😺 AI Spielberg in your pocket

PLUS: We found the *perfect* AI use case

Welcome, humans.

Here at The Neuron, we scour far and wide every day to find the ultimate AI use case, and finally, we can report that we’ve finally found it: inventing new breeds of cats!

Thankfully, these cats are AI-generated and not real-life lab experiments—but the creator did use a combination of Midjourney (images), Luma (video), and Suno (music) to bring these cats to life.

Check ‘em out!

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha is harder than it looks to get good results. We share our tips.
OpenAI’s secretive project “Strawberry” might be really good at math.
Google Gemini was caught snooping on a user’s private docs.
Alma is a startup speeding up the visa process using AI.

How to get the best results from Runway Gen 3 Alpha.

We’ve seen all these amazing AI video demos coming out lately, like those from Runway’s Gen 3 Alpha and Luma’s Dream Machine. They might not be SORA-level just yet, but some of them are pretty amazing, like this car transforming into a pop-up cafe.

These demos make me think all you need to do is input your debit card #, buy some video credits, start prompting, and before you know it, you can become the Steven Spielberg of AI.

In practice, it’s not so easy. In reality, Runway often produces results that look like they’re straight out of a physics or shift dream, like this music video of octogenarians getting absolutely lit on the dance floor!

We spent the last week playing around with Gen 3 Alpha (which you can start using for free!), and this is what we’ve found:

Does a great job with anything fantastical, like transformations or monsters, or monsters that transform.
Struggles with human-like things, like real bodies moving through physical spaces or interacting with devices.
Generates standalone environments fairly well; just avoid background actors (unless from a bird's eye view).

Why’s this stuff so hard? First, teaching an AI to create videos that maintain semantic and contextual coherence in the first place is near impossible. And even if you do get a model to do this reasonably well, it can sometimes take hundreds of attempts (i.e. new prompts) to get good results.

And cause it’s all so new, there are not many helpful resources just yet.

Luckily, Runway has this guide to help provide some tips for how to get the best results. Here’s the prompt format they recommend:

“[camera movement]: [establishing scene]. [additional details].”

Here’s what that looks like in practice: “Low angle static shot: The camera is angled up at a woman wearing all orange as she stands in a tropical rainforest with colorful flora. The dramatic sky is overcast and gray.”

An actual still from a Neuron-generated Gen 3 Alpha test!

Here are some of our personal recs when using these AI video generators:

Focus on single subjects (for now). For best results, avoid interactions with devices or mention of other people in the background.
Avoid hands if possible—they just get weird. Subjects walking, closeups, or “medium close” angles at shoulder height or above should work fine with a few generations.
Go long, then cut down. Plan to generate 10-second clips that you’ll edit down to 2-3 seconds of usable footage.

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IncomeMax chose AE Studio to build a friendly, on-brand chatbot called “Max” to greet users who come to IncomeMax for financial assistance.

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Tell AE Studio exactly what you’re looking to build here.

Around the Horn.

Google will soon release a tool to create video recordings inside a presentation when you drop in a Google Slides or Docs.
OpenAI’s new AI project, which might be dubbed “Strawberry,” apparently scored over 90% on the MATH dataset (which is really good).
A Twitter user claimed that Google Gemini summarized its tax returns without his consent, and that the settings to prevent this… don’t exist?

Treats To Try.

*Neighborhood Sun is a cleantech startup connecting everyone to affordable solar energy. Invest as little as $250 in Neighborhood Sun before its early bird terms end.
Alma uses AI to simplify the visa process for top tech, business, and research talent (raised $5.1M).
HowsThisGoing is an AI Slack bot for summarizing standup meetings and generating progress reports.
Fireworks AI helps enterprises create faster AI models (raised $25M).

*This is sponsored content. Advertise in The Neuron here.

Tuesday Ticker.

Here are the results from last week’s poll:

M.D. chose No way: “Humor has a lot to do with feelings. I don't think AI can match the feelings a human uses to come up with a catchy punchline.”
P. chose It already is: “With the right training and prompting, it can be moderately funny. It still takes a human to go in and elevate it.”
D.S. chose Yes, but it’s still practicing: “99% of humans trying to be funny, aren’t. So not surprising it’s a higher hurdle for AIs. As much as we want to believe that as humans there’s something ineffable about us, it’s probably just a matter of degree of complexity, not kind. Everything we do is pattern-based. Just some patterns will take longer for AIs to figure out. ”