. . AI: Altman v Musk jabs, AI's impact on knowledge workers, AI animation (11.10.23)

Friends, for your Friday night, we’ve got some AI entertainment. There’s a Dad Joke Battle and some very cool AI animation demos.

As always, these are the stories the AI community is talking about most, with their Time to Impact estimated by an ensemble of LLMs. I use a lot of technology in creating these (today ChatGPT caught three typos in my writing!), but I am responsible for the editorial contents. :)

Now here’s the news.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, Editor

Altman and Musk Engage in Chatbot Battle With Mocking Tweets

First impacted: AI researchers, AI industry professionals
Time to impact: Whatever

OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman used his firm's new GPT tool, which allows users to make their own chatbot, to mock Elon Musk's new AI chatbot, posting the words "GPTs can save a lot of effort" with a photo on X of an OpenAI GPT being told to use "cringey boomer humor in a sort of awkward shock-to-get-laughs sort of way." In the screenshot the app said it would name itself Grok, which is the name of Musk's AI. Musk responded with what he said was Grok's response, roasting GPT-4 ("more like GPT-Snore!"), and including fresh examples of the aforementioned cringey boomer humor, as alleged, but without any apparent self-awareness. It was the most-talked-about topic among AI community members on X all day. [via @sama] Share by email

Studies: Generative AI Disrupts Online Freelancing Market

First impacted: Online freelancers, Less skilled workers
Time to impact: Short

John Burn-Murdoch, chief data reporter at the Financial Times, has posted an X thread about AI's impact on knowledge workers. He combines one study finding that the launch of ChatGPT led to a shift in the online freelancing market, resulting in fewer job opportunities and lower earnings, even for highly skilled freelancers, with another study from Harvard Business School that suggests that while ChatGPT can advance productivity and work quality, it also poses difficulties in tasks needing careful interpretation, with the most notable performance enhancements seen among less skilled workers. More than a million people have seen the thread. [via @jburnmurdoch] Share by email

Runway Announces Motion Brush for Gen-2 Software

First impacted: Graphic Designers, Digital Artists
Time to impact: Short

Runway's upcoming Gen-2 software is set to include the new Motion Brush, a tool that allows users to add controlled movement to their designs just by dragging a brush tool over an image. The demo video shows images of objects like vehicles, flames, and smoke animated by the brush. [via @runwayml] Share by email

Pika Labs to Launch AI-Created Animation Product

First impacted: Animators, 3D Animation Artists
Time to impact: Medium

Pika Labs is preparing to launch Pika 1.0, a new product offering text-to-video animation, as shown in a 3D teaser that highlights animated characters' wide array of movements and expressions. The demo video is made up of short clips and calls itslef "the future of animation." [via @pika_labs] Share by email

Zephyr Model Training Code Released for Public Use

First impacted: AI developers, Data scientists
Time to impact: Short

Zephyr model training code is now publicly available on Hugging Face. Zephyr was the result of an international open source team's recent work extending Mistral. [Robust recipes to align language models with human and AI preferences] Share by email

Google Cloud Launches Full-Stack Training Offering

First impacted: Machine Learning Engineers, Data Scientists
Time to impact: Short

Google Cloud has launched Cloud TPU Multislice Training, a new and user-friendly solution compatible with TPU v4 and v5e, used to carry out the biggest publicly disclosed LLM distributed training job on a network of 50,944 Cloud TPU v5e chips, reportedly exceeding the AI accelerators of the TOP1 Supercomputer Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The company says this system, incorporating various elements of the JAX training stack, provides efficient compilation, robust management, scalability, and advances popular machine learning frameworks like JAX and PyTorch. [the world’s largest distributed LLM training job on TPU v5e] Share by email

That’s it! More AI news on Monday!