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Levi’s is using AI models to make Fashion models

AND The history of Elon Musk, Sam Altman and OpenAI

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The Alignment
March 27, 2023

Welcome to The Alignment !

In today's news we have - 

  1. Levi’s is using AI models to make Fashion models

  2. Zoom is upgrading its AI tools, and a collaboration with OpenAI

  3. The history of Elon Musk, Sam Altman and OpenAI

  4. AI Pope Francis brings the style with fashion statement

As always if you enjoy reading our posts be sure to spread the word ! 

Yes, you read that right. Levi’s is leveraging the services of AI startup Lalaland to create fashion models that cater to "every body type, age, size and skin tone."

Levi’s claims that this is a push to highlight diversity and represent models from underrepresented groups. While this may be true, the company has received criticism from some for failing to actually work with diverse human models. 

In a bid to cut operating costs, some folks are also sceptical on whether this tech forward move is a disguise to reduce the costs involved in working with actual models. 

These are the set of dilemmas advances in technology bring with them because the real losers in all of this are the models that are at the risk of losing their jobs. Generative image models are only going to get better, and Lalaland’s demo of Levi’s models is practically indistinguishable from real models. 

This is a smart move from Levi’s with an opportunity to provide a differentiated customer experience along with the possibility to run their business more efficiently. 

Zoom is bringing major AI updates to its products. The company is taking a federated approach whereby they will continue to build internal AI capabilities that will now closely interface with OpenAI’s models. In addition to this, Zoom’s customers will be able to bring in their own models and integrate their features tightly with Zoom’s offerings.

The upgrades are pretty standard, and are mostly focused on productivity features like auto transcripts, summarisation notes, drafting content for conversations with a focus on sales professionals. 

If this sounds familiar, look no further than Microsoft’s upgrades for Microsoft Teams and Business chat. Zoom’s collaboration with OpenAI is interesting too given the fact that Microsoft is a sizeable shareholder in OpenAI and OpenAI practically runs on Azure. 

Once again, Zoom’s AI efforts are identical to what the big companies are already doing. With 300 million users and a thriving enterprise business there is built in distribution available for Zoom. It’s still early days but as adoption increases, product wars between the big players are going to get pretty intense with all sorts of power dynamics. 

The 8 year history of OpenAI. There was a time when Elon Musk was heavily involved with OpenAI which operated as a non-profit. Some hard organisational, financial and technological decisions were made in 2018 that changed the trajectory of OpenAI (and perhaps humankind ?) forever.

Around the industry -

  1. A rare interview with Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI

  2. Character AI founded by ex- Google engineers raises $150 million pre-revenue

  3. Google’s BARD is losing interest 1 week in 

  4. Dataricks created an AI model for $30 that is similar to ChatGPT

  5. Nvidia shows new research on using AI to improve chip designs

  6. The reverse Turing test, does GPT-4 think ChatGPT is AI or Human ?

Product Corner - 

There are way too many cool products to showcase just one !

  • Sana : AI-powered learning platform that helps pioneering companies share knowledge, learn fast, automate admin and perform 10x faster.

  • Phind : Generative AI Search engine for developers

  • Promptloop : Build spreadsheet models in minutes

  • Toko : Learn English by speaking to an AI

  • Dart : Project management on Autopilot

  • Cardinal : Helping product teams to build measurable features 

  • Humand : AI powered digital communities for companies

  • Hacksocial : Your social media assistant

Computer graphics have tried to achieve photorealism for decades.

Platforms like Midjourney are finally achieving it (with a stealthy team of 11). 

These “fake” images are indistinguishable from reality.