The Neuron
Posts
😺 AI dubbing by ElevenLabs

😺 AI dubbing by ElevenLabs

PLUS: Adobe's new AI upgrades.

Noah Edelman & Pete Huang
October 11, 2023

Welcome, humans.

The odds of you scoring the $1.73 billion Powerball jackpot tonight are 1 in 292.2 million.

We don’t need to tell you the odds of you learning something about AI, now that you’ve opened this email. (psst - it’s 1 in 1)

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

ElevenLabs launched an AI dubbing tool.
Goldman Sachs is slowly but thoughtfully deploying AI.
Adobe’s image model got an upgrade.
AMD acquired an AI software startup to challenge Nvidia.

You Will Soon Be Able To Listen To Any Video In Any Language.

See this TikTok of Pete?

Our faves at ElevenLabs just dropped a new dubbing tool that can translate it into 20+ languages, while keeping the original voice and trying to make it sound native.

Early reports say the tool is a bit spotty: obviously bad when it misses but definitely amazing when it doesn’t. But hey - it’s the worst it’ll ever be.

Plus, YouTube and Spotify are testing similar dubbing tools with creators.

Winner: marketers, content creators and media brands

With <20% of Earth speaking English as a first language, AI will let you reach billions of people at a time in their native tongue.

Also winner: you on your next vacation to Paris

Live AI dubbing is probably coming soon to our phones. Spending 10 hours on Duolingo just to get scoffed at by snobby locals might be a thing of the past.

Unclear: language learning as a hobby

Duolingo, meet chess: it better be about the journey, because a computer will destroy you at it.
Whether we see more people learning languages or fewer depends on if the world shuts down again and people randomly decide it’s the thing to do.

FROM OUR PARTNERS

This painting sold for $8 million and everyday investors profited

When the painting by master Claude Monet (you may have heard of him) was bought for $6.8 million and sold for a cool $8 million just 631 days later, investors in shares of the offering received their share of the net proceeds.

All thanks to Masterworks, the award-winning platform for investing in blue-chip art. Masterworks does all of the heavy lifting like finding the painting, buying it, storing it, and eventually selling it. To date, every one of its 16 sales out of its portfolio has returned a profit to investors.

With over 840,000 users, shares of offerings can sell out in just minutes. But The Neuron readers can skip the waitlist to join with this exclusive link.

Companies Should Invest In AI But Set Clear Expectations.

What’s the one thing Goldman Sachs is world-class at?

Nope, it’s not workplace culture. Nor is it being humble. It’s smart investing.

And yes — Goldman is a great blueprint for how to smartly invest in AI to be more productive as a company.

Here are Goldman’s CIO’s Do / Do-Nots for the 80% of key decision-makers that haven’t gotten AI projects to enterprise scale yet:

DO: Experiment with AI and set a clear bar for what “success” looks like.

For instance, Goldman let some software developers experiment with using AI … from which they saw 20-40% productivity gains … so Goldman is letting 1,000 developers use AI by EOY.

DO NOT: Give into hype, aka spray millions of dollars at unproven AI solutions.

This is probably why Goldman isn’t building its own AI models from scratch like other companies. Instead, it’s fine-tuning existing models.

BTW: this advice goes for employees as well: experiment with AI → see what works → invest accordingly. It’s kinda like dating…

Around the Horn.

Adobe Firefly is upgrading its image generator and getting better editing capabilities.
Dozens of use cases from ChatGPT-4V (new version that can “see”).
AMD acquired AI software startup “Nod” to help compete with Nvidia.
Takeaways from an SF event on the challenges/future of AI agents.