More Video Models, WWDC and Computex – Live and Learn #44
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time with the WWDC keynote, more video models competing with OpenAIs Sora, the Nvidia keynote at Computex, a SpaceX launch, as well as an article by Casey Handmer on the solar industrial revolution. As always, I hope you enjoy this edition of Live and Learn!
✨ Quote ✨
Our techno-capital machine is a thermodynamic mechanism that systematically hunts for and then maximally exploits the cheapest energy it can find.
– Casey Handmer - (source)
🖇️ Links 🖇️
Kling Model by Kuaishou. Another company in China has released a video generation model going by the name of "Kling". People termed it the Chinese Sora competitor because it can generate videos of similar quality and length. It seems like video generation is up and coming this year: Lumalabs also launched a video foundation model of their own called DreamMachine and I am just waiting for somebody to open-source a powerful model like Sora so that I can watch the explosion of video foundation models unfold after that.
WWDC by Apple. Apple had their big developer conference in the past two weeks and their keynote was filled with announcements across all their major product lines. The most noteworthy to me were their updates to the VisionOS and their Apple Intelligence efforts as well as their new calculator app (seriously it seems like magic). The whole keynote is quite long but Marcus Brownlee created an excellent summary of the main points and developments.
Version 3.5 Upgrade Song by SunoAI. Music generated by AI is making big strides and you should give SunoAI or Udio a try if you haven't yet. This is part of the official upgrade announcement of SunoAI, detailing all the things that they improved in their newest version. But they tell this story with an AI-generated song. Somehow I wish that we learn about all the updates of major companies as ballads or pop songs or epic rap battles from here on out. And it turns out... we just might ^^
Nvidia Keynote at Computex. Nvidia is continuing to push their GPUs and accelerated computing to its limit: announcing new generations of chips at a breakneck pace and improving their lineup every year, always following their slogan: "Buy more, save more". This keynote seemed somewhat similar to their keynote from the GTC conference earlier this year, both in structure and in content. So if you already watched that, you can safely skip this one. TLDW: Datacenters will need AI-accelerated computing, and NIMs will help with all sorts of business automation, and they are also building digital twins for factories and make wide-scale use of robotics possible by partnering with startups in that space.
Starship Flight 4 by SpaceX. It's insane to think that we might soon have fully reusable gargantuan rockets. With every launch of their Starships, SpaceX is learning more and more and moving closer to making going to Mars a reality. Soon they will land their Starships back on the launch pads routinely. Watching launches like this fills me with awe and joy, here we are at the beginning of the space age and this sort of progress makes me hopeful for a future that is straight out of sci-fi shows.
🌌 Traveling 🌌
The last two weeks have been absolutely bonkers. A burn, a festival, a crypto conference, returning back to Berlin, and then leaving again to visit a friend becoming a priest in the South of Germany. It's been intense but filled with beautiful moments non-stop and I am looking forward to winding down a bit over the coming weeks.
🎶 Song 🎶
Busy Earnin' by Jungle
That's all for this time. I hope you found this newsletter useful, beautiful, or even both!
Have ideas for improving it? As always please let me know.
Cheers,
– Rico