Sunday Rundown #50: Stability AI Goes to Discord & Melted-Face Sand People
Sunday Showdown #10: Four free voice-cloning tools go head-to-head.
Happy Sunday, friends!
Welcome back to the weekly look at generative AI that covers the following:
Sunday Rundown + AI Fail (free): I share this week’s AI news and a fail for your entertainment.
Sunday Showdown + AI Tip (paid): I pit AI tools against each other and share a hands-on tip for working with AI.
On today’s “Sunday Showdown,” I’ll be testing four free voice-cloning tools.
I’ve now done 10 of these showdowns, so here’s a nice overview to help you find your way around:
Let’s get to it.
🗞️ AI news
Here are this week’s AI developments.
👩💻 AI releases
New stuff you can try right now:
While others are leaving Discord, Stability AI just launched a Discord bot called Stable Artisan, which can generate media using Stable Diffusion 3, Stable Video Diffusion, and Stable Image Core.
Microsoft released new Gen AI features for advertisers, including image generation, text overlays, and more.
YouTube is rolling out a “Jump Ahead” feature that lets you skip to the most popular section. At this time, it’s out for YouTube Premium subscribers in the US.
KREA AI has a new feature that creates cool interpolated videos transitioning between two given images.
Udio now offers an “inpainting” tool that lets you regenerate a specific section of the music track.
🔬 AI research
Cool stuff you might get to try one day:
Microsoft is reportedly training its own massive LLM with 500 billion parameters called MAI-1.
ElevenLabs previews an impressive text-to-music tool that appears to be better than both Udio and Suno.
Researchers at the Imperial College London showcased their EMOPortraits model that creates high-resolution, expressive human avatars.
📖 AI resources
Helpful stuff that teaches you about AI:
“The Future of AI” - Emily Chang (Bloomberg Originals) interviews Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai [VIDEO]
"AI at Work Is Here. Now Comes the Hard Part.” - 2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report from Microsoft and LinkedIn.
🔀 AI random
Other notable AI stories of the week:
Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs launched AlphaFold 3, which can predict the structure of proteins, DNA, RNA, ligands, etc. to help researchers with drug discovery and more.
OpenAI and Stack Overflow announced a partnership that lets OpenAI use OverflowAPI to improve its models while helping Stack Overflow develop its OverflowAI product.
🤦♂️ 10. AI fail of the week
Before this cartoon, there was this horror show:
Anything to share?
Sadly, Substack doesn’t allow free subscribers to comment on posts with paid sections, but I am always open to your feedback. You can message me here:
⚔️ Sunday Showdown (Issue #10) - Four free voice-cloning tools: Which is the best?
Remember how I once tried MyShell’s voice-cloning OpenVoice model.
I wasn’t impressed. At least not with the free public demo version.
ElevenLabs also offers voice cloning, and it’s probably great…but it isn’t free.
So for today’s challenge, I hunted down four tools that offer free voice cloning and put them to the test.
Let’s see which tool does the best job.
(Spoiler alert: One of them is a disaster.)