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Bobby Brazen
October 29, 2022

Here's your daily briefing:

Check out this AI startup brainstorming thread from Sarah Guo:

I am getting many emails asking what kind of apps I think are interesting in AI. ten-minute brainstorm of free startup ideas — some aren't good businesses, some have been tried, but not nearly enough of these have been tried when capabilities are improving so rapidly. please add!
— sarah guo 🇵🇹 in Lisbon 11/1-11/3 (@saranormous)
10:01 PM • Oct 29, 2022

Speaking of Ms. Guo, she is mentioned in this Wired article discussing the "gold rush" into generative AI right now:

AI's New Creative Streak Sparks a Silicon Valley Gold Rush

Investors have got the hots for "generative AI" that can make text and images. But so far, the hype runs ahead of the business results.

https://www.wired.com/story/ais-new-creative-streak-sparks-a-silicon-valley-gold-rush/

We found this to be a pretty thought-provoking read from Scott Stevenson about AI legibility, in particular, and the mental frameworks best suited to the near-future, in general.

As neural networks better at chess, they become more illegible: you can't explain why they make the moves they do in words
This will happen in the world at large as we approach singularity: you won't be able to explain in words why anyone does what they do
— Scott Stevenson (@scottastevenson)
4:52 PM • Oct 29, 2022

Particularly this tweet:

The ability to stop thinking in stories, IMO, will be one of the most powerful skills in the next 10-20 years
— Scott Stevenson (@scottastevenson)
5:31 PM • Oct 29, 2022

In a world that is technologically evolving as rapidly as ours, what do we do with our human need for narratives and models when we have none for what's coming?

Will it indeed be a superpower going forward to be able to trust the guidance of AI (or ones own intuition) without needing a comprehensive explanation or without knowing "why"? It's interesting to think of how this might affect our conception of "faith". Will trusting in the wisdom of AI be the modern version of trusting in a higher power?

Astria AI allows you to generate stylized art from your own user-uploaded image. Yet another reason why we're closer and closer to the point where all of our content can be AI-driven to "star" ourselves or our friends.

Generative AI is getting crazier and crazier 🤯
Astria lets you generate AI art that starts with your own images. You upload pictures of yourself (or anything else) and get hyper-realistic art from it.
Check out these examples. 👇
— Product Hunt 😸 (@ProductHunt)
4:00 AM • Oct 29, 2022

Along these same lines there's Avatar AI by Levelsio which allows you to upload multiple photos of yourself and create your own AI-generated avatar. Check out some of these tweets showing how people have used it:

As of now Avatar AI costs $30 for a set of custom generated avatars, whereas Astria's "Finetune Credits" are $5 each. This seems like a perfect example of how these generative AI's will be monetized and, more specifically, how healthy, ubiquitous competition will drive the price of any given proprietary model downward.

In the meantime, there are lots of micro-markets and niche-models to capitalize on:

With tools like this by Krea AI, it will become easier and easier to describe our prompts in everyday, conversational language:

we built a #stablediffusion conversational UI ✨
who wants to try it out? (dm)
— KREA AI (@krea_ai)
10:28 PM • Oct 3, 2022

When Tupac x Biggie "Reconciliation Tour"?

6. Tupac Will Come Back:
People are focusing on AI writing and images, but music hasn't been priced in yet.
An algorithm trained on their music will create new tracks from Tupac, Biggie, Winehouse, Hendrix, etc
— George Mack (@george__mack)
3:09 PM • Oct 28, 2022