OpenAI investing millions in software startups💰, Tesla's cars out of control 🥀, Apple's rumored first MR glasses 👓, and more!

Welcome week #29 of Augmented Rarity 🥳. I’m also surprised that I’m being somehow consistent and even on schedule this week 🤓.

Let’s begin 👇

Artificial Intelligence

While the XR industry loses billions as its main representative, Meta, has a mid-life crisis, the AI industry continues to rise 🔥:

• Meet Mem, an AI powered note-taking app 📝 that the OpenAI Startup Found just invested $23.5 million in it 😮‍💨. Pretty cool because you can send Whatsapp messages to Mem and it instantly adds them to your notes to the category you told it. There are more functionalities but I still have to test them such as smart rewritings ✍️. Anyway, big fan of OpenAI, which we need to talk more about as it is investing in escalating the AI industry beyond making impressive images from text prompts 👏.

  

• OpenAI Found also invested $50 million in Descript, an AI-powered video editor 📼 that lets you quickly edit your recordings and eliminate all those failed attempts, 'ums’ and so on to get a clean dialogue 🧼. It also allows you to alter words, so no need to repeat something 10 times to get it right.
  Take a look at their website 👩🏻‍💻 because the art direction is amazing… Gone are the days when AI companies brand identities were cold and boring, we're entering this era of friendly AIs 🤖.

• If all of this was possible with OpenAI GPT-3, what won't we be able to do with GPT-4 when it finally comes to market? Rumours say that GPT-4 is estimated to be released between December and February 🚀. I'm not that good with the technical part yet but the article explains it pretty well.

• Oh, I forgot to mention something else that OpenAI launched this year: Whisper, an automatic speech to text model 🎤.

• But it’s not all OpenAI, Stable Diffusion is also allowing genius to build cool things like this quick AR inpainting experiment that allows you to edit the real world through your phone’s lenses 😮‍💨.

  

• I mean, according to Gartner, the AI software market will generate $62.5 billion in revenue by 2022 💰, growing at a rate of 21.3% per year 🚀. The new to the moon? 🌝 (Is crypto still a thing? Bitcoin is still super low, 16.8k as I write this).

• Despite this, not everything is rosy. In China, there was a tragic accident recently, in which a Tesla car lost control while parking, killing a man and a teenage girl, in addition to injuring 3 more people 🥀. This opens a debate about how technology can be our best ally but can also be our demise. Not only because of the recurring failures of Tesla's Autopilot or AI making many jobs obsolete, but also because rifles are being mounted on Boston Dynamics robots, putting ethical debates back on the table. Just to clarify, Boston Dynamics already sued Ghost Robotics for patent infringement 🚨.

Before we move on to the XR industry highlights, if you enjoyed this section, please share!

Extended Reality

Yes, the mood dropped drastically with the last 2 news 😢, but with the current state of the XR industry I guess I'll leave it at that.

Since the AI part was very extensive I'll be brief here 🤓:

• Remember Meta being involved in smartwatches? ⌚️ Me neither, but soon no one will as they are abandoning that project to focus on the Metaverse. Yes, even they keep loosing billions because of it 💸, turning into mass layoffs (more than 11,000 employees, approximately 13% of the workforce 😞).

• Meanwhile Apple keeps hating the term Metaverse 😳, they are moving forward with their first MR glasses 👓. Some rumours:

  • Priced between $2,000 and $3,000

  • Mac-level M2 chip

  • More than 10 cameras placed outside and inside the device, for proper tracking

  • The highest-resolution displays anyone can provide 😎

  • New operating system: realityOS

  • Potential names: “Reality Pro” or “Reality One

• People are also toying the idea of Apple willing to build their own digital world 🌍 because in a job posting, Apple describes developing tools and frameworks to "enable connected experiences in a 3-D mixed reality world."

• "Vision Glass," 🕶 Huawei's newest smart eyewear product, was unveiled on November 12 at the 2022 World Conference on VR Industry 🥽. It will be officially launched next month and opened for pre-orders on November 14. This device features an OLED Micro display, ultra-thin smart speakers, and, of course, no CPU segment or local storage, as it is not intended to replace your smartphone, but to translate the experience to the device. A nice iteration to their existing smart glasses 👓 in collaboration with Gentle Monsters.

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Ok so that was a very long email! I felt I owed you because the past issues of Augmented Rarity had been quite short 🫣.

And since you are getting used to my polls, so here’s another one:

And of course if you can like, comment or share I’d be verrrrry grateful 💚.

That’s it for today. See you next Wednesday!

Best,

Martina