anything.

• But it is not only the imaging industry that is being revolutionized by AI, the programming industry is advancing very fast. If you haven't tested Codex, OpenAI’s AI tool for coding, do it asap since it’s still free.

Extended Reality

First Twitter, now Meta. In the last few weeks we have been giving a lot of attention to Meta and the failure of the Metaverse, and even more so now that Facebook has announced that it is going to cut 13% of its workforce 👋.

We understand that being an emerging industry, there is still a lot of investment in terms of infrastructure (digital of course) and adoption by people. I think we are all clear that the future lies in this direction and that this investment is necessary despite all the criticism. It's true that we don't need the Metaverse to exist, but the trend is in that direction.

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And we'll stop there! I'm still thinking about doing extended content in podcast form, but this will be something to explore in 2023. In the meantime, my focus is on being consistent again and sending this email every Wednesday at 15:00 CET!

Have a lovely week, see you in a bit 💚

Best,

Martina