Welcome to the Techmeme Ride Home for Wednesday, February 7, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, OpenAI is adding watermarks to Dolly 3 images, new AI model from Apple, new open source model that is King of the LLM Hill, more rumors of a foldable iPhone, a new streaming service that will be like Hulu but for sports, and the specific words and phrases that will get your college application as they flagged as being AI-generated. Here's what you
miss today in the world of tech. OpenAI says Dolly 3 will embed watermarks into images with C2PA metadata, but acknowledges the metadata can be easily removed either accidentally or intentionally. The Coalition for Content Provenants and Authenticity, a group consisting of companies like Adobe and Microsoft, has been pushing the use of the content credentials Watermark to identify the provenance of content and show if it was made by humans or with
AI. Adobe created a content credential symbol, which OpenAI is adding to Dolly 3 creations. Meta-recently announced it will add tags to AI-generated content on its social media platforms. OpenAI says Watermarks from C2PA will appear in images generated on the chat GPT website and the API for the Dolly 3 model. Mobile users will get the Watermarks by February 12th. They'll include both an invisible metadata component and a visible CR symbol, which
will appear in the top left corner of each image. People can check the provenance, which AI tool was used to make the content of any image generated by OpenAI's platforms through websites like Content Credentials Verify. So far, only still images, not videos or text
can carry the Watermark. But OpenAI points out that C2PA's metadata can, quote, easily be removed either accidentally or intentionally, especially as most social media platforms often remove metadata from uploaded content, taking a screenshot amidst the metadata, end quote. As mentioned, this follows news yesterday that Meta has proposed standards to identify AI content that its industry peers could use and plans to label AI images posted on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads as such.
Resources are telling the information that Apple is building at least two iPhone prototypes that fold widthwise. The devices are in early development and not set for production in 2024 or 2025. So we'll have to wait a while if we ever do see them. Quote, Apple recently approached at least one manufacturer in Asia for components related to two foldable iPhones of different sizes they said. The products could be canceled if
they don't meet Apple standards, they said. Apple has explored foldable products for more than a decade, but its leaders interest in them has fluctuated according to interviews with multiple former Apple employees and a review of its patent filings. Apple CEO Tim Cook began asking the company's designers and engineers about the possibility of a foldable iPhone as early as 2018. Also that year he reacted positively to a demonstration by Apple's
designers and engineers of a seven inch foldable display that person said. Two problems may stand in the way of a foldable iPhone. Apple's engineers have struggled for years to overcome the technical challenges of building such a device and its designers haven't come up with enough compelling features that would make consumers want one, especially given its high retail cost compared to non foldable phones according to three people with
direct knowledge of the effort. Former Apple employees said Apple's first foldable product would likely be the iPad, a lower profile device that would test consumer appetite for a foldable iPhone. Apple has been working with South Korea's LG and Samsung, both of which have been involved for several years in making foldable displays for the foldable iPad prototypes they said. Some details of a foldable iPad were first reported by Chinese, Taiwanese and South Korean media.
Apparently, the original vision for a foldable iPhone had screens on the outside when closed, but this proved to be a non starter. The primary concern for the hardware team was the device's susceptibility to damage from falls. They also aimed to create a foldable iPhone with a sleeker profile targeting a thickness reduction by 50% compared to existing models. However, this goal proved to be challenging due to the size constraints of batteries and
display technologies. Around 2020, according to the sources Apple shifted its focus from iPhones to the development of a foldable iPad, envisioned to be close in size to the iPad mini. This change in direction was partly due to the device's use case, the foldable iPad, potentially with an 8-inch screen, wouldn't need to fit into pockets or meet the rigorous drop test standards of iPhones, allowing for a thicker design.
And X Apple, in play, noted that engineers are currently tackling specific problems related to the persistent crease that appears with continuous folding. Additionally, there's an ongoing effort to refine the hinge mechanism to enable the device to lay flat when unfolded, eliminating any bumps or dips that would interfere with the functionality of the Apple pencil. Sports was already shaping up to be a catalyst for upending the later stages of the streaming
wars. And now this has thrown a huge curveball into everything. Fox ESPN and Warner Brothers Discovery have announced a new joint venture to launch a streaming sports service in the US in the fall of 2024. Each entity would own a third of the venture, quoting the journal. The as-yet-unnamed service will be offered directly to consumers who would be able to stream all of these companies' sports content that companies said in a statement following
a report in the Wall Street Journal about the new venture. For Disney, the partnership with other networks adds to an array of strategic options the company has explored for ESPN. Disney is still looking for a potential strategic partner or investor and will maintain a plan to offer a standalone ESPN streaming app for those who don't want the all-in-one bundle from the three companies people close to the situation said. There are risks to the
tie-up, Disney knows as well as any the perils of a joint venture in media. It is now in the middle of trying to end its joint ownership of Hulu by buying out its partner Comcast after years of difficulties. Also, the new service won't include content from Paramount Global CBS or Comcast NBC Universal. City analysts expect the new service to encompass about 55% of US sports rights according to a note published Tuesday. A chief executive
for the venture is expected to be named in the coming weeks. People familiar with the matter said, well, no price tag has been set. It is expected to be significantly lower than the typical cable bundle which often can run north of $100 a month. Yes, but don't expect this to come in at say $15 a month either. Given the fees that these companies already get from cable companies, ESPN commands around $11 a month per household and you're
adding two others here and the pie gets split three ways. It's unlikely that this would retail at less than $40 a month, maybe even $50 a month. And naturally, three or so years later, after everybody is hooked on that content, that becomes $70 a month. But most of the sports is over here. You can see the potential attraction.
Another AI model from Apple has been released. Apple has partnered with University of California researchers to release open source AI model MGI, which can edit images based on natural language instructions, quoting venture beat MGI, which stands for MLLM guided image editing leverages multimodal large language models M L L M's to interpret user commands and perform pixel level
manipulations. The model can handle various editing aspects such as Photoshop style modification, global photo optimization and local editing MGI is based on the idea of using M L L M's, which are powerful AI models that can process both text and images to enhance instruction based image editing M L L M's have shown remarkable capabilities in cross model understanding and visual aware response generation, but they have not been widely applied to image editing
tasks. MGI integrates MLLM's into the image editing process in two ways. First, it uses MLLM's to derive expressive instructions from user input. These instructions are concise and clear and provide explicit guidance for the editing process. For example, given the input make the sky more blue, MGI can produce the instruction, increase the saturation of the sky region by 20%. Second, it uses MLLM's to generate visual imagination, a latent representation of the desired edit.
This representation captures the essence of the edit and can be used to guide the pixel level manipulation. MGI uses a novel end-to-end training scheme that jointly optimizes the instruction derivation, visual imagination, and image editing modules. MGI can handle a wide range of editing scenarios from simple color adjustments to complex object manipulations. The model can also perform global and local edits depending on the user's preference. This is on GitHub right now, so check
it out. But obviously, if Apple's goal is to put language models on device on your phone, imagine what this could do for editing your Apple photos. Ever tried to break a bad habit and felt like you're climbing Mount Everest in flip flops? Yeah, I've been there too, but here's a breath of fresh air. Fume! It's not about giving up, it's about switching up. Fume takes your habit and simply makes it better, healthier, and a whole lot more enjoyable. Fume is an innovative, award-winning,
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Break free from your anxiety and depression and feel better faster with Mindbloom. Mindbloom.com slash tech meme and use promo code tech meme. Also, we have a new king of the hill if the hill is LLM performance. And the new king is open source. Smalg72B is a Gwen72B based open source LLM released by Abikus AI and it has topped the hugging face open LLM leaderboard by outperforming GPT 3.5 on several benchmarks.
Smalg72B is technically a fine tuned version of Gwen72B, another powerful language model that was released just a few months ago by Gwen, a team of researchers at Alibaba Group. What's most note worthy about today's release is that Smalg72B outperforms GPT 3.5 and mistral medium to of the most advanced open source large language models developed by Open AI
and mistral respectively in several of the most popular benchmarks. Smalg72B also surpassed Gwen72B, the model from which it was derived by a significant margin in many of these evaluations. According to the hugging face open LLM leaderboard which measures the performance of open source language models on a variety of natural language understanding and generation tasks. Smalg72B is now the first and only open source model to have an average score of more than 80 across all major
LLM evaluations. While the model still falls short of the 90 to 100 point average indicative of human level performance, its birth signals that open source AI may soon rival big text capabilities which have long been shrouded in secrecy. In short, the release of Smalg72B could fundamentally reshape how AI progress unfolds, tapping the ingenuity of those beyond just a handful of wealthy
companies. With today's release, Smalg72B becomes the first open source model to achieve an average score of 80 on the hugging face open LLM leaderboard which is considered a remarkable feat in the field of natural language processing and open source AI. Smalg72B excels especially in reasoning and math tasks thanks to the techniques that abacus AI applied to the fine tuning process.
These techniques which will be detailed in an upcoming research paper target the weaknesses of large language models and enhance their capabilities. This year marks the first full college admissions season since the rise of Chatchee BT and the rival of the AI moment generally. College admissions officers are writing for a deluge of college admission essays written by AI robots, but the funny thing is they claim they're not having that
difficult at times spotting the AI assisted writing. It can come down to the overuse or perhaps not quite apt use of specific words. What are the words that will flag your essay as possibly AI written? Beacon, comprehensive curriculum, esteemed faculty, vibrant academic community, and well,
tapestry. This comes from Forbes quote, tapestry in particular is a major red flag in this year's pool several essay consultants on the platform five are told Forbes, Mike and Ivy League alum and former editor-in-chief of the Cornell Business Journal who now edits hundreds of grad school applications each cycle through capital editors said it's appeared repeatedly in drafts from at least 20 of his clients in recent months. He requested anonymity to protect their privacy.
I no longer believe there's a way to innocently use the word tapestry in an essay. If the word tapestry appears it was generated by Chatchee BT he told Forbes, though many such words on their own could have come from a human when a trained I seize them used over and over again in the same cadence across multiple essays quote, it's just a real telltale sign. There will be a reckoning, Mike added, there are going to be a ton of students who unwittingly use the word tapestry or other words
in their essay that may not be admitted this cycle end quote. Ben told the dean of undergraduate admissions at George Washington University explained just how easy it is for admissions officers to sniff out AI written applications. When you've read thousands of essays over the years AI influenced essays stick out told told Forbes they may not raise flags to the casual reader but from the standpoint of an admissions application review they are often ineffective and a misused
opportunity by the student end quote. The words were thin hollow and flat he said while the essay filled the page and responded to the prompt it didn't give the admissions team any information to help move the application towards an admit decision end quote. This actually fits with my experience generating text via chat GBT I've often told people almost the opposite no matter what you're trying to get it to right it ends up sounding like a sixth graders book report you know
doll introduction a few facts doll repetitive summary conclusion in other words thin hollow and flat so I'm surprised to see AI's not great at writing in what seems to be its natural style more phrases that the Forbes piece flags as dead giveaways leadership prowess commitment to continuous improvement and innovation and structuring an argument by going not merely x but y the piece goes on to describe how a whole cottage industry of college application essay editors
is now rising to the four to make essays sound more human quoting again. Pegic a freelancer in Serbia who has three masters degrees and one PhD has edited roughly 100 personal statements and college essays through five or though she initially feared her business would take a hit with the
onset of chat GBT the reality has been quite the opposite the a i boom has fueled unprecedented demand for editors adept at making computer generated writing sound like the real thing chat GBT is extremely wordy she said and there are many abstract words that don't really connect well
today she charges up to a hundred dollars to add human vibes to a i written essays others offering similar services through five or charge anywhere from ten dollars to a hundred fifty dollars depending on the length and quote nothing for you today talk to you tomorrow