Sunday Rundown #75: Extra FLUX & Silenced Robot

Sunday Bonus #35: My home-baked tool to "cartoonify" your face.

Happy Sunday, friends!

Welcome back to the weekly look at generative AI that covers the following:

• Sunday Rundown (free): this week’s AI news + a fun AI fail.

• Sunday Bonus (paid): a goodie for my paid subscribers.

Let’s get to it.

🗞️ AI news

Here are this week’s AI developments.

👩‍💻 AI releases

New stuff you can try right now:

1. Amazon Prime Video launched X-Ray Recaps, AI summaries of the shows you’re watching. Now you no longer have to bother with the whole “watching” thing. Yay, I guess?

2. Anthropic’s new Claude 3.5 Haiku is now available via API. It outperforms the older, larger Claude 3 Sonnet and Claude 3 Opus models on many benchmarks.

3. Black Forest Lab has two new options for its flagship FLUX1.1 [pro] model:

   1. Ultra mode: 4X the resolution that retains fast generation speed and prompt adherence.

   2. Raw mode: Replicates the genuine, less synthetic feel of candid photography for more natural photographic images.

4. Hume’s overhauled app lets you chat to different assistants using its EVI2 speech-language model and supplemented by Claude. (Try it here.)

5. Invideo released a beta version of its invideo AI v3.0 model that can create complete video stories from a single prompt. (Try it here.)

6. Microsoft is rolling out “new AI experiences,” like generative tools inside Paint and a writing assistant in Notepad. (You need to be a Windows Insider to try them.)

---

🔬 AI research

Cool stuff you might get to try one day:

1. ByteDance and Tsinghua University introduced X-Portrait 2, an updated version of a model that animates images using a reference video, which they claim outperforms comparable models like Act-One by Runway:

2. Decart and Etched partnered to work on Oasis, a playable video game generated entirely by AI in real time. (Try the demo.)

3. Kling AI has an awesome Custom Face Video Model in the works that you can train on your own face for text-to-video generation.

---

📖 AI resources

Helpful AI tools and stuff that teaches you about AI:

1. “Incorporating AI Into Your Work & Where It’s Going” [VIDEO]:

2. “Stop Writing All Your AI Prompts from Scratch” - starter prompt for creating "blueprint” prompts (and the philosophy behind it) by Ethan Mollick and Lilach Mollick.

---

🔀 AI random

Other notable AI stories of the week:

1. Both Anthropic and Meta are working to make AI models available for US government security and defense operations.

2. OpenAI bought the chat.com domain from HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah. It now redirects to chatgpt.com.

🤦‍♂️ AI fail of the week

“Blink once if you’ve been kidnapped, robot!” (Final version used here.)

---

💰 Sunday Bonus #35: Try my AI photo-to-cartoon converter

Today is a just-for-fun kind of day.

I’ve been toying around with stringing AI tools together to produce different outputs and made a fun sequence that takes your photo and turns it into a cartoon portrait.

Enjoy: