Joi, ChemCrow and the Economic Potential of Generative AI – Live and Learn #20

✨ Quote ✨

What AI could be – A way to make everything we care about better.

– Marc Andreessen - (source)

🖇️ Links 🖇️

LLMs with chemistry tools by Andres M. Bran et al. ChemCrow is an LLM that can do "autonomous task solving in chemistry". This means that the model can accurately describe the steps necessary to synthesize chemical compounds. Ask how to synthesize penicillin and it will happily answer. The model is built on an LLM that is consulting expert systems for the detailed chemical knowledge necessary to produce coherent output and prevent hallucinations. And the results are nuts. Especially from a safety point of view a lot of harm can be done with models like this. The authors recognize this and didn't release the full code for the model. But the rest, the part that is deemed safe, can be found on Github.

An Erotic AI Chatbot named Joi. Yes... You can also use LLTMs for stuff like that... Joi is a telegram bot or "AI girlfriend" that sends erotic voice messages and even generates imagery. The thought of people actually falling in love with systems like these is creepy. Especially if the love is real and could be lost at any moment due to the company discontinuing the service, going bankrupt, or the users not having enough money anymore to pay for the credits. Either way, the world we are moving towards is looking increasingly like an insane techno dystopia. Once technology like this is combined with widespread VR glasses, humanoid robots, or even brain-machine interfaces, we will truly live in some sort of weird sci-fi movie.

AI powered Applications Builder by ForgeAI. Build all sorts of crazy applications simply by connecting LLMs and other AI building blocks together. ForgeAI has a few impressive examples of what is possible to build with their platform. And their website even sports a marketplace where people can offer the apps that they've made. To me, platforms like ForgeAI show the possibility of building crazy applications within mere hours. Features that once were complex and hard to implement, features that needed entire development teams, can now be implemented leisurely – on an afternoon with a good cup of coffee and some AI magic.

The Economic Potential of Generative AI by McKinsey. According to this report, the generative AI market will be worth around $3 trillion, which is equivalent to the entire GDP of the UK! It will have a big impact on all business sectors, but the ones that will be affected the most are customer operations, marketing, software engineering, and R&D. Moreover, generative AI has the potential to transform the way we work by substantially increasing overall labor productivity. The full 68-page report has many more insights and goes into much more detail than the shorter web version and this summary. It can be found here.

🌌 Midjourney 🌌

Midjourney also got a BIG update published: Version 5.2 dropped and it enables a new feature called "zooming out".

To me, this seems like magic. The consistency between the images is insane. It looks like a real person photographed in a different location. And yet it isn't and only took a few minutes to generate. But how? How can you generate such coherent images in only a few minutes?

The idea is simple. You generate a base image like this:

Then you zoom out with prompts that add more context like "in the Arctic", "in the desert", "on a street in New York" etc. so that Midjourney dreams up the base image with the surrounding context that you want. Would you have guessed that the wizard image at the beginning was generated this way too?

Anyways, with tech like this, AI girlfriends will soon get their own online presences, starting to blur the line between what is real and what isn't even more...

You could even have Instagram accounts for persons that don't exist, or create fake dating profiles. The possibility of deep-faking seemingly real personas to scam people just got a lot scarier. You can generate a person with a complete backstory, including images and profile data in a couple of hours, even including a custom voice and soon even 3D avatars and video... This means that we move towards a world where you can't really trust any digital content anymore unless it's GPG signed by a trusted key.

But on the bright side, Midjourney's zoom-out can also be used to generate nice pieces of art 😉.

Here are some more examples:

🎶 Song 🎶

Way Out by FKJ

Youtube Music | Spotify

---

I hope you found this newsletter useful, beautiful, or even both!

Have ideas for improving it? Please let me know.

Cheers,

– Rico