Why don’t you build the metaverse?

Happy Presidents’ Day! Hope everyone in the US has been enjoying their long weekend. Calin is back at the keyboard (talking about him in the 3rd person), covering gen AI developments in gaming and coding and the intensifying debate on biases.

What do we have for you today?

👾 The democratization of game creation has begun! Roblox introduces AI tools

🧑‍💻 Chat with your IDE - writing code through prompts

🧐 Can we fix the bias problems?

Roblox to introduce AI tooling for game creation

Creating “new worlds” has always been a fascination for both game designers and gamers. I remember as kid spending hours creating my own little universe in SimCity.

Roblox wants to let people build virtual worlds by just typing. Having positioned themselves as a player focused on creating the infrastructure for the metaverse, they recently announced a set of tooling that will allow users to create virtual materials based on natural language prompts and code based on text inputs.

Andreessen Horowitz has been bullish on the capacity for Gen AI to revolutionize games, but designing games that "work" is a complex process and some believe things will move slower than expected.

Let the Coding Games begin

The next generation of coding assistants is here. Last Wednesday, Replit launched a ChatGPT-like bot for coders. The AI bot is called Ghostwriter Chat and has been trained by Replit to help write computer code.

For those of you who are not familiar with Replit, they offer a collaborative IDE that allows developers to write code and collaborate in real-time.

Improving code writing with LLM’s isn’t new, GitHub’s Copilot has been around for a while, but Replit is taking the assistance one step forward, moving from code-autocomplete features to a bot that you can chat with. It can also help you debug code.

The vision is nothing short of a SciFI movie. Replit wants to create a completely autonomous AI coder, that can be treated like a human engineer and they believe they can get there in a year.

I’m not biased. I’m just the sum of all humankind's biases

The conversation on biases is heating up. This is somewhat unsurprising. We haven’t figured out how to eradicate biases in the way we think and speak as humans, so how can we expect a machine trained on human outputs to be bias-free?

In an experiment to describe issues from the perspective of UK newspapers, we can see how distorted media views (i.e. race bias) end up being replicated by ChatGPT through various prompts.

OpenAI published a blog post on Thursday explaining how they are trying to address fixing these biases. Through their fine-tuning process, they identify content that isn’t “balanced” and use a form of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback to deal with responses that are prone to biased answers.

Anthropic is also studying this problem. In a recently published study, they point out how RLHF helps reduce biases from models, but also how simple prompting techniques can help this process.

Gen AI Deals that make your eyes (and mouth) water 💰

👉 Hyper-personalized video creation platforms raises $8m

What caught our eye? 👀Interactive video platform Hippo Video has raised $8m in a funding round led by Dallas Venture Capital. The platform uses generative AI engine, Humanize AI, to create hundreds of hyper-personalized videos in a single day. The technology enables sales teams to increase engagement with personalized video outreach, leading to improved win rates and higher revenue.

👉 Nanite raises $6M to advance their AI-driven polymer design platform for gene delivery

What caught our eye? 👀Nanite Inc. has raised $6M in a seed funding round led by Zetta Venture Partners and with participation from Arkitekt Ventures. The company, which is focused on developing next-generation non-viral gene delivery, will use the funding to advance their AI-driven polymer design platform, called SAYER.

New developments to spam your #random Slack channel 💬

• 🧑‍🚀 Fly me to the moon: NASA said it's using commercially available generative AI software to design new spacecraft and mission hardware

• ✏️ Scribble Diffusion: Turn your drawing into a professional high fidelity image

• 🔱 AI is pop(e)ing: The Vatican hosts religious leaders to discuss moral conundrums in new tech

Things to learn when you need a raise

• OpenAI GPT 3.5 AI assistant with Langchain and Pinecone

• Create your custom AI avatar generation website with Stable Diffusion

Want access to the Generative AI investors database? Share and subscribe to AI In the Middle (below) to receive it! ⬇️

Before you go

Jump higher and run faster with this new shoe designed by Bing AI.

That's all folks! Thanks for reading, sharing, and subscribing. Have some interesting new developments to share with us? Our DMs are open. Have a wonderful week!

— Calin Drimbau (@calindrimbau)