Consistent Characters now live on Midjourney.

🔥 Latest News

1. Midjourney debuts ‘cref’, a feature for generating consistent characters across multiple gen AI images. This is gamechanging for animators, filmmakers, and game developers as they are now able to bring creations to life with the power of narrative and storytelling. I played with the tool, and the results work great. Check out the base image and consistent characters that were created from that.

2. Cognition emerges from stealth to launch AI software engineer Devin: Cognition, a recently formed AI startup backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and tech industry leaders including former Twitter executive Elad Gil and Doordash co-founder Tony Xu, announced a fully autonomous AI software engineer called “Devin”. While there are multiple coding assistants out there, including the famous Github Copilot, Devin is said to stand out from the crowd with its ability to handle entire development projects end-to-end, right from writing the code and fixing the bugs associated with it to final execution. Several AI leaders have stepped up to say this is the first agent that seems to match up and even surpass human ability.

3. Hugging Face is launching an open robotics project: Hugging Face is venturing into new territory with the launch of an open robotics project. The ambitious expansion was announced by former Tesla staff scientist Remi Cadene. Cadene – who will be leading the robotics initiative – revealed that Hugging Face is hiring robotics engineers in Paris, France. A job listing for an “Embodied Robotics Engineer” sheds light on the project’s goals, which include “designing, building, and maintaining open-source and low cost robotic systems that integrate AI technologies, specifically in deep learning and embodied AI.

4. TikTok could potentially get a new owner who may harvest user data: Social media app TikTok is in the middle of the battle of its life. The platform is currently facing opposition from several lawmakers who crafted legislation looking to ban the platform in the US. And now, with TikTok’s future up in the air, it looks like its potential downfall has attracted the attention of potential buyers, one who may have an interest in using data from the platform’s users to help train its artificial intelligence models.

5. Cohere releases powerful ‘Command-R’ language model for enterprise use: AI startup Cohere announced the release of a major new language model called Command-R, as the Toronto-based company finds itself in the midst of a heated fundraising round that could bring in as much as $1 billion in fresh capital. Command-R represents a significant leap forward for Cohere’s technology, offering enhanced performance on key AI tasks like retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and tool use, longer context windows up to 128,000 tokens, and more affordable pricing. The release comes at a pivotal time for Cohere, which is locked in an arms race with rival AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic.

6. OpenAI announces new board members, reinstates CEO Sam Altman: Open OpenAI  announced that Sam Altman will be rejoining the company’s board of directors several months after losing his seat and being pushed out as OpenAI’s CEO. Joining him are three new members: former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Sue Desmond-Hellmann, ex-Sony Entertainment president Nicole Seligman and Instacart CEO Fidji Simo — bringing OpenAI’s board to eight people.

🔧 New Tools

• Pika adds a new feature that allows users to automatically generate sound effects for their AI videos made on the web platform

• Deepgram launches Aura, a new real-time text-to-speech API that integrates lifelike voice models with a high-speed API, enabling developers to craft real-time conversational AI agents

• Huawei introduces PixArt-Σ, a text-to-image AI model, creating detailed 4K images accurately

• UC Berkeley’s AI spinout Covariant launched RFM-1, a Robotics Foundation Model that provides robots the human-like ability to reason

• DeepMind and Stanford introduce RT-Sketch: A model that uses sketches to control robots

💰 Latest Startup Fundings

• Chinese generative AI startup Alsphere gets $14M funding to develop a rival to OpenAI’s Sora 

• Generative AI video startup Tavus raises $18M to bring face and voice cloning to any app

• Kaedim raises $15M in Series A to fund AI-based 3D asset creation solutions

• UG Labs raises $7M to infuse conversational AI and voice interactivity into games for kids

• Blockus, a web3 gaming tech stack and payments provider, raises $4M pre-seed round led by Maple VC

• AI-powered beat and track generator SOUNDRAW raises $3M from investors including Eminem’s manager Paul Rosenberg

• Bear Robotics, a robot waiter startup, secures $60M from LG