AI mind maps, amazing text-to-video, better predictions, the future of fashion and more

February 17, 2024

“AI is a deceptive, over abused term. Collective Intelligence (CI) is more useful. It’s often just us (our labor/data), in aggregate, harnessed to produce value by a few, who maybe have an easier time acting with impunity because we are distracted by fairytales about sentient robots.” - Holly Herndon

OpenAI’s amazing Sora text-to-video model has the AI world abuzz. This massive leap is leading to speculation on how and how soon it will impact the movie production business. See a compilation of Sora videos and Hollywood’s response below.

Nature, humanity, technology, and culture are all intertwined, we just need to see it. Sasha Wallinger shares insights into how to apply this in life and business, including in shaping the future of fashion in this week’s fascinating podcast episode.

I believe in visualization is a powerful way to enhance our thinking. See below for one useful tool, a lot more visualization tools and techniques coming in future episodes.

Ross

📖In this issue

  • Easy creation of AI-generated mind maps

  • AI improves human forecasters’s prediction quality by 23%

  • Innovation Humans + AI approaches in fashion and music

  • OpenAI Sora’s breakthrough text-to-video model

  • Emergent capabilities in AI voice models

  • Sasha Wallinger on the intersection of fashion and technology, hidden connections, nature and culture, and nurturing minds

  • A wonderful compilation of design canvases

🤸🏽In practice

Generate useful mind maps with AI

There are plenty of “AI generated mind map” software tools on the market, but most aren’t very good. One of the best ones, Neuro Mermaid AI, is free.

I’ll be pointing to other content we’re creating on how to generate mind maps and other concept visualizations in forthcoming newsletters.

👩🤖What you need to know in Humans + AI

Using AI improves human forecasters’ accuracy by 23%

A new research paper shows that human forecasters augmented by AI have their performance improved dramatically, and far exceed AI alone. The improvement is consistent even with biased forecasting models, and apply equally to more or less skilled forecasters.

Fashion designers are using AI extensively

“This month’s London fashion week, marking the event’s 40th anniversary, will showcase a host of AI-generated outfits and industry insiders have expressed a growing optimism about what the technology can do for the sector – from improving diversity to shortening the path from design desk to shop floor.”

Pioneers are using AI to create “radically new” music

“Award-winning performer Holly Herndon is using artificial intelligence to pioneer novel forms of composition, pushing back against AI-generated music that produces an endless glut of the same instead of anything radically new.”

🔥Hot news in AI

  • OpenAI’s very impressive Sora text-to-video model soars way past existing models (example below) - OpenAI, Hollywood Reporter 

  • In creating the largest text-to-speech model yet Amazon has observed “emergent” capabilities to generate very realistic voices - Techcrunch

  • Google has announced Gemini 1.5 with a staggering context window of 1 million tokens now (8x the largest GPT-4 model) and up 10 million potential - Google

  • Universal time series forecasting model uses data across domains to achieve superior zero-shot predictions - arXiv

🎙️Latest podcast episode

Sasha Wallinger on the intersection of fashion and technology, hidden connections, nature and culture, and nurturing minds (AC Ep31)

What you will learn

  • Weaving nature, culture, and innovation

  • Bridging virtual and physical realms in the fashion and sustainability nexus

  • Pioneering the digital-physical hybrid in community building

  • Reflecting on technology’s evolution from the Industrial Revolution to AI integration

  • Innovations in everyday technology transforming personal and fashion experiences

  • Exploring the frontier of bio-scientific materials in fashion and wellness

  • Emphasizing digital detox and mindfulness for grounding and future-thinking

Wonderful collection of design canvases

The thoughtful and generous Dave Gray has compiled a fantastic list of over 60 "design canvases”. He says “a Design Canvas is more than just a template or visual framework for a couple of reasons:

1. It incorporates more rigorous business thinking around a specific purpose (like designing a business model)

2. It is considered as a tool and goes through a tool development process, like you would use when creating software, involving prototyping, customer use-case testing and iterative development.

3. Instructions for use are included in the canvas, making it self-explanatory and to some degree self-facilitating.

4. This results in a “game board” that’s more robust, more clear in its intended use, more self-explanatory, and easier to use.”

Thank you for reading!