Robotics & AI

DeviantArt provides a way for artists to opt out of AI art generators • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 11, 2022Posted in AI, Apps, deviantART, Media & Entertainment, Robotics & AI, text-to-imageNo Comments

DeviantArt, the Wix-owned artist community, today announced a new protection for creators to disallow art-generating AI systems from being developed using their artwork. An option on the site will allow artists to preclude third parties from scraping their content for AI development purposes, aiming to prevent work from being swept up without artists’ knowledge or permission. “AI technology for creation is a powerful force we can’t ignore. . . . It would be impossible for DeviantArt to try to block or censor this art technology,” CEO Moti Levy told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “We see so many instances where AI tools help artists’ creativity, allowing them to express themselves in ways they could not in the past. That said, we believe we have a responsibility to all creators. To support AI art, we must also implement fair tools and add protections in this domain.” As AI-generated artwork began to proliferate on the web earlier this year, fueled by the release of text-to-image tools like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2, art-housing platforms were forced to take a policy stance. Some, including Newgrounds, PurplePort and Getty Images, banned AI-generated art altogether, concerned both about the impact to artists and the legal ramifications of art created by tools that were developed on copyrighted works. Today’s bleeding-edge AI art tools “learn” to generate new images from text prompts by “training” on billions of existing images, which often come from data sets that were scraped together by trawling public image hosting websites like Flickr and ArtStation. Some legal experts suggest that training AI models by scraping public images — even copyrighted ones — will likely be covered by fair use doctrine in the U.S. But it’s a matter that’s unlikely to be settled anytime soon — particularly in light of contrasting laws being proposed overseas. OpenAI, the company behind DALL-E 2, took the proactive step of licensing a portion of the images in DALL-E 2’s training data set. But the license was limited in scope, and rivals so far haven’t followed suit. “Many creators are rightfully critical of AI-generation models and tools. For one, they do not give creators control over how their art may be used to train models, nor do they let creators decide if they authorize their style to be used as inspiration in generating images,” Levy continued. “As a result, many creators have seen AI models being trained with their art or worse: AI art being generated in their style without the ability to opt out or receive proper credit.” Art created with DeviantArt’s DreamUp tool. Image Credits: Digitonaut / DeviantArt DeviantArt’s new protection will rely on an HTML tag to prohibit the software robots that crawl pages for images from downloading those images for training sets. Artists who specify that their content can’t be used for AI system development will have “noai” and “noimageai” directives appended to the HTML page associated with their art. In order to remain in compliance with DeviantArt’s updated terms of service, third parties using DeviantArt-sourced content for AI training will have to ensure that their data sets exclude content that has the tags present, Levy says. “DeviantArt expects all users accessing our service or the DeviantArt site to respect creators’ choices about the acceptable use of their content, including for AI purposes,” Levy added. “When a DeviantArt user doesn’t consent to third party use of their content for AI purposes, other users of the service and third parties accessing the DeviantArt site are prohibited from using such content to train an AI system, as input into any previously trained AI system or to make available any derivative copy unless usage of that copy is subject to conditions at least as restrictive as those set out in the DeviantArt terms of service.” It’s an attempt to give power back to artists like Greg Rutkowski, whose classical painting styles and fantasy landscapes have become one of the most commonly used prompts in the AI art generator Stable Diffusion — much to his chagrin. Rutkowski and others have expressed concern that AI-generated art imitating their styles will crowd out their original works, harming their income as people start using AI-generated images for commercial purposes. The tools have set off firestorms of controversy in recent months. A system trained to imitate the style of acclaimed South Korean illustrator Kim Jung Gi, who passed away suddenly in early October, was condemned by many in the art community as a tasteless stunt. After winning a prize at the Colorado State Fair’s art competition, artwork made by AI set off a fierce backlash. Elsewhere, character designers like Hollie Mengert have decried what they see as poor AI imitations of their style that are nevertheless inexorably tied to their names. For DeviantArt’s part, it’s encouraging creator platforms to adopt artist protections and says it’s already in discussions about implementation with “several players.” But it’s unclear whether it’ll be able to rally the broader industry behind its approach; less scrupulous actors could theoretically ignore DeviantArt’s terms of service to scrape images regardless of HTML tag. Technologists Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon are spearheading a separate effort called Source+ to let people disallow their work or likeness to be used for AI training purposes. Meanwhile, Shutterstock is banning all AI art not created with DALL-E 2 to mitigate copyright issues (and likely to preserve its partnership with OpenAI). Image Credits: Digitonaut / DeviantArt Unlike Shutterstock, DeviantArt has allowed — and will continue to allow — art generated with third-party AI tools on its platform, Levy says, though it encourages users uploading AI-generated art to tag it as such. He claims that tens of thousands of images tagged as “AI-art” are being submitted to DeviantArt each month, growing over 1,000% in the last four months. “Since DeviantArt’s inception, we’ve never believed in blocking any art genres or categories. We have always made room for and supported all types of creators and their works,” Levy said. Beyond simply allowing AI art, DeviantArt is committing to

Dispatches from the conference room • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Actuator, Alphabet, Hardware, Iron Ox, Lidar, Robotics & AI, wing, XPRIZENo Comments

Greetings on a brisk New England morning. I’m finally here on my long threatened trip to Boston. I was planning to be here in early July ahead of our robotics event, but SARS-CoV-2 and its many variants had different ideas. I narrowly avoided another reschedule on my third time around with COVID, but now I’m in that brief (and ever narrowing) window of relative immunity. It’s like I’m Superman or something (probably shouldn’t have gone with one of the few DC superheroes without a mask). Given the fact that I haven’t been out since 2019, I may well have overbooked. Met with four startups yesterday afternoon after arriving at Logan, spent this morning meeting with a couple of VCs/accelerators and startups, and am currently writing to you from a MassRobotics conference room (shoutout to Joyce, who kindly reserved me a conference room to chat with some founders ahead of a panel and more meetings tonight). An aerial general view during a game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees on August 13, 2022 at Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts. Image Credits:Billie Weiss/Boston Red Sox/Getty Images Call it a fact-finding mission. Or maybe a temperature check. We’ve entered an interesting moment, where superpowered robotic VC investments are finally having to contend with the realities of market forces. For a moment there, the industry appeared relatively immune to the slowdown, but in spite of continued bullish feelings about automation at large, nothing here can appropriately be labeled “recession proof.” Anecdotally, we may have also entered the stage in which the key players in already well-represented categories such as logistics/fulfillment are already in place. That isn’t to say there isn’t room for key new players to enter the picture, but I suspect it’s a lot harder to get tens of millions in funding by telling investors that you’re an Amazon Robotics killer than it was at the beginning of the pandemic. At the moment, I’ve got a keen eye out for two things: First, the companies solving the extremely unsexy problems. There are still a lot of extremely bad — and impossible-to-staff — jobs out there that are ripe for automation. I spoke with a company that’s a great representation of that phenomenon, which I’ll dive into when I debrief my Boston trip in next week’s Actuator. Second, the key components of the broader robotics experience. I know a lot of well-funded companies are looking to create their full-stack solutions, but as these technologies grow in application, a ton of smaller industries are going to sprout up around that. If you’ve got a sufficiently adaptable piece of that puzzle, you’ve got a great — and perhaps overlooked — business on your hands. There’s value in well-placed myopia. Sometimes thinking small is the right business move. I realize and respect that a lot of folks enter the space with plans to change the world, but they think globally and act locally and all of that good stuff. Roughly 24 hours into this trip, and I’m realizing how much I missed landing in a place and talking to as many startups as possible. Glad I’m able to do this in Boston again, and hoping to be in more cities soon to see what companies are cooking and, perhaps, check the temperature of the industry from a much closer vantage point. Again, lots more on all of the above next week. Image Credits: Iron OX For now, two things are top of mind on this newsletter. One is fun. The other less so. We’ll start with the bad news first. Layoffs. Almost overnight, half the staff at Iron Ox is out of work. Even forgetting the extremely real and immediate human impact of such a move, it’s very disheartening for the industry. There are a lot of questions here. Is this a broader indictment of fully automated greenhouses? Is it something specific to Iron Ox? Perhaps the company’s solution was more proprietary and less adaptable to existing systems than a startup needs to be in the space. Either way, it’s hard not to walk away from this with the sense that such a well-funded firm is something of a bellwether for automation’s hard road ahead, as the space grapples with bigger macroeconomic issues. Chief legal officer Myra Pasek confirmed the layoffs this week with ZebethMedia. All told, they amount to just under half of Iron Ox’s staff, and appear to run across the organization. It’s a gutting of a company that is clearly doing some soul searching around which existing elements to capitalize on going forward. Says Pasek: We’ve decided to hyperfocus on our core competence of engineering and technology; as a result, we eliminated many roles that are not core to our renewed focus. However, the layoff was comprehensive and included positions throughout the organization — i.e., not limited to only certain departments. Reducing the Iron Ox team was a painful decision — one we did not take lightly. We are working with our board members and leaning into our extensive ecosystem throughout Silicon Valley to help employees find meaningful new work at mission-aligned companies. Iron Ox has always hired world-class talent, and I’m confident that the individuals we unfortunately had to cut this week will have many options open to them. As a matter of policy, we are not going to provide additional details or comment on specific personnel, and we ask that you respect their privacy at this sensitive time. This was precisely the caveat I was alluding to in last week’s newsletter when talking about climate robotics firms. Not everything is a surefire bet, but that shouldn’t distract founders from the fact that there’s a lot of good to be done and money to be made in this space. Image Credits: NimbRo The more pleasant news this week is around teleoperation. Our TC Sessions: Robotics pitch-off winner Touchlab made it to the semifinals, but ultimately, the XPrize Avatar trophy went to NimbRo, which hails from the Autonomous Intelligent

OpenAI leads $23.5M round in Mem, an AI-powered note-taking app • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in AI, Enterprise, funding, Mem, note taking, OpenAI, Robotics & AI, StartupsNo Comments

Last year, OpenAI announced the OpenAI Startup Fund, a tranche through which it and its partners, including Microsoft, are investing in early-stage AI companies tackling major problems. Mum’s been the word since on which companies have received infusions from the Fund. But today, the OpenAI Startup Fund revealed that it led a $23.5 million investment in Mem, a work-focused app that taps AI to automatically organize notes. The investment values Mem at $110 million post-money and brings the startup’s total raised to $29 million. Co-founded by Kevin Moody and Dennis Xu, Mem differentiates itself from traditional note-taking apps by emphasizing “lightweight organization,” in Moody and Xu’s words. The workflow revolves around search and a chronological timeline, allowing users to attach topic tags, tag other users and add recurring reminders to notes. Mem users can capture quick notes, send links and save images from anywhere using SMS, messaging apps and the platform’s mobile client. Collaboration features let teams share, edit and comment on notes and directly attach them to shared calendars for faster reference. Mem’s search experience uses AI to search across notes, aiming to understand which notes might be most relevant in a given moment to a particular person. Moody and Xu say the platform is designed to augment knowledge workers in their typical responsibilities, like reading through pages of information, extracting the pieces relevant to a particular question and transforming the information into an answer or a report. Mem taps AI to organize notes in real time. There’s no doubt knowledge-seeking tasks are time-consuming. According to Gartner, professionals spend 50% of their working hours searching for information and on average take 18 minutes to locate a file (albeit the veracity of metrics like these has been challenged over the years). One source estimates that document disorganization costs businesses $3,900 per employee each year in productivity losses, making Mem an attractive proposition if the tech works as advertised. “The number one thing we hear from the organizations we talk to is the desire to be able to marry their vast troves of proprietary knowledge with … generative AI models — to support use cases that range from conducting research to writing to selling and beyond,” Moody and Xu told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “The magic of Mem is that we bring together your own private and proprietary data along with state-of-the-art generative language models to unlock truly personalized, factual outputs. We combine knowledge sources across the individual, team and organizational levels, leading to significantly better performance across the board.” Mem recently launched Mem It for Twitter, which allows users to save threads, get AI-generated summaries of their contents and see suggestions for similar tweets. It’s also continuing to refine Mem X, Mem’s built-in work assistant, with new features like Smart Write and Smart Edit, which leverages AI to generate text based on a prompt, summarize files, generate titles for documents and let users use natural language commands to edit or format text. Mem’s AI-powered writing tools, which are launching in preview soon. The plan for the foreseeable future is to increasingly lean into these sorts of AI-powered experiences, Moody and Xu say, with support from OpenAI through the OpenAI Startup Fund. OpenAI Startup Fund participants receive early access to new OpenAI systems and Azure resources from Microsoft in addition to capital. “OpenAI is obviously leading the wave of technological revolutions that we are riding,” Moody and Xu said. “This makes the OpenAI Startup Fund the ideal partner for what we’re building — for both the technical expertise and strategic guidance they bring to the table.” OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap, who also manages the OpenAI Startup Fund, added in an emailed statement: “Mem uses powerful AI to make knowledge workers more productive by removing the tedium and drudgery of organizing and accessing information, ultimately allowing people to focus on the parts of their work that matter. Their vision aligns squarely with our goal at the OpenAI Startup Fund to accelerate companies using AI to enhance productivity and, more broadly, human potential.” Mem competes with a number of companies seeking to tackle the same knowledge-finding and notes-organizing challenges. In enterprise search, there’s Glean, which recently raised $100 million in a venture equity round. On the knowledge management side, Atlassian’s wiki-like collaborative workspace Confluence and Notion, which was valued at $2 billion in 2020, still dominate. But Moody and Xu argue that 16-employee Mem has an advantage in that it’s “self-organizing,” ostensibly resulting in less manual curation and labor. While they declined to reveal Mem’s revenue or the names of any major customers, they assert that Mem is successful, owing to its AI-driven tech. “We’re confident in our unique approach to self-organizing and generative knowledge management. … Our personalized machine learning models not only help knowledge workers stay organized automatically, but also go beyond simply helping find things — we actually help people do their work,” Moody and Xu said. “The shift to remote work has made effective, asynchronous knowledge sharing more important than ever, and the market slowdown has caused companies to focus on efficiency. Our AI-assisted knowledge work saves people time, and the rapid improvement in large language models gives us a further tailwind.”

This is Amazon’s new delivery drone, the MK30 • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Amazon, drone, drone delivery, drones, Hardware, Robotics & AINo Comments

Following this morning’s debut of the Sparrow bin picking robot, Amazon just unveiled MK30, the latest iteration of its delivery drone. The system is the successor to the MK27-2, which is set to debut limited deliveries to residents in Lockeford, California and College Station, Texas. The MK30, which is set for a 2024 debut, is both smaller and lighter than the earlier version and able to withstand harsher temperatures and a broader range of weather conditions. Another key element here is making things quieter. Drone noise has been one of the most anticipated complaints about bringing these systems into residential settings. The system maintains the same basic hexacopter foundation as its predecessor — a different tact that the fixed wing systems deployed by the likes of Wing. Image Credits: Brian Heater Amazon writes, Reducing the noise signature of our drones is an important engineering challenge our team is working on. Our drones fly hundreds of feet in the air, well above people and structures. Even when they descend to deliver packages, our drones are generally quieter than a range of sounds you would commonly hear in a typical neighborhood. Prime Air’s Flight Science team has created new custom-designed propellers that will reduce the MK30’s perceived noise by a further 25%. That’s a game-changer we’re very excited about. Also on-board are new safety systems designed to avoid a wide range of different obstacles, from fellow drones to trees to people and pets. “While it’s impossible to eliminate all risks from flying, we take a proven aerospace approach to design safety into our system,” the company writes. “As always, our newest drone will go through rigorous evaluation by national aerospace authorities like the Federal Aviation Administration to prove its safety and reliability.” The acknowledgement of risk is important here. The truth is as these things become more common, so too, will accident reports. Amazon’s delivery drones have been through their share of ups and downs (so to speak), but the program appears to have survived some wide ranging cuts from CEO Andy Jassy – the same may not apply to the company’s latest mile Scout delivery robot, however. Amazon: A drone being tested in a wind tunnel “[T]o sustainably deliver a vast selection of items in under an hour, and eventually within 30 minutes, at scale,” Amazon writes, “drones are the most effective path to success.” Plenty of skepticism remains around the efficacy so such programs, of course. Amazon, however, isn’t alone in better big on drone deliver — one baby step at a time. Alphabet’s Wing program recently announced a deal with Door Dash for food deliveries in Logan, Australia.

Amazon debuts Sparrow, a new bin picking robot arm • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Hardware, Robotics & AINo Comments

The bin moving robots designed by Kiva Systems still form the foundation of Amazon’s warehouse robotics play a decade after it acquired the startup. There’s a reason — for example — that the recently announced fully autonomous Proteus robot effectively looks like a green (“Seahawks green,” per robotics VP, Joseph Quinlivan) version of one of those systems. Over the years, the retail giant has broadened the scope of its warehouse ‘bots – hundreds of thousands of them now occupy fulfillment centers across the U.S. Image Credits: Brian Heater As one might imagine, robot arms are a big piece of that puzzle. Robin (which debuted 18 months ago) and Cardinal (which rolls out this year) are the two most prominent examples, both designed to move packages and send them on their way inside the warehouse. Cardinal is effectively an update to Robin that’s able to pack boxes full of packages. There are currently around 1,000 Robin units deployed in Amazon warehouses. At an event held in its Westborough, Massachusetts robotics center (about 40 minutes from downtown Boston), the company added a third bird into the mix: Sparrow. Image Credits: Amazon The new arm is a more sophisticated take on the company’s existing robotic arms, adding the ability to pick and place specific objects in bins. The arm’s computer vision and AI are capable of identifying and move “millions” of items, according to the company. Amazon writes, Working with our employees, Sparrow will take on repetitive tasks, enabling our employees to focus their time and energy on other things, while also advancing safety. At the same time, Sparrow will help us drive efficiency by automating a critical part of our fulfillment process so we can continue to deliver for customers. The company is, of course, quick to point out that Sparrow (along with its other robots) is designed to replace repetitive tasks – and, perhaps, save a few human backs in the process. It’s understandably become common practice to get out ahead of the standard criticism of companies automating away jobs, but pointing out that these systems, 1. Have the ability to actually create more jobs in the long run and2. Those are “better” jobs than the standard warehouse fare. Image Credits: Amazon Per the second, Amazon attached a note about its employee education programs in the Sparrow blog post, noting, An example of our commitment to advancing employee careers is our Amazon Mechatronic and Robotics Apprenticeship. A 12-week classroom apprentice program covered by Amazon that is followed by 2,000 hours of on-the-job training and industry-recognized certifications, helping our employees learn new skills and pursue in-demand, technical maintenance roles. Following completion of the apprenticeship, employee pay increases by approximately 40% for program participants.

SoundHound, the voice AI platform, lays off 10% of staff citing ‘challenging market conditions’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Layoffs, Robotics & AI, SoundHoundNo Comments

SoundHound — maker of the voice AI technology used by Mercedes-Benz, Deutsche Telecom, Snap and Mastercard and more — has laid off about 10% of its workforce amid ongoing economic turmoil across global markets. The Santa Clara-headquartered company — which went public via a SPAC in April of this year — announced the decision to its employees on Wednesday. Alongside that, it also imposed salary cuts for some of those not laid off. The company did not specify the details of the salary cuts, nor how many were affected. “Yesterday, we announced to our SoundHounders that we are taking actions to streamline our company, including an approximate 10% reduction in workforce. We don’t take this lightly, but in the face of challenging market conditions, we must channel our investments into the areas that continue to drive growth and allow us to best serve our customers. We’re extremely grateful to the departing colleagues that have contributed to our success as a leading voice AI platform,” said Fiona J McEvoy, a director of corporate communications at SoundHound, in a statement emailed to ZebethMedia. SoundHound has a total headcount of 450 employees — meaning that the layoff has impacted around 45 people. The company will likely share more details during its Q3 earnings call later today. Founded in 2005, SoundHound offers its voice AI platform in 25 languages. It powers voice-enabled experiences in a number of the cars provided by Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz and Honda. Earlier this month, the company also tied up with Samsung’s Harman International to offer fully OEM-owned and branded in-vehicle voice experience to several vehicles. Alongside offering its standalone platform to companies, SoundHound has two mobile apps, namely SoundHound Music that works similar to Apple’s Shazam and lets users discover music playing around them and Hound that offers voice-based search and assistance. In November last year, SoundHound announced it would go public via a SPAC transaction with blank check company Archimedes Tech SPAC Partners at a nearly $2.1 billion valuation. It was over 5x what Apple paid for its competitor Shazam, a $400 million announced in December 2017 and closed in September 2018. But its fortunes as a public company have been mixed. In its last quarterly results for the second quarter that ended on June 30, SoundHound reported a 26% year-on-year revenue drop to $6.2 million, while Q2 net loss spiked to nearly $31 million, compared to $15 million in the same quarter a year before. And its market cap, like that of many tech companies at the moment, is not doing very well. It’s currently trading at around $2/share with a market cap of $406 million. SoundHound has become another tech company to take the layoff route during this economic slowdown. In addition to recent layoffs announced by Facebook owner Meta and Twitter, others including Netflix, Salesforce, Spotify and Tencent and many others have cut collectively tens of thousands of jobs in the last several months. Indian startups such as Byju’s, Ola and Unacademy have also laid off hundreds of employees to reduce their operating expenses amid dip in funding and investments.

GitHub teases new Copilot feature that lets developers code with their voice • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Copilot, Enterprise, GitHub, GitHub Copilot, Hey GitHub, Robotics & AINo Comments

GitHub is working on a new tool that will allow developers to code with their voice. Announced at the annual GitHub Universe conference yesterday, the experimental feature works in tandem with Copilot, GitHub’s controversial AI-powered pair-programmer that collaborates with software developers by suggesting functions or lines of code — a bit like Gmail’s Smart Compose. Copilot officially launched for everyone back in June, costing $10 per month or $100 per year after a free 60-day trial. GitHub is serving access to the new voice feature via a waitlist that’s open for interested developers now, but essentially it will allow developers to activate Copilot’s ears via the “Hey, GitHub” wake word. It is limited in scope for the time being, insofar as it only works with Microsoft’s source-code editor VS Code, but it’s apparently working to expand things in the future. According to GitHub, its new voice assistant can understand natural language requests for Copilot to suggest a code snippet, or summarize what a specific section of code does. But even if a developer doesn’t want any code suggestions, it can serve other practical use-cases such as helping them navigate a codebase by saying something like “Hey GitHub, go to line 34,” or even control the IDE by toggling to zen mode. GitHub copilot voice assistant in action Image Credits: GitHub While this is still an early stage experiment developed by an R&D team called GitHub Next, it could have significant ramifications from an accessibility perspective, as it reduces the amount of interaction that’s required with a mouse and keyboard. It’s also not clear whether Copilot is yet able to talk back to a developer, but based on the initial demonstrations GitHub has published, it would appear not. A two-way dialog could be useful though, for example if a developer wants a quick audio summary of what a piece of code does, or if Copilot needs clarification on a specific request the user has made. Elsewhere at GitHub Universe yesterday, the Microsoft-owned company also revealed that it would soon targeting Copilot at the enterprise, with a new plan that allows businesses to buy licenses at a seat level — this will also mean additional admin controls so companies can manage and control their Copilot deployment across the organization.

OpenAI leads $23.5M round in Mem, an AI-powered note-taking app • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in AI, Enterprise, funding, Mem, note taking, OpenAI, Robotics & AI, StartupsNo Comments

Last year, OpenAI announced the OpenAI Startup Fund, a tranche through which it and its partners, including Microsoft, are investing in early-stage AI companies tackling major problems. Mum’s been the word since on which companies have received infusions from the Fund. But today, the OpenAI Startup Fund revealed that it led a $23.5 million investment in Mem, a work-focused app that taps AI to automatically organize notes. The investment values Mem at $110 million post-money and brings the startup’s total raised to $29 million. Co-founded by Kevin Moody and Dennis Xu, Mem differentiates itself from traditional note-taking apps by emphasizing “lightweight organization,” in Moody and Xu’s words. The workflow revolves around search and a chronological timeline, allowing users to attach topic tags, tag other users and add recurring reminders to notes. Mem users can capture quick notes, send links and save images from anywhere using SMS, messaging apps and the platform’s mobile client. Collaboration features let teams share, edit and comment on notes and directly attach them to shared calendars for faster reference. Mem’s search experience uses AI to search across notes, aiming to understand which notes might be most relevant in a given moment to a particular person. Moody and Xu say the platform is designed to augment knowledge workers in their typical responsibilities, like reading through pages of information, extracting the pieces relevant to a particular question and transforming the information into an answer or a report. Image Credits: Mem There’s no doubt knowledge-seeking tasks are time-consuming. According to Gartner, professionals spend 50% of their working hours searching for information and on average take 18 minutes to locate a file (albeit the veracity of metrics like these has been challenged over the years). One source estimates that document disorganization costs businesses $3,900 per employee each year in productivity losses, making Mem an attractive proposition if the tech works as advertised. “The number one thing we hear from the organizations we talk to is the desire to be able to marry their vast troves of proprietary knowledge with … generative AI models — to support use cases that range from conducting research to writing to selling and beyond,” Moody and Xu told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “The magic of Mem is that we bring together your own private and proprietary data along with state-of-the-art generative language models to unlock truly personalized, factual outputs. We combine knowledge sources across the individual, team and organizational levels, leading to significantly better performance across the board.” Mem recently launched Mem It for Twitter, which allows users to save threads, get AI-generated summaries of their contents and see suggestions for similar tweets. It’s also continuing to refine Mem X, Mem’s built-in work assistant, with new features like Smart Write and Smart Edit, which leverages AI to generate text based on a prompt, summarize files, generate titles for documents and let users use natural language commands to edit or format text. Image Credits: Mem The plan for the foreseeable future is to increasingly lean into these sorts of AI-powered experiences, Moody and Xu say, with support from OpenAI through the OpenAI Startup Fund. OpenAI Startup Fund participants receive early access to new OpenAI systems and Azure resources from Microsoft in addition to capital. “OpenAI is obviously leading the wave of technological revolutions that we are riding,” Moody and Xu said. “This makes the OpenAI Startup Fund the ideal partner for what we’re building — for both the technical expertise and strategic guidance they bring to the table.” Mem competes with a number of companies seeking to tackle the same knowledge-finding and notes-organizing challenges. In enterprise search, there’s Glean, which recently raised $100 million in a venture equity round. On the knowledge management side, Atlassian’s wiki-like collaborative workspace Confluence and Notion, which was valued at $2 billion in 2020, still dominate. But Moody and Xu argue that 16-employee Mem has an advantage in that it’s “self-organizing,” ostensibly resulting in less manual curation and labor. While they declined to reveal Mem’s revenue or the names of any major customers, they assert that Mem is successful, owing to its AI-driven tech. “We’re confident in our unique approach to self-organizing and generative knowledge management. … Our personalized machine learning models not only help knowledge workers stay organized automatically, but also go beyond simply helping find things — we actually help people do their work,” Moody and Xu said. “The shift to remote work has made effective, asynchronous knowledge sharing more important than ever, and the market slowdown has caused companies to focus on efficiency. Our AI-assisted knowledge work saves people time, and the rapid improvement in large language models gives us a further tailwind.”

Movio wants to make your marketing videos with generative AI • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in ai generated content, ai generated image, Enterprise, la, Los Angeles, movio, Open AI, Robotics & AI, Stability AI, Stable Diffusion, text-to-imageNo Comments

Generative AI is suddenly everywhere. Over the past year, you’ve probably seen people showcasing impressive AI-generated artworks, thanks to progress in text-to-image algorithms introduced by groups like OpenAI and Stability AI. A proliferation of startups is now trying to devise applications for this new class of language model, where the machine is capable of creating new text, images, and videos based on simple human input. One of them is Movio, a two-year-old startup leveraging generative AI along with other machine learning frameworks like GAN to make videos featuring talking human avatars. The platform is going after marketers with a Canva-style drag-and-drop interface. Users will first pick from a range of templates, be it a theme for a shopping site or a trip to Japan. Then they can add a hyperrealistic avatar to be the video’s “spokesperson”, with speech generated by text input. The outfit, face, and voice of the AI-made human can be swapped with a click. Movio’s user base is currently in the lower hundreds of thousands, with paying customers nearing 1,000. It has so far raised around $9 million in funding from investors including IDG, Sequoia Capital China, and most recently, Baidu Ventures. Xu met his co-founder and CFO Liang Wang, a veteran of ByteDance and the music social network Smule, when the two were studying at Carnegie Mellon University. Last year, we covered how Movio, which was then called Surreal, landed a brilliant use case for deepfake. At the time, the company was based in Shenzhen, the hardware haven also known for its vibrant export-led e-commerce industry — most of Amazon’s sellers are from the metropolis. Merchants were using Movio to create promo videos narrated by synthesized humans, doing away with the need to hire real models. Movio recently moved to Los Angeles, where its co-founder and CEO Josh Xu previously worked for six years as a Snap engineer. That’s because the startup is hoping to capture the wave of marketers who are warming up to AI tools to assist their job. “We are doing what Jasper and Copy.ai do but for video production,” Xu said to ZebethMedia, referring to two of the top AI content helpers of today. “Videos are powerful — just image if marketers can send emails with talking human avatars instead of plain text.” Movio can only synthesize talking heads for now, but it’s working toward a future where its algorithms can generate whole-body movement, which will allow the company to get closer to its goal of being an “all-in-one AI video production platform.” The startup charges users by the length of videos, which is correlated with the script they submit, as well as a premium fee from those who use customized faces, a feature that is particularly popular for “corporate training,” according to Xu. Movio has also opened its API to third-party websites, some of which are using its engine to create pop-up customer support avatars. “AI-generated video is just a small segment within the AIGC [AI generated content] industry. We’ve seen how much text-to-image can do, and I expect text-to-video to bring about even greater disruption when it’s ready,” said Xu.

Wing brings drone delivery options to DoorDash customers in Logan, Australia • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in App, Apps, DoorDash, drone delivery, Robotics & AI, Transportation, wingNo Comments

DoorDash is teaming up with Alphabet’s Wing to offer customers an easier way to arrange for goods to be delivered via drone. Beginning this week, a small number of DoorDash users in Logan, Australia will be able to order certain convenience and grocery items through the DoorDash app and have them delivered by a Wing drone, typically in 15 minutes or less, Wing says. The experience looks much like it does with a typical DoorDash delivery. A dedicated “DoorDash Air” carousel in the app highlights items eligible for Wing drone delivery, and the GPS location of orders is tracked in real time. Perhaps the only major difference is, unlike a standard DoorDash delivery, users who order via drone will be asked to specify a delivery spot in the app where their package can be safely lowered from the drone once it arrives. As Wing notes on its corporate blog, the DoorDash partnership is a step toward opening Wing’s platform so that its delivery service can be accessed via third party apps. “We see this new functionality as a logical step on this journey to make drone delivery a plug-and-play option for more businesses and consumers — no matter what app they use,” the company writes. Image Credits: DoorDash For DoorDash, the collab signals the company’s ongoing commitment to autonomous delivery tech. Last year, DoorDash introduced DoorDash Labs , a division focused on building automation and robotics solutions for last-mile deliveries. Separately, DoorDash has piloted delivery robots from vendors including Starship Technologies. Wing’s tie-in with DoorDash comes at an especially precarious time for the drone delivery industry. Technical, logistical and financial hurdles have impeded major players’ progress toward ubiquitous drone delivery — assuming that’s even an achievable vision. A report from Bloomberg earlier this year revealed that Amazon, for example, which has been developing delivery drones for years, has yet to overcome key safety concerns and technological limitations. Wing has wisely kept its scope smaller, focusing on a select few markets including several cities across Australia, Finland and Virginia and Texas in the U.S. The company has had to contend with its own share of issues, including neighbors irked by the drones’ loud propellers and weather-related flight disruptions. But Wing has achieved some success to date, reaching 200,000 lifetime deliveries in March 2022 and inking partnerships with supermarket chains like Australia’s Coles and Walgreens. According to analyst firm Research and Markets, the global drone package delivery market could be worth $5.56 billion by 2030. Among others, carriers like FedEx and UPS and retailers such as Walmart are testing autonomous drone cargo flights for short-haul deliveries.