📔 Weekly Journal: Controversial AI-Generated Commercial for Toys “R” Us
[6 min read] Your weekend guide to getting ahead on the digital frontier. Today, the usual market news and also all about the first brand commercial generated by Sora AI
Welcome to this week’s Weekly Journal 📔, your guide to the latest news & innovation in emerging technology, digital assets, and our exciting path to the Metaverse. This is week 82 of the 520 weeks of newsletters I have committed to, a decade of documenting our physical and digital lives converge.
New subscribers are encouraged to check out the history & purpose of this newsletter as well as the archive.
- Ryan
🌐 Digital Assets Market Update
To me, the Metaverse is the convergence of physical & virtual lives. As we work, play and socialise in virtual worlds, we need virtual currencies & assets. These have now reached mainstream finance as a defined asset class:
🔥🗺️ 7-day heatmap below, showing the current share of the market for the top cryptocurrencies, and their change in price over the last week.
🎭 Crypto Fear and Greed Index is based on volatility, social media sentiments, surveys, market momentum, and a few other bits and pieces.
🗞️ Interesting news from this week
🫱🏻🫲🏼 Futureverse has partnered with Animoca Brands to enhance metaverse blockchain technology. This collaboration aims to develop an open metaverse ecosystem by integrating eight Web3 companies using a proposed Equity Swap. The unified platform will focus on scalable infrastructure and rich content, supporting NFTs, digital payments, and decentralised communications. Co-founders Aaron McDonald and Shara Senderoff highlighted that this venture, based in Auckland, New Zealand, will enhance user experiences and drive adoption of Web3 technologies. This merger brings together over 300 employees across 16 countries and numerous high-profile partnerships, including with FIFA and Warner Music Group.
🕶 Solos is set to challenge Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses with its upcoming AirGo Vision glasses, featuring a camera and OpenAI's GPT-4o AI model for object recognition and interactive assistance. These glasses, expected to be priced above USD$249.99, will offer hands-free video recording and an AI voice assistant. The swappable frame system allows users to switch out the camera for different looks or sun shades. The AirGo Vision also includes notification LEDs and can integrate with Google Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude AI models. Release details are yet to be announced.
Toys “R” Us sparked debate with an AI-generated ad using OpenAI’s Sora tool, showcasing founder Charles Lazarus inspired by a dream. While critics highlighted the ad's uncanny and inconsistent visuals, the milestone of AI producing a brand commercial marks a significant technological achievement. The ad's imperfections, such as erratic animations and surreal imagery, underline current AI limitations. Despite backlash, proponents see potential in AI’s innovative applications, though concerns about devaluing human creativity persist.
👓 Read of the Week
This weeks read is “From GPT-4 to AGI: Counting the OOMs” the first in a series of excellent essays by Leopold Aschenbrenner.
Its worth the read but for those who are busy here's a summary of the key points:
AI progress has been rapid, with models like GPT-4 achieving capabilities once thought impossible.
This progress can be attributed to three main factors:
Compute scaling (~0.5 OOMs/year)
Algorithmic efficiencies (~0.5 OOMs/year)
"Unhobbling" gains (unlocking latent capabilities)
From GPT-2 (2019) to GPT-4 (2023), there was a ~4.5-6 OOM effective compute increase, plus major unhobbling gains.
The author predicts a similar scale-up in the next 4 years (2023-2027):
3-6 OOMs of base effective compute increase
Further unhobbling gains (from chatbot to agent/coworker)
Potential challenges include the "data wall" as high-quality training data becomes scarce.
By 2027, the author expects AI capabilities to surpass PhD-level experts across many fields.
This could lead to AGI - systems capable of automating cognitive jobs, including AI research itself.
While there are uncertainties, the author argues that straight-line trend extrapolation suggests AGI by 2027 is plausible.
The pace of progress is expected to continue, with each new generation of models surprising most observers.
🎥 Watch of the week
This is wild. A demo with lots of controlled variables but a glimpse into the way that AI tech will revolutionise how we learn.
AI 🎨🤖🎵✍🏼
In the Metaverse, AI will be critical for creating intelligent virtual environments and avatars that can understand and respond to users with human-like cognition and natural interactions:
Anthropic has unveiled Claude 3.5 Sonnet, a cutting-edge AI model surpassing OpenAI’s GPT-4o in recent tests. Featuring its new Artifacts feature, Claude allows users to generate and share significant content like code snippets and short stories outside of chat sessions. Claude Artifacts has been hailed as a groundbreaking AI innovation of 2024, according to Tom's Guide.
Following this easy guide, you can try the following:
Create an interactive mood board generator using React.
Build a simple, playable 2D survival game using React and SVG graphics.
Develop a virtual bookshelf app using React hooks and Tailwind CSS.
Construct an interactive Family Tree Builder using React.
That’s all for the free version this week! If you have any organisations in mind that could benefit from learning about emerging technology, be sure to reach out. Educational workshops are one of many consulting services I offer.
DCA With Me 🤑
Dollar Cost Averaging is an investment strategy in which an investor regularly invests a fixed amount of money into a particular asset/asset class at regular intervals, regardless of its current market cycle. By doing so, the investor can reduce the impact of market volatility and potentially earn a better return over time. Motto = time IN the market beats trying to time the market
To experiment with this, I invest $50 NZD into a Digital Asset every week. Each week I will choose an asset that seems underpriced in the short term and has positive long-term potential. My timeframe is 3-5 years. I don’t give financial advice but if you want to follow along with me you can use my easycrypto.co.nz referral link to support this newsletter. Let’s dive into this week’s pick:
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