Monkeys with brain implants 🙉, what's trending in the creative AI industry ⚡️, some depressing Metaverse updates 📉, and much more!

Welcome to another week of Augmented Rarity! 💚

Let’s get started with this week’s highlights ✋

🚨 Update: from now on this email will be sent on Fridays - Wednesdays were fine but we were missing that weekly overview.

🤖 Artificial Intelligence

• OpenAI updates ⚡️

  • OpenAI newest model “text-davinci-003” 🖋 handles more complex instructions and produces higher-quality, longer-form content. Rumours say that we’ll get GPT-4 in the first quarter of 2023 👀

  • Part of this release is ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot on steroids, so you can interact with the AI in a conversational way. The model is far from perfect and generates nonsensical responses, but still promising 🤩

• Elon AI related stuff 🥸

  • As expected, Neuralink did not unveil anything new as Elon is inefficient at meeting deadlines (too many companies huh). The event lasted almost 3h ▶️, here are the main highlights:

    • A monkey with a brain implant moving the cursor of a computer with his brain 🙉. Elon says: "It’s like replacing a piece of your skull with a smartwatch, for lack of a better analogy” - we’ll discuss this in a dedicated email/podcast.

    • Elon expects human trials within six months 🧠, meanwhile its main competitor, Synchron, got approval half a year ago.

  • Tesla full self driving beta is now available in America 🚗 for $15k or a monthly subscription of around $300. Not sure how I feel about this due to its log of fatal accidents 🥀

• AI art 🖼

  • Stable Diffusion 2.0 has been released. Highlights:

    • Improved image resolution and even the ability to convert low resolution images to higher resolution.

    • Depth2img - enlarge the characteristics of an existing image and add depth to it

  • NFT avatars are out, what’s trending now are AI generated avatars 👩. I will be testing one of these 2 paid options this weekend:

    • avatarai.me

    • profilepicture.ai

  • This platform to generate video game assets based on Stable Diffusion will be soon launching 🎮

  • Dream by WOMBO, an AI art generator app, wins Google Play’s best app of 2022 🏆

• Random 🐩

  • Disney’s new neural network can age actors 👴

  • San Francisco’s police will be allowed to use remote-controlled robots 👮‍♀️. Very dystopian.

  • Bionat Labs, a startup leading in micro-robotic tech, gets $43M funding for its tiny remote-controlled medical robots 🤖. Clinical trials with human patients will start running next year.

  • A robot pet for less than $300? Yes and it’s called Bittle, your new palm-sized open source bionic robot dog 🐶. Get it pre-assembled or construct it yourself. Pawsome 🐾.

🥽 Extended Reality

• Sony will release a system of small sensors that attach to your body to capture motion data and allow you to control an avatar in virtual reality apps. The price will be about $360 💰.

• XR headsets being delayed ⏳

  • Playstation VR 2, which apparently take VR to a new level 🕹

  • Still no date for the launch Apple’s Mixed Reality headset, but since rumours say it will cost $2K, let’s start saving 😳. Here you can read more about these rumours and about RealityOS, the software designed for Apple’s future MR headset.

• Metaverse monetary drama 💸

  • Meta’s investors are concerned about Meta’s situation 📉 - Zuck had to clarify how only 20% of their investment goes to Reality Labs, their metaverse division… the one that made them lose nearly $20 billion since the start of 2021.

  • And guess who is also concerned, the European Union, since they spent $400K on it’s own Metaverse and nobody cares about it.

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And that’s it for this week, see you again next Friday 👋

As always, thanks for reading. Remember to share it to support it!

Have a lovely weekend 💚

Best,
Martina