AI Marches to Capitol Hill 🏛️

Good morning, AI explorers!

Welcome to another edition of AI Authority, delivering all of the top groundbreaking AI news shaping our world into a bite-sized newsletter every Friday.

Highlights from this week include:  

• 👨🏻‍⚖️ AI’s Congressional Hearing

• 🤖 Tesla’s Bot Army Invades Offices

• ⚙️ Meta’s AI Upgrades

• ⬇️ + More!

Let’s dive in 👇

A rundown of some of the top headlines in the AI space this week:

🏛️ AI Takes Center Stage on Capitol Hill

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified before Congress on the future of AI this week, in a massive moment for an industry growing at an exponential rate.

While calling the current revolution "potential printing press moment," Altman urged lawmakers to regulate AI to prevent any potential risks, emphasizing the need for government intervention as AI technologies continue to advance at breakneck speed.

Altman's debut before Congress, flanked by other AI experts, was full of pressing issues surrounding AI regulation… But three key questions loomed large:

• The potential need for a new federal agency to oversee AI development

• Who should own the data that AI trains on

• The extent to which AI might influence the 2024 election

While there were few clear-cut answers, these critical issues underscored the need for ongoing debate and caution as we navigate the uncharted waters of artificial intelligence.

Watch a great condensed version of the 3-hour hearing here, for those interested in catching the most notable exchanges.

Also grabbing headlines from the hearing — the fact that Altman apparently owns zero equity in OpenAI:

🤖 Tesla's Humanoid Robots Take Significant Strides

Seven months after their initial reveal, Tesla's humanoid robots are now walking together, picking up items, and recognizing objects, according to a new video unveiled by CEO Elon Musk at a recent shareholder meeting event.

This impressive development comes after a period of rigorous AI training from human-tracked movements and enhancements in motor control and environment discovery and memorization.

One bot was even demonstrated picking up objects from one container and putting them in another - an example of the bot's ability to learn from human demonstrations.

The Tesla Bots, named ‘Optimus’, has come a long way since its debut, when they could barely walk forward — and are now moving independently (albeit slowly).

Is this the dawn of a new era of humanoid robots in everyday life? Tesla is expected to start production on the Tesla Bot after the delivery of its first long-awaited Cybertrucks.

Check them out in action below:

⚙️ Meta Making Big AI Moves

Meta made another deep dive into the AI waters this week, unveiling its very own in-house AI chips and providing several other major updates.

Designed to supercharge video processing and AI tasks, these MTIA chips are poised to power up everything from virtual reality to generative AI in the unfolding metaverse — and reportedly consume significantly less energy than current competitors.

In addition to its AI chips, Meta also announced a planned overhaul of its data centers — breaking ground later this year on more modern, AI-focused designs.

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg also revealed the company’s Research SuperCluster — one of the fastest supercomputers in the world — has completed Phase 2 of its buildouts. The cluster will be used for training Meta’s LLMs (large language models), as well as implemented for the “world’s first AI translation system for oral languages.”

While the focus of the space has largely been on OpenAI and Google, Meta’s updates are a reminder of the many other big players currently making moves in the AI race.

A compilation of the latest AI-powered platforms to add to your toolbox:

• Runway ML — AI video editor with text-to video generation (link)

• Parthean — An AI coach for personal finance (link)

• Scribe — Document processes with ease using AI (link)

• HoopsGPT — Advanced basketball analytics taken to the next level with AI (link)

• Glasp — A social web highlighter (link) (Check out our video on the tool below)

Our favorite tweets, threads, AI generations and more from the past week:

Sometimes you just need to let ChatGPT cook:

An… interesting workaround to get Bard AI to follow instructions:

Even the NPCs will think you’re awkward:

We had some fun earlier this week with creating some movie posters that will (almost certainly) never be made:

Some more of our favorite movie/TV AI-generated finds on the timeline this week:

A Bollywood remake of “Ghost Busters” from Reddit user notsewfast_:

Popeye: The Movie from Reddit user TECNICO_MUNECOS:

“The Shining”, starring Danny DeVito 💀

Bonus sneak peak from us coming Sunday — “Succession” characters as fitness models:

C