💣Musk open sourced his AI

ALSO: How to create consistent characters in Midjourney

Estimated Read Time: 8 minutes

Musk unleashes Grok on the public, Apple’s making preparations to enter the AI race, and Midjourney is about to stomp on the comic industry. Plus a detailed tutorial on how to use Midjourney’s most bombastic feature.

Today’s Horizon

• Musk open-sourced his AI Grok.

• Apple is researching their own AI.

• How to create consistent characters in Midjourney.  

• Armies of robots are descending upon us.

• The future is a one-person billion dollar company.

News (1 minute)

👀Musk open-sourced his AI chatbot

What happened: Elon Musk just open sourced his AI chatbot Grok. While it’s probably to spite OpenAI (let’s be honest), open source AIs are a good thing. It means the AI is freely available to all of humanity and can be tampered with.  

The details: 

• Grok has been released on Github. It’s entirely free.

• The AI is more basic than other models like ChatGPT.

• Grok can be used for coding generation, creative writing, and answering questions.

• The release is useful for researchers and developers.

• You can download and train the AI yourself.

• Commercial use is allowed.

Why it matters: Open source means anyone can use the AI or modify it to their heart’s content. You could download Grok right now and train it yourself. This means the AI is highly customizable to your preferences.  

While it’s not powerful now, its open source nature means Grok could become a vital AI in the coming years. The more open source models, the better.

Stocks

📈AI Company Stocks Today

As of 03.17.2024 market close.

Headlines

🚄SILVER BULLETS

The US State Department has issued a warning against AI in their newest report, stating AI could pose an extinction level event. The report is matched by recent EU and Indian laws that restrict AI development in an effort to reduce the risk for powerful AI. Currently the US has shown no signs of regulating AI in any way. Instead the country relies on corporations to regulate themselves so far (has that ever worked).

OpenAI’s video generation SORA will be available to the public later this year. The CTO of OpenAI has also stated audio will be implemented at some point, though it’s not clear how soon that’ll be. SORA is incredibly impressive

Agility Robotics have a way to control armies of robots. Their new fleet platform Agility Arc, will allow one user to control hundreds of robots at once (I want this power). This is a pretty unique (and important) feature. The company joins a long line of robotics manufacturers eager invade push their product into the marketplace. Amazon and BMW are openly waiting for more robotic help. Soon most warehouse jobs will be snatched away by the evil robot overlords companies. Prepare yourself.

Future of AI (1 minute)

🤫Apple quietly unveiled their LLM

What happened: Apple’s been pretty quiet on the AI front. Turns out they were busy at work on a new LLM model, called MM1. While it’s not an AI model you can use (like ChatGPT or Gemini) it’s a breakthrough for AI and a sign of Apple’s future AI plans.

The details:

• Apple quietly released a research paper detailing MM1, their breakthrough for LLMs.

• MM1 combines multiple different models, such as image and text.

• Sources say Apple’s busy at work on their own AI model, “Ajax”.

• The company is on track to spend $1 billion per year on AI development.  

• It’s rumored IOS 18 will heavily feature AI.

Why it matters: AI is about to get even better if MM1’s claims are true. And Apple is about to enter the AI race. Whatever “Ajax” is, it’ll be big. I’m bettering on IOS 18 will have AI tools we’ll use everyday.  

How-to (4 minutes)

🤯Midjourney has consistent characters now

What happened: Get ready for a comic book revolution. Midjourney has released their “Character Reference” feature. Now you can create a consistent character across multiple Midjourney images. Got a cool comic book hero? You can make him look like a kids cartoon, realistic, put him in a different setting, and so on. The feature is not perfect, however.

Caveats: 

• It works best with images made within Midjourney. While you can upload your own image (even of yourself!) the feature won’t work as well.

• Your character in the image won’t be… exactly the same. Their facial features will be slightly off. Something will change. Especially if you alter the art-style too.

• Creature characters are especially prone to appearing different. Small details like the tail or size of their eyes can be very different.

How to use: (We’ll be using the Discord version here.)

1. First create an image in Midjourney using whatever style you want OR upload your own image in jpeg or png format. Midjourney will keep the character more consistent if it’s generated by Midjourney itself.

2. Left click on the image of your character so it fills up your screen.

3. Right click on the image and copy the image’s address.

Now to create the new image.

4. Type whatever prompt you want. Then at the end of the prompt add the following: “--cref URL” The URL is the image address you copied earlier. The new image will use your character as a reference for the new image.

Character Reference Sheets:

Create a character reference angle sheet to have a different reference at each angle for the character in the future. Then pin the reference sheet in your messages to easily find them in the future (or save their image address).

Here’s the prompt for you.

“Character sheet of a [Description]. [Subject] is isolated on a white background. Multiple angles. Multiple Expressions.”

Consistent Styles:

You can also create consistent styles by typing “--sref URL”. Same process as before, copy the image address of the picture whose style you like, then paste in the place of URL.

You can then adjust the intensity of the style with the command “--sw 500”. The 500 can be anything up to 1000. The higher the number, the more the image will take inspiration from the style reference.

With both of these you can easily create an entire comic book.

Why this matters: This is the turning point. Until now the commercial potential of generative AI has been limited to one-off images, and there’s only so much you can do there. With consistent characters we can use Midjourney to generate anything we want. Comic books, animations (2D assets), Youtube videos, videogames. The world just got busted open (even if the feature isn’t perfect yet).

This is going to hit the comic industry like a bullet. 🚄

Future of AI (1 minute)

💰The one-person Billion dollar company 

Why is everyone talking about a one-person billion dollar company?

A while ago Sam Altman said his group-chat has a bidding pool for the first year when a one-person billion dollar company comes about.

While that might seem like a pipe dream, it’s actually just a matter of time.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a term for an AI model that can learn and perform tasks like humans. You could train the AI to do a job like an employee, and have AGI train more subsystems. The point is AGI is an incredible tool for any business or skilled person… when it comes out.

There are no AGI models out yet. While OpenAI’s Q* project is rumored to be AGI, the release date of such a tool is still a mystery.

How can you prepare for AGI?

You might get replaced by AI, but you can get hired as an AI specialist. Knowing how to use AI tools and AGI (whenever it comes out) will be a vital skill for future jobs. The world will never be perfect, it will always have problems. And every problem is a chance for you to solve it.

Productivity

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AI Generated Images

🪓The viking from across space and time

Source: Midjourney

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