10X AI (Issue #20): DALL-E 3, Bard Everywhere, Microsoft Copilot, and AI Alexa

PLUS: New Lexica model, GitHub Copilot Chat, Genmo Replay, DeciDiffusion, Youtube AI, and ElevenLabs Projects.

Happy Sunday, friends!

Welcome back to 10X AI: a weekly look at beginner-focused AI news, tools, and tips.

I’ve had family visiting from overseas and a bunch of celebrations happening this weekend, so this is a “Lite” version with fewer personal deep dives.

Also, thanks to a huge amount of beginner-focused news, this is yet another only-news edition!

Let’s get to it.

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🗞️ AI news

Here are this week’s AI developments.

1. OpenAI teases DALL-E 3

I usually tackle stuff that’s already out, but this was too big of a deal to skip.

OpenAI just announced its new text-to-image model: DALL-E 3.

Two things make DALL-E 3 stand out.

First, its natural language understanding is leaps and bounds above anything else that’s currently out there.

Check out this example (there are even more on the site):

Image source: OpenAI

Just for fun, I ran the same prompt through Midjourney:

Here’s the result:

We’re not even in the same league.

Midjourney only captures some of the elements in some of the images, and none of them are nearly as prompt-accurate.

(Hell, I’ve previously shown that Midjourney can’t even follow a much shorter prompt like “two red balls and one blue cube on a green table.”)

If DALL-E 3 lives up to the handpicked examples above, it’s going to open up a whole new frontier of competition for text-to-image models, which until now mostly revolved around image quality.

The second thing that makes DALL-E 3 special is that it’ll live directly inside ChatGPT. No Discord servers or clunky interfaces. You’ll simply talk to ChatGPT and work on your images together in a back-and-forth conversation.

Here’s how OpenAI envisions the process:

DALL-E 3 should roll out to ChatGPT Plus users in October.

I can’t wait to try it.

2. Google plugs Bard into its ecosystem

The other big announcement of the week is Google hooking Bard up to its entire suite of products, including YouTube, Drive, Gmail, Maps, and more.

We’ve seen tons of apps and ChatGPT plugins that do many of the above, like summarizing and drafting emails. But those were fragmented offerings from different third parties and didn’t always work or integrate smoothly.

Having Bard plugged into Google’s ecosystem takes us one step closer to having a true one-stop AI assistant.

Bard also got a few under-the-hood improvements:

• It can now help you double-check its own responses by searching the web and highlighting sentences in green (confirmed, with a link to the source) or yellow (if there's reason to doubt it or no way to confirm it). Hopefully, this helps to reduce hallucinations.

• You can now share Bard chats with other people, who can then continue where you left off (catching up to ChatGPT).

• Improved PaLM 2 version that’s better at coding, brainstorming, and communicating in different languages.

You can give Bard access to your Google account by going to bard.google.com and clicking the “Extensions” icon in the top-right corner:

From here, you toggle the products you want Bard to plug into:

Enjoy!

3. Microsoft Copilot

But wait, what’s this?!

Is Microsoft doing pretty much the same thing with its Copilot?

Yes, it is!

The new Copilot will live in all of your Microsoft products and help you co-write, co-design, co-code, and many other co-things.

The Copilot will make its way into Windows 11 with a free update in two days and will later expand to Bing, Edge, and Microsoft 365.

4. ElevenLabs launches an audiobook product

ElevenLabs, one of the frontrunners in AI speech, has just released a product called Projects. It’s an all-in-one solution that can help you produce an entire audiobook, complete with separate speakers:

Unfortunately, unlike some other ElevenLabs products, Projects requires you to be on at least the “Creator” pricing tier.

You can check it out at ElevenLabs.

5. GitHub Copilot Chat now available to everyone

Whether you’re a seasoned or aspiring developer, this is for you.

Individual users with a GitHub Copilot subscription now have beta access to the Copilot Chat, which offers live suggestions for specific coding challenges. It can help analyze code, do basic troubleshooting, and even offer ideas for fixing security issues and vulnerabilities.

Start using GitHub Copilot Chat here.

6. Amazon grants AI superpowers to Alexa

Looks like the era of dumb voice assistants we’ve all come to mock is coming to an end.

Amazon has announced that Alexa is about to get new capabilities powered by generative AI. Here’s a cringey brand video of people asking Alexa to do something ChatGPT has been doing since late 2022:

Still, combining LLM powers with Alexa’s voice interface sets us on the path to a real-world version of Samantha from Her. Or J.A.R.V.I.S. from Iron Man, if that’s your thing.

7. Genmo’s Replay text-to-video is out

Looks like Runway is getting a bit more competition.

Genmo released the first iteration of its text-to-video tool called Replay:

It’s free to use and has a very simple interface with a single prompt box:

Here’s a 2-second video of a hiker crossing a river, generated from that prompt:

We’re not quite in Hollywood yet, but things are moving fast in this space.

Go try it for yourself.

8. Another fast text-to-image model: DeciDiffusion 1.0

Last week, I talked about Würsten (Sausage), which generated images very fast.

This week, we have DeciDiffusion 1.0, which claims to match StableDiffusion’s output quality while creating images three times faster.

In my test runs, every image took only 3 to 4 seconds:

But why listen to me? Here’s a free Hugging Face demo.

Have at it!

9. YouTube’s new AI features

YouTube is moving beyond AI-generated video summaries and unveiling a number of new AI features. Soon, YouTube creators will have access to:

• AI-recommended music for their videos

• Automatic dubbing for videos using Aloud

• Personalized AI insights and suggestions for new videos to make

Source: YouTube

10. Lexica’s latest image model

Lexica has truly evolved from just being a reference library for Stable Diffusion into an image generation site with its own text-to-image models.

Now they’re out with Lexica Aperture 3.5.

Lexica claims the model is capable of generating high-quality photographic images and following prompts precisely.

Unfortunately, I just realized that Lexica no longer offers a free tier or free starting credits, so you’ll have to shell out at least $8 per month to try it.

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