Cows With VR Headsets Love AI

Hi everyone, Dylan Curious here with your weekly dose of fascinating AI news and developments!

First up, can you believe that some farmers in Russia are using VR headsets on cows to make them think they're grazing in green pastures? It's a creative solution for keeping cows content when they're stuck eating hay in a barn. It got me thinking about the implications of immersive VR for humans too - are we heading towards a Ready Player One future?

Speaking of immersive visuals, China has unveiled an impressive new AI video generation model called Vu. From the demos, it looks like it can already produce some stunningly photorealistic 16-second video clips, giving DALL-E and other models a run for their money. The progress in this space over the past year alone is mind-boggling.

In other news, a recent AI talent tracker shows that while China has a huge domestic AI talent pool, many Chinese researchers still end up staying in the US after getting educated here. It's a fascinating snapshot of how global the AI talent pipeline is. Meanwhile, GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is integrating the power of GPT-4 to help developers go from ideas to working code more seamlessly. As an amateur coder myself, I'm excited to see how this lowers the barriers to building with AI.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin also shared his personal view that there's a 10% chance of an "AI doom" scenario. While I'm more optimistic, I agree it's crucial that we grapple with the ethical implications of advanced AI, as Google's DeepMind team did in their recent 274-page research paper on the topic. There are so many important considerations, from safety to privacy to economic impacts.

In quirkier news, Nissan invented self-parking office chairs that tuck themselves back into place with a clap - a fun peek at a future where our furniture might tidy up after itself. And some of my favorite AI YouTubers have teamed up to launch a new collaborative channel called AI Community. I highly recommend checking out their thoughtful long-form discussions.

Finally, a few interesting papers I came across this week:

• Researchers arguing that advanced AI could be a Great Filter that explains the Fermi paradox

• A new "motion diffusion" technique (a la stable diffusion) for more fluid character animation

• BlenderAlchemy, a tool that leverages GPT-4 to make 3D design in Blender more intuitive

• An enhanced neural network architecture from MIT that learns its own activation functions

Lots of fascinating work happening in the AI space! As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts. What stood out to you? What should I dive deeper on in a future issue?

Warmly, Dylan Curious