😺 Pika 1.0

PLUS: Amazon in the post-Bezos era looks pretty good

Welcome, humans.

“Authentic” is Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2023, standing in stark contrast to a finalist: "deepfake". Also on the list is “rizz” (= having romantic charm = you’ve got game), a term that has never been used to describe anyone in the AI community.

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

Pika 1.0 is here—the best AI video tool we’ve seen yet!
Amazon announced Q, an AI assistant for AWS customers.
Stable Diffusion turbo can generative AI images in real-time.
OpenAI isn’t expected to offer Microsoft/investors board seats…

Pika is the best AI video tool we’ve seen yet…

Pika

The only thing that makes VCs drool more than Patagonia vests are two Stanford PhD dropouts with a new idea.

Meet Pika.

The startup made a splash yesterday (>6M views) with the launch of its AI video platform “Pika 1.0”.

You describe an idea (e.g. "Elon Musk in a spacesuit, 3D animation”) → Pika transforms it into an animated video (see the amazing results here)!

From there you can do things like…

add text captions.
add/subtract items from a video.
inpainting/masking.
transfer styles.
expand canvases.

…and more, all by using your words like a good boy.

It’s the most impressive demo we’ve seen in the text-to-video realm (no offense, Runway).

Why it matters: Pika’s mission isn’t to replace Hollywood film production but to empower “everyday consumers” to create stunning 3D animation, anime, cartoon, and cinematic videos just by typing.

And to that, we say “bravo”.

The technical barriers to bringing ideas to life—for entertainment AND work—will soon be extremely low, paving the way for a whole new generation of video creatives.

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Amazon introduced a chatbot assistant for AWS customers.

AWS

At its re:Invent conference in Vegas yesterday, Amazon showcased big AI advancements to let the world know it’s not falling behind in a post-Bezos era.

The biggest news is Amazon Q, a chatbot for enterprises on AWS.

Q (not to be confused with OpenAI’s secret project Q*) is Amazon’s take on “ChatGPT but for big business”: 1) plugs into major systems like M365, Salesforce, and your internal wikis and 2) only uses info that a particular user is allowed to see.

Both have long been big asks by big companies.

Q’s flagship use case? Making AWS easier to use (l o l), drawing on “17 years of AWS knowledge and experience”.

Which is the enterprise IT version of the “landlord special”—just slap a chatbot over everything…

TBD on how powerful Q is (it’s a blend of models from Bedrock), but Amazon was adamant about prioritizing privacy and reducing 'hallucinations'—a nod to Bedrock’s recent safety guardrails.

In other news, they unveiled two intriguing chips for AI training, dubbed Trainium2 and Graviton4 (odd names, huh?), plus they bagged early access to Nvidia’s sought-after H200 Tensor Core GPUs.

Around the Horn.

Stability AI launched Stable Diffusion turbo which churns out AI images in real-time—give it a whirl on Clipdrop here!
OpenAI isn’t expected to offer board seats to Microsoft/other investors.
Startups like Ramp are using results from OpenAI’s models to fine-tune cheaper open-source models like Llama 2 (even though it’s technically a no-no).
A new Microsoft paper explores GPT-4’s huge potential in radiology.

Wednesday Wirings.

Pika, the AI video platform we covered today, raised $55M from Lightspeed and the CEOs of Quora, HuggingFace, Giphy, Perplexity, ElevenLabs, AND Tome…
Dell secured a $150 million deal to provide servers to AI startup Imbue for advanced AI models.
AI21, a maker of AI models for enterprises, raised $53M.
Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain interface startup, snagged another $43M.
Cradle, which helps scientists design and engineer proteins with AI, raised $24M.

We curated the top 27 tools you need for work in our “Top Tools For Business”!