THE NEWS

🤖PikaLabs teases new insane video capabilities

So, Pika Labs just dropped a teaser for their new video capabilities, and it's mind-blowing!

These guys, a bunch of Stanford computer science Ph.D. pals, started the company after they wanted to win the $10,000 AI video contest of now rival Runway, but got fed up with the software.

They quickly rose to fame and have become the go-to spot on Discord for AI animations lately.

AI's gotten crazy good at making images that look real, but videos? Not quite there yet. Right now, the best you can do is give life to static pictures. But try anything more, and things get weird, fast.

Let me show you some examples I have created.

Here's a picture from Midjourney (just ignore the fuzziness and quality drop from the gif converter): The horse and rider are a bit off, but you could probably sneak it into a video without it being too noticeable.

And this dolly zoom? It's pretty neat, the character even moves a little. Even though the window frame does get a bit wonky at the end if you throw in some slow-mo (with Topaz Labs) and a gritty voiceover you've got a pretty cool scene.

But, when you try to do something big, like a horse galloping down a Western town street, it gets tricky. The horse sliding around, another horse in the back doing weird stuff, and the flag moving all funny? It just sets off your 'this is weird' alarm, and that's not great for getting into the story.

Now, the new Pika 1.0 trailer changes the game. It's like a whole new level of video generation. Watch the full 50 second trailer here.

Even if they cherry-picked the best bits for the trailer, the results are stunning. It's a massive jump in quality for AI-generated videos.

Andrej Karpathy, one of the top AI scientists out there and an investor in Pika Labs tweeted something thought-provoking about the trailer:

One cool thing about the new Pika is you can upload your videos and let the AI help you to tweak and re-imagine scenes. I see this getting integrated into Tiktok in no time.

Pika Labs also announced that they raised $55 million in a funding round so things are looking sunny for the company.

There's not much additional info out there yet, so we've got to wait and see. But if it's as good as it looks, I might need to update my prediction from two days ago. We could be seeing AI-generated videos that are actually enjoyable in the next 6-12 months.

If you want to play around with it you can get on the waitlist here.

ONE MORE THING

Amazon enters the AI game with an AI chat bot for businesses

Amazon's AWS has rolled out Amazon Q, a chat tool that acts like an AI assistant for businesses.

Employees can use it to quickly find company-specific information, like logo guidelines or coding details, without digging through documents.

Companies can choose from LLM’s such as Meta's Llama 2 and Anthropic's Claude 2, and can customize them based on company needs.

In Amazon Connect, Q operates in real-time, aiding call center agents by listening in on the calls and providing instant information.

Amazon might've been a bit slow jumping into the AI scene, but they're making up for it now.

With Q, they're giving big companies that are just getting into AI a new option. Focusing on stuff like contact centers, supply chains, and business intelligence could be Amazon's smart way to stand out from Microsoft and the rest of the competition.

Here’s Ethan Mollick testing it:

⌚ If you have one more minute

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AI Art of the Day 🎨

Check out the Pika teaser for 3D animation. It’s mind-blowing. Click on the tweet for the video.

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That's all for today, folks!

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