Meta's AI Image Generator 📷 X.AI to Raise $1 Billion 🤖 Cardano Price Jumps 🪙
Meta released its own image generator in the US last Wednesday. The company used 1.1 billion public images on Facebook and Instagram to train the model, based on its Emu image-synthesis model.
Meta’s AI Image Generator
US Adds 199,000 Jobs in November
X.AI to Raise $1 Billion
Google Releases Gemini
Cardano Price Jumps
Meta’s AI Image Generator Trained on Facebook Images 📸
Meta released its own image generator in the US last Wednesday.
The company used 1.1 billion public images on Facebook and Instagram to train the model, based on its Emu image-synthesis model, created earlier this year.
The market for image generators, perhaps much like the AI chatbot market, is becoming saturated now.
Others like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and even ChatGPT (if you have GPT-4) can be used to generate images now.
Meta says that they’ll handle potentially harmful output with filters and a watermarking system to make images traceable. Unfortunately, the watermarking system isn’t available just yet but will be rolled out soon.
Arstechnica say that the the system seems “about average these days in terms of AI image synthesis.”
Whether this will be enough to get people to use it remains to be seen but Meta is fairly late to the image generation game. It might need more than “fairly average” to gain any significant market share in the space.
US Adds 199,000 Jobs in November 📈
199,000 jobs were created in the US in November, a 33% jump from the 150,000 in October.
The unemployment rate also fell to 3.7%, down from 3.9% in the prior month.
The data add more weight to the argument that interest rates will remain at their current levels for higher than expected.
The Nasdaq rose 0.53% following Friday’s news and treasury bond yields fell 0.37%.
Futures markets also believe that the likelihood of rates falling in spring has fallen after the jobs report.
Odds on a quarter-point interest rate cut in March fell, while a full cut is still priced in for May.
The US dollar rose on the news and now stands at $1.25 to £1 and £1.08 to €1.
X.AI to Raise $1 Billion 🤖
Elon Musk’s AI startup, X.AI, filed with the SEC last week to raise up to $1 billion in an equity offering.
X.AI was incorporated in Nevada in March, and according to its website, its goal is to “Understand the Universe”.
The company released its own chatbot, Grok, on November 4th and it’s currently available to select X Premium+ users.
X.AI’s website says “Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor! It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”
Musk has said that investors in X would own 25% of X.ai and that the AI company will work closely with X, Tesla and others companies to make progress on its mission.
The date of the filing to raise the funds coincided with Musk’s appearance at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit in which he told advertisers who had suspended campaigns on X to “go fuck yourself”.
Google Releases Gemini 🤖
Google’s new Gemini family of large language models (LLM) were released on Wednesday. There are three “flavors” - Nano, Ultra and Pro.
The Nano version can run directly on a user’s mobile phone and Google hopes the models will help them in their effort to take on OpenAI, Microsoft and the other companies now entering the LLM space.
According to DeepMind’s release blog, “Gemini is the first model to outperform human experts on MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding), one of the most popular methods to test the knowledge and problem solving abilities of AI models.”
The Pro version is meant to compete against ChatGPT and the Nano version against smaller LLMs like LLaMa 2, Meta’s open source model.
The Ultra model is aimed at turning generative AI into a useful everyday tool and be built on.
Google has said that Gemini will be added to Chrome which will give billions of people access to any tools built on top of it.
Google’s Bard chatbot will also now be powered by Gemini.
The question is now whether Gemini can help Google catch up to ChatGPT (which already has 100 million weekly active users).
It’ll be interesting to see what else, if anything, Google builds on top of Gemini or whether the platform really is as capable as Google claims.
Their disastrous Bard release will still be in the minds of many but the AI battle between OpenAI/Microsoft and Google will likely only become more fierce in 2024.
Cardano Price Jumps 🪙
Tokens tied to Layer 1 blockchains gained on Friday, with Cardano leading, as Bitcoin’s price runup fuelled rotation into altcoins.
Cardano (ADA) was up to $0.63 at one point on Saturday, its highest level since the summer of 2022, but still well below its peak of $2.90 in August 2021.
ADA is up about 48% in the past week and currently has a market cap of about $26.6 billion.
Much like in early November, slowing Bitcoin momentum led traders to take profits from it and invest in smaller riskier cryptos like ADA.
In the crypto markets, it's common to see a pattern of investment shifts following significant increases in the value of Bitcoin.
Initially, there is a surge in investment in larger cryptocurrencies, which is then followed by a trend towards investing in meme coins and smaller-cap tokens.
Thanks for the link to my newsletter, Harry. I hope it resonates with your subs too!