😸 Elon's AI just got wilder

Welcome, humans.

AI music videos are a trend now: AI writes the lyrics, makes the beats, and generates the video clips—all edited by a human, of course.

This one involves a cast that looks oddly similar to The Muppets in a hip-hop video, doing so-called “street” things.

And honestly? It’s way better than it has any right to be…

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

• xAI launched its new Grok-2 chatbot and its image generation is wild.
• AI startup acquisitions rose in Q2, possibly indicating market weakness.
• A study found AI models hallucinate more on non-Wikipediable topics.
• MIT released a categorized database of 700+ potential AI risks.

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Elon Musk’s new AI Grok-2 is out, and it lets you generate images now.

Elon Musk’s company xAI just released a new “beta” version of its Grok-2 AI chatbot for X Premium users. If that’s you, you can try it here (or click “Grok” on X.com).

Here’s how xAI hypes up Grok-2:

• Grok-2 outperforms some top AI models (Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4 Turbo) on the LMSYS leaderboard.
• It performs well on tasks involving math with images, and answering questions about documents.

You can use Grok-2 to code, access trending news (on X), and even generate images. And by all accounts, the images are the wildest part:

Grok-2 will pretty much let you generate anything. Users on X have already generated plenty of copyrighted characters with weapons, and well-known political figures in “controversial” scenarios (to say the least).  

xAI’s able to do this by partnering with Black Forest Labs, who released the open-source image generator FLUX.1 we told you about last week.

So now, if you have access to Grok, you can generate FLUX-level images straight in X. Plus, it’s fast. (What could go wrong?)

Here are 12 wild examples people made in less than 24 hours:

• Hyper-realistic people (examples: 1, 2)
• Myspace profile pics and different kinds of Redditors.
• Clothing with readable text on it.
• “Normal” pics of political figures (that other bots won’t generate).
• Smooth action shots (when used w/ Luma).
• Sports fashion clips (with Runway).
• Memes with the actual text you ask for.
• Gorgeous locations (on Mars).
• Famous art featuring copyrighted characters.
• Elon Musk supporting various causes.
• “Highly accurate” music theory professors.
• A short film (with Grok + Luma).

Next up: xAI plans to make X a more intelligent and interactive platform through Grok’s "multimodal understanding" (processing different types of information together).

This could enable:

• Smarter analysis of posts with both text and images.
• Improved searches, using text and visual inputs.
• More context-aware replies to content in multiple formats.

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Around the Horn.

Even Realities will launch a new pair of $599 AI-powered glasses next week—and early reviews are actually positive.

• SAG-AFTRA (Hollywood actors union) signed a “new standard” deal with AI startup Narrativ to allow actors to negotiate their own voice rights with advertisers.
• Crunchbase reported 65 AI startups were acquired in Q2 of this year, which is 55% more than the same time last year… This could be a bad sign for AI startups.
• MIT researchers released a database of over 700 AI risks, categorized by type and classified by how, when, and why they could occur.
• A new study out of Cornell found that all the major AI models hallucinate, but that hallucinations vary by topic; essentially, if the source of an answer isn’t available on Wikipedia, it’s less accurate overall.

Treats To Try.

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2. a1.art lets you customize ordinary photos and transform them into new images and videos across 3,000+ different styles.
3. Profundo’s AI research assistant automates data collection, analysis, and report generation for faster insights.
4. Conva.AI lets you create and customize AI assistants for your apps (try the sandbox here).
5. Tusk automatically generates code for small UI changes and bug fixes, creating pull requests from issue tickets.
6. Trellis converts unstructured data like documents, calls, and emails into structured, database-friendly formats for easier analysis.

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Thursday Trivia

One glance, everyone knows the rules: one is AI, and one is real.

Which is which?

A.

B.

A Cat's Commentary.