15 min
New Week #126 New World Same Humans
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- Technology
Welcome to this update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 25,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮
To Begin
This week, more AI magic rains from the sky.
Also, average temperatures on planet Earth exceed the 2C warming threshold for the first time.
And my take on the OpenAI fiasco. In the end, it’s about power.
Let’s get into it.
✨ Like magic
This week, further glimpses of the ongoing collision between human creativity and machine intelligence.
Stable Diffusion released Stable Video Diffusion, a new text-to-video model that looks to be a step beyond anything we’ve seen so far.
In keeping with the company’s open source mission, the code for the model is available at its GitHub repository.
Meanwhile, X users went wild for a new tool, Screenshot to Code, that leverages GPT-4 and DALLE 2 to take a screenshot of any web page and automatically write the code that will render it:
And Elon Musk announced that X’s new on-platform large language model, Grok, will launch to all Premium users next week:
Grok is trained on a vast dataset of X posts; it’s sure to be expert in writing posts with a great chance of going viral. What’s more, it will have access to X posts in real-time; that could make for a whole new way to discover and interact with news stories.
⚡ NWSH Take: This gallery of the week’s AI wonders could go on far longer. I didn’t mention the new voice-to-voice model from UK-based Eleven Labs, for example: just upload your own voice and hear it converted to that of a famous celebrity, or a custom character that you create. // What’s the broader point here? A couple of weeks ago I shared an excerpt from a long AI essay called Electricity and Magic. That essay argues for a two-sided model of machine intelligence and its manifestations in the coming decades. First, machine intelligence is becoming something foundational — akin to a form of fuel that will power an army of autonomous vehicles, robots, and more. But in our daily life AI will manifest differently; not as fuel, but as magic. The innovations above give a glimpse of what I’m talking about. AI is moving into domains — from music, to film-making, to writing — once believed to be impervious to encroachment by automation. It’s as though someone has waved a magic wand over our machines. // The crucial point to understand, though, when it comes to AI magic? The result won’t be, as many people imagine, the devaluation of human creativity. Instead, amid a tsunami of machine-generated outputs, what is uniquely human — including creative work grounded in embodied experience — will only become more prized.
🌊 Crossing over
Another significant, and unwelcome, climate milestone was passed in the last seven days.
According to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Services (CS3), Friday 17 November was the first day on which average global temperatures were more than 2C above pre-industrial levels.
Data for 17 November indicated that global surface air temperatures were 2.07C above those in 1850. Provisional data for the following day indicated a 2.06C elevation.
This doesn’t mean that the much-discussed 2C threshold has been crossed. For that, we’d need to see a sustained elevation above 2C.
CS3 is part of the EU’s Copernicus Earth Observation Programme, which draws on vast amounts of satellite and other data to track the changing planetary environment.
⚡ NWSH Take: It’s expected that we’ll see occasional 2C+ days well before we exceed the 2C limit as commonly defined. Still, this week saw both the first ever and the second day that global average temperatures tipped over the threshold. It’s pretty clear where we’re heading. // This news comes on the eve of the UN COP28 summit in Dubai, which starts on 30 November. Many view last year’s summit, held in Egypt, as the moment
Welcome to this update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 25,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮
To Begin
This week, more AI magic rains from the sky.
Also, average temperatures on planet Earth exceed the 2C warming threshold for the first time.
And my take on the OpenAI fiasco. In the end, it’s about power.
Let’s get into it.
✨ Like magic
This week, further glimpses of the ongoing collision between human creativity and machine intelligence.
Stable Diffusion released Stable Video Diffusion, a new text-to-video model that looks to be a step beyond anything we’ve seen so far.
In keeping with the company’s open source mission, the code for the model is available at its GitHub repository.
Meanwhile, X users went wild for a new tool, Screenshot to Code, that leverages GPT-4 and DALLE 2 to take a screenshot of any web page and automatically write the code that will render it:
And Elon Musk announced that X’s new on-platform large language model, Grok, will launch to all Premium users next week:
Grok is trained on a vast dataset of X posts; it’s sure to be expert in writing posts with a great chance of going viral. What’s more, it will have access to X posts in real-time; that could make for a whole new way to discover and interact with news stories.
⚡ NWSH Take: This gallery of the week’s AI wonders could go on far longer. I didn’t mention the new voice-to-voice model from UK-based Eleven Labs, for example: just upload your own voice and hear it converted to that of a famous celebrity, or a custom character that you create. // What’s the broader point here? A couple of weeks ago I shared an excerpt from a long AI essay called Electricity and Magic. That essay argues for a two-sided model of machine intelligence and its manifestations in the coming decades. First, machine intelligence is becoming something foundational — akin to a form of fuel that will power an army of autonomous vehicles, robots, and more. But in our daily life AI will manifest differently; not as fuel, but as magic. The innovations above give a glimpse of what I’m talking about. AI is moving into domains — from music, to film-making, to writing — once believed to be impervious to encroachment by automation. It’s as though someone has waved a magic wand over our machines. // The crucial point to understand, though, when it comes to AI magic? The result won’t be, as many people imagine, the devaluation of human creativity. Instead, amid a tsunami of machine-generated outputs, what is uniquely human — including creative work grounded in embodied experience — will only become more prized.
🌊 Crossing over
Another significant, and unwelcome, climate milestone was passed in the last seven days.
According to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Services (CS3), Friday 17 November was the first day on which average global temperatures were more than 2C above pre-industrial levels.
Data for 17 November indicated that global surface air temperatures were 2.07C above those in 1850. Provisional data for the following day indicated a 2.06C elevation.
This doesn’t mean that the much-discussed 2C threshold has been crossed. For that, we’d need to see a sustained elevation above 2C.
CS3 is part of the EU’s Copernicus Earth Observation Programme, which draws on vast amounts of satellite and other data to track the changing planetary environment.
⚡ NWSH Take: It’s expected that we’ll see occasional 2C+ days well before we exceed the 2C limit as commonly defined. Still, this week saw both the first ever and the second day that global average temperatures tipped over the threshold. It’s pretty clear where we’re heading. // This news comes on the eve of the UN COP28 summit in Dubai, which starts on 30 November. Many view last year’s summit, held in Egypt, as the moment
15 min