We need to talk about Kevin-GPT

Guess what's been keeping me awake at night these days? It's not autonomous AI, but good old-fashioned jet lag. I wonder how long it will take for Generative AI to solve this problem as well.

ChatGPT tells me “an AI-powered app could help travelers optimize their sleep patterns and adjust their circadian rhythms before and after a long-haul flight. The app could recommend exposure to light at specific times or suggest changes to the timing of meals and exercise to aid in the adaptation to a new time zone.” Can someone build this, please?

Someone told me that to solve the jet lag problem, I should just go back to where I traveled from. I took their advice and I’m traveling back to San Francisco to spend the summer there (or whatever season awaits as I’ve been warned that summer is “different” in SF).

On a serious note, I'm excited to move to San Francisco. The energy in the AI ecosystem is palpable, and everyone is gearing up for a Woodstock moment in AI. Have you seen the actual llamas at the Hugging Face event? I'm pretty sure they weren't generated.

My lack of sleep has caused me to ramble. So, what do we have for you this week?

• 🔫 Autonomous AI: inventive AI on a mission to complete its task. Recently, a couple of newly released projects have sparked discussions on Twitter about doomsday scenarios. Is "AI perseverance" the next hot topic? And more importantly, is humanity safe? It's hard to say, but read on for more speculation.

• 🎙️ Build and deploy web applications entirely through voice control. Copilot X hinted at the possibility, but McKay Wringly showed us how to make it a reality. The demonstration is mind-blowing. If I were a front-end developer, I would start looking for a job.

• 🕹️ NeRFs for nerds. As you may know from previous coverage, I'm a big fan of the gaming industry. So, it's no surprise that I'm excited about LUMA's announcement to add a plugin to the Unreal Engine. Let's take a closer look at what this means.

Autonomous AI: it’s done when it's done

The concept of autonomous AI is not new. It refers to an artificial intelligence system that can operate independently without requiring human intervention or control. If you've been to San Francisco, you may have seen the new breed of autonomous cars that roam the streets without drivers. And they do a pretty good job, to be fair.

Two open-source projects have caught some attention recently as they gave us a flavor of what AGI could look like. One is AutoGPT by SigGravitas and the other one is Baby AGI by Yohei. AutoGPT was the #1 trending project worldwide on Github, which is no small feat.

These projects offer a glimpse into the future, demonstrating how next-generation systems could connect a series of tasks, execute them without human intervention, and iteratively improve the execution process. With a task creation agent, a task prioritization agent, and a task execution agent, you pretty much have an autonomous system. So in case chatGPT doesn’t give you that A in a test, it can keep improving until it does, whilst you get a latte.

All of these developments raise deep ethical concerns and questions, such as how much "human supervision" we need over these systems. I’m not surprised some people have asked to pause “AI developments”. The risks could result in “loss of control of our civilization.” Or it could all be fine. Who knows.

Siri, build me a website and make it snappy

Okay, I know I talked about voice control programming in the last edition, but I’ve got my favorite subjects, okay? I studied C++ in high-school (please don’t ask about my age or how I keep young) and back then the IDEs were pretty much non-existent. Everything was manual. Maybe with some support, I might have been able to correctly allocate memory and avoid buffer overflow errors.

The idea of being able to communicate to a machine what we want to build without any coding knowledge is still mind-boggling to me. McKay Wrigley created a GPT-4 coding assistant that can build and deploy web apps through voice commands. It can even style it in a trendy gradient (whaaat?). This is the best video I’ve seen this year.

The future of coding. We won’t need to understand how to write or how to fix code. We’re just going to use our voice. Honestly, we should all stock up on Vocalzone, cause we’ll be coding until our throat hurts.

Gaming just got a lot more real

Luma AI launched a NeRF plugin for Unreal Engine. Let’s start from the top. A neural radiance field (NeRF) is a fully-connected neural network that can generate novel views of complex 3D scenes, based on a partial set of 2D images. By adding their tool to the Unreal Engine platform, they can save teams hundreds of hours that would typically be required to make a game or film scene more realistic.

High-quality NeRFs can be rendered on your phone and in a web browser. It’s exactly the capability to generate realistic 3D imagery quickly, with inexpensive and efficient hardware that makes NeRF technology attractive. The technology can also power the adoption of VR/AR in a future where ultra-realistic representations of objects becomes possible at a lower cost through NeRFs. Will this prompt the return of Zuck with ultra-realistic legs this time? Who knows.

It’s a big deal for the gaming world as we can substantially speed up game creation with NeRFs and who knows, maybe VR reality with ultra-fidelity representations of real-world objects is just as good as the real world. Ahh…who am I kidding, an In-N-Out NeRF burger is not going to cut it. But it may keep me playing for just a little bit longer. Are you just as NeRFous about the future?

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

👉 Benchmark leads $10m seed round in LangChainWhat caught our eye? 👀Originally an open-source project, LangChain captured the hearts of the builders. The one trend in generative AI that is undebatable is that people are building. The bet is that more tooling will be required to enable applications to be production-ready. This one was a no brainer.

👉Fixie raises $17M in a seed funding round led by Redpoint VenturesWhat caught our eye? 👀Founded by former Apple and Google employees last year, Fixie aims to help businesses integrate large language models into their workflows, data, systems, and more. Its AI-powered agents can integrate with external systems, such as APIs, databases, and productivity tools, to automate processes and add NLP to products and services.

👉 AI-powered search engine Perplexity AI lands $26MWhat caught our eye? 👀Perplexity AI, which bills itself as a “conversational search engine,” closed a Series A funding round led by New Enterprise Associates. Perplexity reports that it had 10 million monthly visits and 2 million unique visitors in February alone.

👉 AirTree backs generative AI content creation and management platform Narrato

What caught our eye? 👀Narrato, a AI content creation and collaboration platform, announced today it raised a $1 million pre-seed round led by AirTree Ventures. Narrato’s main feature is an AI content assistant that helps with planning, including automatic brief generation, content creation and optimization.

New developments to spam your #random Slack channel 💬

• 🍳 Fry My Deck - get the bot of Naval and others to roast your pitch deck

• 🧠 GPT4 is a reasoning engine, not a knowledge base

• 🏎️ How do startups compete in the midst of a platform shift?

Things to learn when you need a raise

• How will the 3rd generation of large language models look like?

• A comprehensive guide to LangChain

• From Deep Learning to Stable Diffusion (new course with over 30h of video content)

• Midjourney tutorials

• Understanding multimodal systems

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Before you go

Reverse-engineer any image with Midjourney’s “/describe” command.

And scene. That’s all for today! Thank you for always reading, sharing, and subscribing. Want to share something with us? Slide in our DMs, they’re open.

— Calin Drimbau (@calindrimbau)