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Welcome to AI Future - your weekly one-stop shop for all things AI.

AI is invading entertainment. Would you watch an AI replica perform a concert?

In the news this week:

• ⭐ Celebrities love their AI copies

• 🎤 Voice deepfakes are now the norm

• ❌ Don’t use ChatGPT in the court

• 🇺🇸 Schumer wants AI policy

📰 AI in the News

AI’s New Hollywood

Metaverse: it’s the buzzword that absolutely flopped in the last couple years. Or did it?

Ever since the Great AI Explosion of Early 2023, celebrities and their agents are slowly starting to realize that 1) AI replicas are getting very good and 2) it can give them leverage on their image.

By replicating their likeness, voice and movements, they could be anywhere in the world at any time, including in digital worlds like Fortnite, the video game Gen Z loves.

Just ask Neimar, whose 3D replica made an appearance at New York Fashion Week.

The opportunity: celebrities (new and upcoming) cashing in on the near-infinite new ways their faces can reach the world (since it’s software).

The first-order question: will mass AI replicas dilute value?

The second-order question: will mass AI replicas drive greater value to in-person entertainment like sports?

Voice Deepfakes Now A Commodity

Voice cloning works like this: upload a few clips of you talking, and an AI model will learn to replicate how you talk. Then, give it any new text and it’ll make it sound like you said it.

In the last few months, UK startup ElevenLabs ($19M fundraising last week led by Andreessen Horowitz) was the lead player among voice cloning startups.

It’s really, really good, requiring just 1-minute of audio to clone a voice and immediately sparking concerns around deepfakes upon their public launch.

But in just one week, Meta and Google showed us that they can also do the same. Meta released VoiceBox; Google released AudioPaLM. Both are models that can not only speak but also do it in a ton of different languages.

Consensus in the AI community is now extremely clear: human voices in any language, tone and accent are a solved problem. Expect them everywhere, all at once.

Key use cases: advertising/marketing (e.g., mass production of personalized videos), entertainment, any consumer experience more broadly.

More Stories

• Stanford’s CS50 class will be introducing an AI tutor that can detect bugs, explain code, and provide feedback on programs. (link)

• Amazon launched a $100 million program to fund AI enterprise initiatives. (link)

• Inflection AI announced its foundational model Inflection-1 that outperforms GPT-3.5 on most benchmarks. (link)

• Google started rolling out its AI feature for Sheets in Workspace Labs. (link)

• Marvel used AI to design the imagery of the opening credits of Secret Invasion. (link)

💡 Industry Insights

🏥 Healthcare

Not ready for primetime? Over half of clinicians don’t believe AI is ready for healthcare yet. That coincides with Pew research showing the general public is also wary of letting AI models make clinical decisions. The majority of AI startups are focused on automating clerical work, enabling healthcare professionals to focus on the core of their work. For the others, only time will tell to see if taking the big swing will pan out. (link)

Still, CEOs are excited: They’re suggesting peers should “run - not walk - toward AI”. What they’re looking forward to: informed decision-making, personalized treatment plans, streamlining low-value tasks. What they’re worried about: replacing too many patient touchpoints, bias. (link)

Outbound AI raises $12 million: Speaking of automating clerical work, Seattle-based Outbound AI raised $12 million to automate billing and claims. It’s targeting small-to-medium-sized healthcare groups with a product that is 4-5x faster at billing than humans. (link)

🏠 Real Estate

Matterport generative AI: Pre-generative AI startup Matterport is revisiting the topic by announcing new AI features in its platform helping customers optimize how buildings are built and run. The new platform Genesis allows users to type in a prompt like “show me a mid-century look for my house” and receive new designs on the fly. (link)

👩‍⚖️ Legal

$5,000 fine for using ChatGPT: Two New York-based lawyers were slapped on the wrist with a $5,000 for submitting a ChatGPT-generated legal brief that contained fake cases. The judge said the lawyers acted in bad faith and “acts of conscious avoidance and false and misleading statements to the court”. (link)

AI policy in the US: Senator Chuck Schumer wants AI legislation. He filed the SAFE Framework, looking to guide legislation around security, accountability, protecting our foundations, explainability and innovation. Experts say the “explainability” part is going to be very, very hard. This movement follows the impending passage of the EU AI Act. (link)

Thomson Reuters acquires Casetext: Rumors of potential acquirers for the AI assistant for litigators have been swirling for a few months. It’s a $650 million deal following Thomson Reuters’ announcement that they’d invest $100 million/year on AI capabilities. (link)

📈 Venture Deals of the Week

• Primer raised $69 million to provide reliable AI solutions to government defense and commercial agencies. (link)

• Granica, an AI efficiency platform that helps cloud customers eliminate faulty data, emerged from stealth with $45 million in funding. (link)

• ElevenLabs, an AI text-to-speech platform for generating synthetic voices, secured $19 million. (link)

• Healthcare billing and claims automation startup Outbound AI raises $16M (link)

• Deepchecks, which ensures the validation of ML models at every stage of their lifecycle, raised a $14 million seed round. (link)

• Parrot, an AI transcription service for legal and insurance depositions, raised $11 million. (link)

🛠️ Latest AI Tools

• TalkBerry provides actionable feedback from mock job interviews. (link)

• Microsoft released a Bing Chat widget that you can add on iOS. (link)

• Olvy analyzes your customer feedback from Slack, Zendesk, Intercom, & Hubspot. (link)

• Timestamp YouTube videos in one click with Instant Chapters. (link)

• Get answers to your marketing problems with Virtual CMO. (link)

• Image Upscaler AI touches up your photos, cartoons, and images. (link)

• Flair is a design tool for branded content (& it gets hands right!). (link)

• Upword is a research tool that organizes and summarizes content quicker. (link)

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