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Synthesia launched Expressive AI Avatars

Synthesia launched Expressive AI Avatars

PLUS: a solid investment opportunity

Michael Parrish
April 26, 2024

TOGETHER WITH

Good morning, human brains, and welcome back to your daily munch of AI news.

Here’s what’s on the menu today:

AI controls its emotions better than you 🤗 🤬
Synthesia launched Expressive AI avatars.
A great investment opportunity in AI 🤖 💵
It grew its customer base 5x and processed $35M+ in bookings last year.
The skinny on Microsoft’s Phi-3-Mini 📲 🔥
Microsoft unveiled its 2.8 billion parameter model.

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MAIN COURSE

Melodramatic AI avatars 🤗 🤬

On Wednesday, Synthesia launched Expressive AI Avatars. They display a wide range of human emotions, naturalistic expressions, and more.

Emotional availability? I’ll leave that to the bots… 🤖 🥀

Source: Synthesia

Emotions? I’ve been disassociated for years.

Join the club. 🙃 Synthesia’s avatars can now convey happiness, sadness, and more based on your text inputs.

How does it work?

Synthesia’s EXPRESS-1 model powers these avatars, which enables them to predict facial movements, micro-expressions, and more in real-time.

Why bother?

These AI avatars could provide personalized, interactive customer support, lead interactive training sessions, serve as virtual influencers, assist with patient management, and more.

“Soon you’ll be able to recreate the entire workplace experience inside our platform, with AI avatars that can move around in three-dimensional spaces and communicate with you or other avatars, showing you around the workspace, helping you find a meeting room, teaching you about your company and its products, or introducing you to your colleagues before you’ve met them in real life.”

— Synthesia

So, these things are taking over?

You bet. Synthesia’s tech is used by over 55,000 businesses, including ½ of Fortune 100 companies. After its last $90 million funding round, its current valuation sits around $1 billion.

Add AI to Your Portfolio Today.

This AI company is set to disrupt the labor-intensive $4.1T hospitality industry, and here is your chance to invest!

Jurny, through partnerships with industry giants like Airbnb, Vrbo, and Expedia, is already fully automating operations for thousands of hotel and Airbnb property managers across the globe.

+ In 2023, they grew their customer base by over 5x — and processed $35M+ in bookings.

+ They’ve raised over $12M from leading VCs and from over 1,100 individual investors.

+ Featured in numerous reports and by the media, including Skift, McKinsey & Company, Forbes, Bloomberg, Entrepreneur, and many others, as a leading AI company.

If you are interested in investing in this disruptive AI company alongside top venture capitalists, click here to learn more.

SIDE SALAD

Microsoft’s pocket rocket 📲 🚀

On Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled Phi-3-mini. It’s a 3.8 billion-parameter model that competes with models twice its size.

Who said bigger is better? 😅

Source: Microsoft

What so great about it?

Phi-3 Mini is a lightweight AI model with 3.8 billion parameters. It performs comparably to larger models while being efficient enough to run on your smartphone.

What’s under the hood?

It leverages a dataset that enhances Phi-2's methods with rigorous web data filtering and synthetic data from larger models. It’s only 1.8 GB, so you can operate it offline on an iPhone 14 with an A16 chip.

Source: Microsoft

Let me guess, it’s not out yet?

Actually, it’s available for you to use now on Microsoft Azure, Hugging Face, and Ollama. Microsoft also announced two upcoming models: Phi-3 Small with 7 billion parameters and Phi-3 Medium with 14 billion parameters.

So, it’s perfect?

Nah. Phi-3 Mini struggles with factual inaccuracies, bias, safety concerns, and more.

High Phi-ve Microsoft… 🤦‍♂️

YOUR DAILY MUNCH

Tools 🔨

OptimateAI — AI-powered, all-in-one sales operations platform.

ShiftX AI — simplifies the process of creating and managing workflows.

AlphaCorp AI — A chat app that allows you to use/compare leading models.

Think Pieces 🧠

Human pilot vs. AI Pilot? (Video).

AI-powered quantum computers that work like a brain? Quantum computers and AI excel at different tasks; a hybrid system could be game-changing.

AI and string theory. How AI is being utilized in string theory to predict outcomes from microscopic string configurations.

Startup News 💰

Cognition Labs, the developer of Devin, reached a $2 billion valuation. Cognition Labs is only 6 months old.

NVIDIA’s CEO hand-delivered the first DGX H200 to OpenAI. Jensen Huang claims it’s to “advance AI, computing, and humanity.”

Research 👨‍🔬

Audio Dialogues — enhances the audio understanding of LLMs by developing a multi-turn dialogue dataset for sound and music.

Reuse Your Rewards — a method to align language models in different languages by transferring a reward model from one language to another.

BLINK — a benchmark that evaluates the visual perception abilities of multimodal large language models by reimaging traditional computer vision tasks.