- The Rundown AI
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- Hollywood's AI alarm bells
Welcome, AI enthusiasts.
After seeing the mind-blowing capabilities of OpenAI’s Sora, the entertainment business is bracing for impact.
Hollywood mogul Tyler Perry is going as far as slamming pause on a $800M film studio expansion — warning that an AI crisis is about to hit the industry. Let’s get into it…
In today’s AI rundown:
Tyler Perry halts studio expansion over AI fears
Tech titans back Figure AI in $675M funding round
Automate meeting notes with Notion AI
OpenAI’s mysterious Feather platform
7 new AI tools & 4 new AI jobs
More AI & tech news
Read time: 4 minutes
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
HOLLYWOOD & AI
Image source: Getty Images
The Rundown: Hollywood mogul Tyler Perry revealed he halted a major studio expansion after seeing OpenAI’s Sora, predicting sweeping entertainment industry job losses from AI progress.
The details:
Perry paused his $800M film studio expansion after seeing Sora’s debut on Feb.15.
The Actor and director said he already employed AI for aging makeup effects in two upcoming films, saving hours of labor.
Perry said he doesn’t see how the industry survives without regulations to protect workers.
Perry called for an "all hands on deck" approach from Hollywood, urging unions and Congress to act and protect industry workers.
Why it matters: As studios weigh bottom lines against human livelihoods, it’s inevitable that AI is going to create major shakeups in the industry. While union deals and slow-moving legislation try to catch up, the tech is already here — and this is the worst it will ever be.
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FIGURE AI
Image source: Figure
The Rundown: Humanoid robotics startup Figure AI has reportedly secured a massive $675M funding round led by tech giants including Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
The details:
Bezos committed $100M, alongside Microsoft ($95M), Nvidia ($50M), Intel ($25M), Samsung ($5M) and more.
OpenAI and Microsoft initially led the round, and had even reportedly previously considered acquiring the robotics startup.
Figure aims to create robots that safely take on labor shortages in repetitive or hazardous jobs, with a recent partnership placing the tech in BMW’s car manufacturing plant.
Figure AI's pre-money valuation reaches roughly $2B with the new investments.
Why it matters: It’s not every day you see Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and other tech titans all on the same project, but the race to get humanoid robots to market is heating up — and everyone wants in. Expect the tech to get here a LOT sooner than people think.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: Using Notion AI, you can automatically summarize meetings, generate topic tags, capture tasks, organize meeting notes, and more with ‘auto-fill properties’.
Go to Notion or open the Notion app.
Establish a database for meeting notes, incorporating relevant properties. For example, the meeting date, attendees, a summary, topics discussed, and tasks assigned.
Enable Notion AI to autofill fields that can be generated from your meeting notes.
To do this, select 'Property', then 'Edit Property', then 'AI Auto-fill', and finally, insert the prompt or list of tags.
Bonus tip: Enable the 'Auto Update on Page Edits' feature so your properties stay up-to-date!
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OPENAI
Image source: Feather
The Rundown: Rumors swirled after the internet re-discovered an OpenAI landing page called ‘Feather’, with a patent filing describing the trademark as ‘data labeling and annotation services’.
The details:
Based on the trademark from November 2023, ‘Feather‘ appears to be an old service related to finetuning, data sets, etc., for enterprise partners.
Current speculation is that the site may be used by contractors who label sets of images, audio, code, and text for training AI models.
The website provides an ‘unauthorized user’ message when prompted to sign in.
Why it matters: The world is salivating for any new OpenAI releases — and while it does feel like something big is coming soon, Feather seems more like the rumor mill trying to make something out of nothing.
NEW TOOLS & JOBS
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📣 Type Prompt- Create engaging social media content with AI-driven hook prompts (link)
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🛠️ Dify AI- Create the custom AI agent using any LLM (link)
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QUICK HITS
Nvidia researcher Dr. Jim Fan announced he is co-founding a new research group named GEAR, aimed at building AI foundation agents spanning multimodal LLMs, general purpose robots, and more.
A new study from the Mozilla Foundation warns that AI romance chatbots pose privacy risks, collect sensitive user data, and may foster unhealthy behaviors.
Xiaomi showcased its new line of AI-infused phones, including an ‘AI Portraits’ feature that allows users to upload existing images to generate a portrait photo.
Perplexity announced a partnership with ElevenLabs, introducing a daily podcast narrated by the startup’s AI-generated voices.
Lexica unveiled Aperture v4, an upgraded image generation model that generates near 4k resolution images.
A consultant for Dem. presidential nominee Dean Phillips admitted to creating the AI-generated Joe Biden robocall that stirred controversy last month, though the campaign denies involvement and denounced the deepfake.
THAT’S A WRAP
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