What's New In ML #8
World's first AI-generated graphic novel, AI system that can smell, millibots, extracting color palettes from text, robotaxis, startup funding
Hello friends,
Welcome to the 8th edition of What’s New In ML on Infinite Curiosity. The goal of this segment is to help you stay updated on what’s happening in the world of ML, AI, and Data. We’ll talk about real-world applications, cutting edge research, startups, and everything else that’s moving this field forward.
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APPLICATIONS AND RESEARCH
World's first AI-generated graphic novel hits the market
"Hess decided to pay homage to his favorite book (which is now off copyright due to its age) and reimagine it as a graphic novel. He used AI-art generation platform Midjourney to create what might be the world’s very first fully illustrated novel. Not only is it the first fully illustrated novel… It is the first fully illustrated novel where an AI created the illustrations. And this is where highly skilled artists who have studied their craft for years start to get upset."
AI can reverse-engineer a smell based on its chemical makeup
"Computer scientists and chemical engineers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan have developed a machine-learning algorithm that can reverse-engineer a smell based on its chemical makeup. With this technology, they hope to one day create custom scents on-demand."
Caterpillar-like soft robot can fold, roll, and grab.
"When you hear the term 'robot,' you might think of complicated machinery working in factories or roving on other planets. But 'millirobots' might change that. They're robots about as wide as a finger that someday could deliver drugs or perform minimally invasive surgery. Now, researchers have developed a soft, biodegradable, magnetic millirobot inspired by the walking and grabbing capabilities of insects."
Artist uses AI to extract color palettes from text descriptions
"A London-based artist named Matt DesLauriers has developed a tool to generate color palettes from any text prompt, allowing someone to type in 'beautiful sunset' and get a series of colors that matches a typical sunset scene, for example. Or you could get more abstract, finding colors that match 'a sad and rainy Tuesday'. To achieve the effect, DesLauriers uses Stable Diffusion, an open source image synthesis model, to generate an image that matches the text prompt. Next, a JavaScript GIF encoder named gifenc extracts the palette information by analyzing the image and quantizing the colors down to a certain set."
Cerebras proposes AI megacluster with billions of AI compute cores
"Chipmaker Cerebras is patching its chips – already considered the world’s largest – to create what could be the largest-ever computing cluster for AI computing."
Cruise to launch robotaxis in Austin and Phoenix by the end of 2022
"Cruise, which was founded in 2013 and purchased by General Motors in 2016, currently operates the service in San Francisco during late night hours using a Chevy Volt-based vehicle called the Cruise AV. And the driverless taxi service being launched in Austin and Phoenix will still use that model, but the first Cruise Origin vehicles, seen above, will be rolling off the line in 2023."
LinkedIn's feature store Feathr joins the Linux Foundation
"Launched internally at LinkedIn in 2017, Feathr makes feature serving easy, fast, and scalable, especially for real-time AI applications. We built it to help our AI teams store, transform, serve, and share features with low latency and high throughput."
"The Feathr feature store provides an abstraction layer between raw data and ML models. This abstraction layer standardizes and simplifies feature definition, transformation, serving, storage, and access from within ML workflows or applications."
Google gives a sneak peek at MediaPipe Studio, a low-code solution for on-device ML
"We recognize that creating and productionizing custom on-device ML solutions can be challenging, so we’re reinventing how you develop them by leveraging simple-to-use abstraction APIs and no-code GUIs. We’re excited to give you a sneak peek at MediaPipe Studio, our low-code and no-code solution that gets you from data to modeling to deployment on Android or iOS with native code integration libraries that make it easy to build ML-powered apps."
STARTUP FUNDING
WhiteLab Genomics raises $10M Series A from Omnes Capital for an AI platform designed to aid the discovery and development of genomic therapies.
Rephrase.ai raises $10.6M Series A led by Red Ventures for its synthetic media platform
Sigmoid raises $12M Series B led by Sequoia India for its AI solutions offering
Federato raises $15M Series A led by Emergence for its RiskOps platform
Winn.AI raises $17M Seed led by Insight and S-Capital for its real time AI assistant
Unlikely AI raises $20M Seed from Amadeus Capital Partners and Octopus Ventures for their AI platform
Diveplane raises $25M Series A led by Shield Capital for its AI-powered business solutions
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