This Week In XR: Open AI Dev Day Bombshells, Aleph Alpha AI Raises $500 Million, xAI’s Grok

Open AI’s Massive Dev Day Announcements. At its first “developer day,” OpenAI unveiled a range of new features, upgrades, and price reductions that will strongly influence the development of a new category of software. The new OpenAI’s GPT Builder will allow anyone to customize and share their own AI assistants (GPTs), which creators can sell to other users in its new app store. You can add advanced custom instructions to your GPTs, including files, descriptions, and actions, and sell them to other users, with OpenAI taking a 50%.

GPT-4 Turbo, a new LLM with an upgraded 128K context window that allows it to read prompts as long as a 300-page book, was introduced. The company is lowering its API pricing. OpenAI has also introduced a new legal defense fund that will indemnify its users from copyright infringement claims.

Grokking Musk’s Take on AI. xAI opened the waitlist for its new ChatBot called Grok, a word coined by sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein in his 1961 bestseller, Stranger in a Strange Land. To grok is to deeply understand and empathize. In a post announcing Grok last Saturday, November 4th, the company explained how Grok will grok the world in real time with a LLM (Large Language Model) that includes X’s real time newsfeed, which means at times Grok may be incorrect, biased, and even malicious. According to the post, Grok will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other apps. The plan is to integrate it into X Premium+ so there’s a fee to grok with Grok.

Germany’s Leading AI startup Aleph Alpha Raises $500 M. The startup, founded in 2019, gives businesses “full sovereignty” over the implementation of AI into their businesses. TechCrunch compares it to France’s Mistral ($112 million in funding), which works with large corporations to deploy LLMs internally. The round was co-led by Schwarz Group (the owners of the Lidl supermarket chain) and Bosch Ventures. Other investors include Berlin-based Christ & Company Consulting, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, SAP, and Burda Principal Investments.

The AI Pin Is Here. It’s hard to tell at the moment if this is the new iPhone, but the battle of the personal AI Chatbots is on. The small, screenless, always on clip-on leaves the users heads up and hands free. The AI Pin’s voice operating system will read your email and give you unlimited access to ChatGPT. No smart phone is required, but Pinners will need a monthly $24 T-Mobile subscription.

Layoffs At Pico Signal ByteDance Is Pivoting Away From Consumers. They always deny rumors that weeks later turn out to be true. And so over 1,000 people around the world, mostly on the content and marketing sides of the business, are looking for new jobs. Bytedance characterized it as normal restructuring. Most of the hardware team was left standing, leading to speculation the company is planning to pivot to MR as Meta has.

Samsung Will Release a Galaxy branded MR Headset in 2024. The joint venture between Google, Samsung, and Qualcomm reportedly has 2024 plans for 30,000 units of their mixed reality headset to rival Apple Vision Pro. According to new reports from the Korean newspaper The JoonAng, the Samsung, Google, and Qualcomm partnership will only release around 30,000 units in 2024. According to JoonAng, Samsung’s Galaxy MR will have 4K/per eye (8K) displays from Sony, the same as the Vision Pro.

Spatial Expands Into Games. The company is leveraging its integration with Unity to enable developers of existing and new games built on Unity to be directly imported onto Spatial, where it offers a 50% rev share on User Generated Content. Its first season of in-house games includes Punch Hero, Racing Empire, Infinite Ascent, Shooty Shooty, Mostly Only Up, Buddy Blitz, and Cyber Punk: Neon Ghost, and several titles from IzyPlay.

AI Lip Dubbing Puts Words In Your Mouth. Lipdub is a new free app from New York City based Captions, a two year old video startup serving social media content creators with text captioning bundled with other services, like editing and special effects. The app uses AI and voice cloning to make the lips match the translated word. Click the video above and behold the magic, or download the free app and see for yourself.

Inworld AI annouced a multi-year co-development partnership with Xbox to deliver new tools powered by AI for game developers. This partnership will bring together Inworld’s expertise in working with generative AI models for character development, Microsoft’s cutting-edge cloud-based AI solutions including Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Research’s technical insights into the future of play, and Team Xbox’s strengths in revolutionizing accessible and responsible creator tools for all developers.

Jeffrey Katzenberg: AI Will Drastically Cut Number of Workers It Takes to Make Animated Movies. “If you look at how media has been impacted in the last 10 years by the introduction of digital technology, what will happen in the next 10 years will be 10x as great — literally,” the former DreamWorks and Disney animation legend said at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum. “And I think AI as a creative tool — think of that as a new paintbrush or a new camera — has so much opportunity around it.” Katzenberg said his animated movies that were made by 500 artists over five years won’t take ten percent of that effort.

Rec Room Has Unleashed The Ninja Turtles The recent reboot has rekindled interest in the 90s icons. Rec Room users can style their avatars in the likeness of their favorite Turtles, or even the infamous Shredder. Rec Room also unveiled a four player game in which the team takes on the usual assortment of bad guys. Rec Room, and the Turtles, are also on game consoles and tablets.

This Week in XR is also a podcast hosted by the author of this column, Charlie Fink, with Ted Schilowitz, Futurist, Paramount Global, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap. This week our guest is Michael Beneville, Chief Creative Officer of Area 15 in Las Vegas, and soon, Orlando. We can be found on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.

What We’re Reading

Snoop Dogg, sentient AI and the ‘Arrival Mind Paradox’ (Louis Rosenberg/VentureBeat)