ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
AI has dominated the news so much in the past year, that it’s easy to forget the level of erstwhile hype about the last techno fad, NFTs (non fungible tokens). But one story from the time of the NFT and the hoopla surrounding crypto in general has remained on the radar. And this week that story reached its denouement, possibly drawing a line under the high profile of the NFT forever, while serving a timely reminder about giving too much power to newly-minted billionaires.
Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced
Last week Sam Bankman-Fried was finally sentenced to 25 years in prison following his conviction for fraud during his time as CEO of FTX. It has been eye opening through the whole FTX fiasco to see just how quickly a company with so little expertise and so much hype can attract so much high profile support, achieve such stratospheric growth, and collapse so swiftly. We really do live in a move fast and break things age. Which makes it really important to stay abreast of things.
Demis Hassabis & Deep Mind
Moving back, as it were, into the modern era there has been some AI news this week. I have seen two sets of headlines dedicated to someone who was an acquaintance on the mind sports circuit more than 2 decades ago. Back then, Demis Hassabis was best known for setting all kinds of records at the Mind Sports Olympiad as a very young athlete. These days, of course, he is better known as the founder of Deep Mind, whose AlphaGo astonished the world when it defeated Go master Lee Sedol.
Hassabis was awarded a CBE in the Easter Honours List for his work contributing to AI. He has also been in the news for getting involved in the debate over the safety of children’s online lives. Unsurprisingly for someone who made his first fortune selling a video game company, Hassabis has encouraged parents to let their children play video games. Or rather, to channel children's passions into creativity, even if those passions involve doing things many consider bad for you. Creative passion directed in this way is, he believes, the perfect recipe for success in precisely the move fast and break things world we have just described.
It comes as OpenAI has released a voice cloning AI. This means that you could in theory have an AI make a call on your behalf in the fully believable voice of anyone you choose. Except that at present, you can’t do that because OpenAI haven’t yet released the platform to the public. It is surely, however, only a matter of time.
Voice Cloning is very good and already here. I’ve cloned my voice using ElevenLabs and it’s very, very close to my real voice (which is impressive as I’ve got a Northern Irish accent that it replicated perfectly). Cloning also only takes a few hours now (versus a week or more early last year), so it’s getting better every day.