Leo's Lightbulbs

Hello everyone and welcome to Leo’s Lightbulbs! I’ll be covering the top news from the past week every Monday morning in your inbox. This newsletter was written completely by hand, without any AI assistance or even AI editing.

To me the big news this week is the Scarlett Johansson voice controversy. I’m concerned that this may actually stifle innovation as people fear such lawsuits. While what OpenAI did may have looked bad and been sketchy, it shouldn’t really be considered illegal, and shouldn’t have been such a big deal. We’re only going to see more such things in the future, and ScarJo doesn’t have unlimited rights to all AI assistants. That said, what OpenAI did WAS super, super sketch.

💡Scarlett Johansson suggests that the OpenAI “Sky” voice sounds like her intentionally; OpenAI pulls voice voluntarily under threat of legal action

💡OpenAI's defense: It wasn't intentional, we're just incompetent and kept the CEO out of the loop

💡Companies including OpenAI pledge to use AI responsibly once again, for a dose of irony

💡MS Build announcements: Real time translation of videos, help playing Minecraft, a ton of Copilots

💡Anthropic publishes exciting research about how AIs actually work (currently they are a mystery, or “black box”)

💡Google's AI previews in search are... not so great to start with; one example is a suggestion to add glue to pizza sauce to help the cheese stick

💡AI’s threats to democracy and elections have yet to materialize (gifted NYT article)

💡Someone is targeting Chinese men with fake Russian AI women in a strange mix of patriotism and pyramid scheme (gifted NYT article)

💡Arizona state lawmaker uses AI to write law against deepfakes, pleasing irony-lovers everywhere

💡Nvidia looking at a 10-for-1 stock split, to reduce their share price

💡Sam Altman under fire, rumors he may be replaced begin to swirl

💡Meta's newly appointed AI council, like most AI boards, is made up entirely of white men

Have a wonderful week everybody! I check this email address ([email protected]) daily, so don’t hesitate to reply with any thoughts or questions for a chance to get featured next week!

Yours,

Leo