Strange Daily: Issue #9

OpenAI brings fine-tuning capabilities to GPT3.5, Midjourney releases inpainting feature, AI creative tools receive fresh fundings.

August 24, 2023

Welcome to Issue #9 of Strange Daily, your bi-weekly bulletin of all things AI and creativity. Lots of new updates from AI players like OpenAI, Midjourney, and Eleven Labs. AI startups building creative tools receive fresh financings.

Latest news

  • OpenAI brings fine-tuning to GPT-3.5 Turbo [Link]

  • Meta to launch AI ‘off-switch’ in Europe, confirms non-personalized content feeds on Facebook, Instagram in Europe [Link]

  • Midjourney releases a new Inpainting feature that allows users to modify any part of an image and add more elements to it [Link]

  • ElevenLabs exits beta phase, introduces advanced AI-powered voice synthesis platform that supports over 30 languages and offers emotionally rich speech generation [Link]

  • Alibaba unveils AI mathematical tool MindOpt Copilot [Link]

🤝 Partnerships

  • AI-based photo editing app PhotoRoom teams up with Lionsgate: Launches an AI-selfie generator for fans for the fourth installment of the The Expendables movie franchise [Link]

  • Frost Giant Studios collaborates with the Chainsmokers for the soundtrack of its real-time strategy game, Stormgate [Link]

🎓 Recent Academic Papers

  • Google AI research propose a general approach for personalized text generation using LLMs [Link to abstract/full-text] 

  • Together AI unveils Llama-2-7B-32K-Instruct: A breakthrough in extended-context language processing [Link to abstract/full-text]

  • Hugging Face introduces IDEFICS: Pioneering open multimodal conversational AI with visual language models [Link to abstract/full-text]

  • AudioLDM 2: A unique AI framework for audio generation that blends speech, music and sound effects [Link to abstract/full-text]

  • MIT unveils a revolutionary system leveraging light for machine learning, surpassing ChatGPT’s capabilities [Link to abstract/full-text]

  • CoDEF: An AI model that allows you to do realistic video style editing, segment-based tracking and video super-solution [Link to abstract/full-text]

🔧 Cool Tools and Experiments

  • Narraton: An AI-powered projector by MIT students that tells stories by merging AI and old-school design [Link] 

  • MumsGPT: An AI chatbot enriched with over 20 years of parenting insights [Link]

💰 Latest Startup Fundings

  • AI writing tool Lex raised a $2.75M seed round led by True Ventures [Link]

  • Modyfi raises $7M in seed funding led by NEA: Launches full public beta for its AI-native design platform [Link]

  • Wand.app raises $4.2M for its AI-powered creative tool that gives artists the ability to manually customize and visualize their ideas [Link]

That’s it for this edition. Stay tuned, and stay strange.