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Gemini Raises Eyebrows 🕺🤔
What's Appening: Google Gemini AI, Epic Court Win, EU AI Laws, GTA 6, Decrypt Merger
3Advance Team
December 12, 2023
GOOGLE’S GEMINI IMPRESSES, BUT DEMO EMBELLISHES PERFORMANCE
👀 TLDR:
In this week’s What’s Appening, we take a look at Gemini, Google’s new AI engine that will take the fight directly to OpenAI. The demo of Gemini was impressive, although Google was accused of a little bit of fakery to make it look even more impressive. Still, it’s going to power everything from Bard to Search to YouTube to Pixel smartphones, and it certainly puts Google back on the map. But we also ask, with all these new AI applications and tools launching from Big Tech companies, where is Apple? This week, we also have bad news for Google, as Epic Games wins the long-running court battle over app store fees. We also brief you on the EU’s AI laws and a snazzy new app from Apple. Our Stat of the Week looks at GTA’s record-breaking trailer. And What’s dAppening sees maturity in web3 publishing as the latest big merger takes place.
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Takes 🎬
🕺🤔 Gemini – Google Releases LLM in Bid to Challenge OpenAI
Last week, Google announced Gemini, its Large Language Model designed to power its AI applications, such as Bard, and eventually other Google products like Search and YouTube. As an LLM, Gemini is best seen as a rival to GPT-4, the engine behind ChatGPT. The demo for Gemini was impressive, even if it later transpired that Google faked some of the best bits. Google was keen to stress the idea of “anything-to-anything”, meaning Gemini is multimodal and capable of working with audio, text, images, video, and code. We’d encourage you to check out the demo video, as well as the Android Developers’ Blog, which looks at Gemini offering a new foundation for AI on Android. Yet, we’d also like to draw your attention to another matter: Over the past few months, we’ve brought you news of new AI products, tools, and features from OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Samsung, Amazon, and now this big challenge to OpenAI’s dominance from Google. Notice someone missing? The consensus is that, despite rumors of working on a big generative AI project, the world’s biggest tech company is behind the curve. Over to you, Apple. #GeminiAI Read more here.
🏆🧑⚖️ Epic Games – Victory in Long-Running Battle with Google Over App Store Fees
Epic Games, the company behind the phenomenally popular Fortnite, has spent years in the courts fighting Apple and Google over app store fees. Yesterday, it won a huge victory over the latter. A jury unanimously found in Epic’s favor, ruling that Google’s app store is an illegal monopoly. The ruling could have huge repercussions on how app stores charge fees, which have already been challenged in the EU thanks to the Digital Markets Act. One of the key bits of evidence in the Epic case was Google’s practice of signing favorable deals with bigger developers, like Activision-Blizzard. Epic’s CEO Tim Sweeney said that all developers should have access to those competitive fees, not paying up to 30% as Google and Apple often demand. In fact, we will leave the last words to Sweeney, who said: “The dominoes are going to start falling here. The end of 30% (fees) is in sight.”. #EpicVictory Read more here.
👑 TikTok surpasses $10 billion in consumer spending. There’s no let-up in King TikTok’s popularity. It has just become the first non-gaming app to surpass $10 billion in in-app spending. It’s mostly down to the coins used to tip creators, of which TikTok takes a 50% cut. Kerching! Details are here.
⚖️ EU Passes the first comprehensive laws to regulate AI. The EU announced a new legal framework to regulate artificial intelligence. It is, as you might imagine, quite a hefty bill, but you can get some of the important details here.
📔 Apple’s Journal App has arrived. One of the low-key announcements from WWDC 23 was Journal, a new app from Apple that pushes iPhone users to record and reflect on special moments, just like a journal. It’s now been launched along with iOS 17.2. Get the details here.
🧐 Stat of the Week: 100m Views
🏎️👀 GTA 6 – Game Trailer Breaks 3 Guinness World Records in 24HRs
It’s become something of a meme in the gaming world to talk about the long wait for Grand Theft Auto 6 (GTA V was released in 2013!), yet fans were treated to a glimpse of what to expect when the YouTube trailer dropped on December 6th. And, boy, did it drum up excitement, hitting over 100m views within 24 hours. The trailer broke three world records within that time frame, including smashing Mr Beast’s record of 59 million views for a non-music video. Safe to say GTA 6 will probably break records, too, when it eventually arrives in 2025. Yes, you heard right. It’s been a long, long wait, and that wait will continue for at least another year. #GTA6Trailer Read more here.
🕸️ What’s dAppening?
🤝📰 Decrypt – Magazine Merges with Rug Radio to Create Web3 Publishing Brand
Web3 reporting has not yet come of age. In truth, it can be very shoddy. So we wade through the dross to bring you web3 stories that matter each week. But there are some quality publications, including Decrypt. It covers web3, as well as points of confluence with other tech, notably gaming and AI. Decrypt has just announced a merger with Rug Radio – a decentralized media platform – to create a global web3 publishing company. It is, in fact, the third major merger in web3 among media organizations in recent months, and we think that’s a good sign. The sector needs reliable reporting and accountability, and it needs authoritative voices. These mergers add weight to the ability to tell the ‘story of web3’ to the masses. #CryptoMerges Read more here.
Meanwhile at 3Advance...
We touched on this last week, but this week we want to cover some of our adventures in AI → Speech AI, to be precise. We’re currently working with three different speech engines, with projects in progress or kicking off in the New Year. What we’re investigating ranges from auto-generating audio/podcasts to audio translations for videos currently narrated in English. Here are some insights from our experimentation.
WellSaid Labs provides text-to-speech services through their website, starting at $49 per month. Their voice choices are excellent, and the speech is pretty realistic, though don’t try to make any jokes! They also offer an API with similar starting prices (that are negotiable) and we’re already using WellSaid Labs to generate the What’s Appening podcast.
Eleven Labs is another leader in the field. What’s different from WellSaid is that their available voices are just not quite as good as WellSaid’s. Though this might be a matter of opinion. Pricing is lower to get started, which is great, but what really stands out for Eleven Labs is that you can train it on your own voice, so that it speaks, well, just like you. It’s far from perfect at first, and it does take a little more effort to get it right. We’ll be launching some client apps in the new year that will use their API. Watch this space.
Meta Seamless, we talked about last week on What’s Appening. We’re still pretty amazed by it. What is most spectacular about Meta’s latest release, focused mainly on language translation, is that it carries across, from English to Spanish (for example) the inclination and expressive nature of natural speech. We highly recommend you check out the demo website with your own voice. Otherwise, scoot on over to LinkedIn where Paul uploaded a sample. Note that although Meta released the open-source model (where developers like us can deploy it ourselves), the license currently only allows non-commercial use. We expect that to change very soon.
Note that while we include starter pricing here, it really will take some personal investigation and math to calculate how much this will cost for your own needs. Obviously we’d love to hear what ideas you have for Speech AI. Next year we’ll be working on a lot of projects that involve Generative AI. Hopefully with you. ;) Reach out today if you’re ready to talk about it.
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