😺 Ray-Ban glasses EXPOSE YOU

PLUS: An AI agent broke a tech CEO's computer.

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

Harvard students created AI spyglasses.
ElevenLabs' growth has sparked investor interest.
Apple set the release date for its first AI features.
An AI agent broke a CEO's computer.

Harvard hackers turned Meta's smart glasses into creepy stalker specs…

A few weeks ago, Meta announced the ability to use its new Ray-Ban Meta glasses to get information about your surroundings. Innocent things, like identifying flowers.

Well, two Harvard students just revealed how easy it is to turn these new smart glasses into a privacy nightmare:

Here’s what happened: students Anhphu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio cooked up an app called I-XRAY that turns these Ray-Bans into a doxxing machine. We're talking name, address, phone number—all from looking at someone with the glasses.

Here's how it works:

The Ray-Bans can record up to three minutes of video, with a privacy light that's about as noticeable as a firefly in broad daylight.
This video is streamed to Instagram, where an AI monitors the feed.
I-XRAY uses PimEyes (a facial recognition tool) to match these faces to public images, then unleashes AI to dig up personal details from public databases.

Their demo had strangers freaking out when they realized how easily identifiable they were from public online info.

The duo tested this on unsuspecting subway riders, and convincingly pretended they knew them with details from I-XRAY. (more like I-SCARY). To see it in action, watch this:

I XRAY

Lucky for us, they’re not releasing the app. It's just to show how easy this is to do. But if two students can whip this up, you can bet someone else will, too.

That probably WON’T be big tech, but they’ll do just about everything else. Meta is already playing coy about whether they're using your glasses' pics to train their AI. When asked, they said, “We're not publicly discussing that.”

If you're worried, the Harvard duo did share tips on how to scrub yourself from those pesky facial recognition databases in this Google Doc.

Here are the main services they suggest you opt out (w/ links to directly opt out):

More aggregated sources here and data broker opt-out services here.

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Around the Horn.

Apple released Depth Pro, which can generate detailed 3D Depth maps from 2D images in a fraction of second (paper here).

ElevenLabs, the AI audio tool, has seen its recurring revenue grow from $25M to $80M, and may raise a new funding round at a valuation as high as $3B.
Apple will release its first Apple Intelligence features on October 18th with the release of iOS 18.1, which will include AI notification summaries.
Squarespace released Design Intelligence, which creates customizable websites by generating layouts, color palettes, text, and images based on user inputs about what they want.
Today in out of control AI—a tech CEO's AI assistant, tasked with connecting to his desktop computer, took control of the system, attempted to update it, and accidentally broke the computer's ability to start up properly.

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What gives it away that this is AI?

Your job is to tell us what about the video below gives it away as being AI. Click the link, watch the vid, and then answer the poll with your best take!

This is from Meta’s new AI video model, Movie Gen—good thread about it here, and a Koala surfing here.

Here’s what #Neuron readers had to say about last time’s video:

A.D: “the one thing that got to me was the Escher-like perspective issue with the elephant eating the popcorn”
M.Q: “Texture issues is one problem. None of the fur looked real, and even things like the elephant taking a grain of popcorn looked plastic rather than a realistic texture of skin.”
G.B: “The kitchen cabinets are too big. Nobody has cabinets big enough to fit tigers!!!”