“We’ve never seen a technology move as fast as AI has to impact society and technology. This is by far the fastest moving technology that we’ve ever tracked in terms of its impact and we’re just getting started.” Paul Daugherty, CEO of Accenture

In today’s email:

• News: ChatGPT could be used in future GM vehicles

• News: Microsoft special AI announcement March 16th

• Zoom out: The impact of AI on global politics and warfare

• New projects: AI animates people from a single photo

• New tools: Relight your photos with ClipDrop

Microsoft to Hold Special Event on AI This Week

On March 9th, Microsoft Germany CTO Andres Braun dropped a bombshell comment about GPT-4 coming in the next week to Microsoft.

Just yesterday, Microsoft announced a special event titled "Reinventing productivity with AI" which will be lead by CEO Satya Nadella and VP Jared Spataro.

Microsoft has been at the forefront of integrating OpenAI’s latest releases after becoming their primary investor late last year.

The event hints at exploring “how AI will be used to reinvent productivity and introduce a new way of working for individuals and organizations alike.”

While the exact details of what will be covered at the event are not known, it is rumored that GPT-4 could be announced, or an integration of ChatGPT into the Microsoft Suite of Office products could be unveiled.

The event is set to be held on March 16th at 8:00am PST at the following link:

ChatGPT to be Integrated in Future GM Vehicles

General Motors (GM) is teaming up with Microsoft to bring ChatGPT, an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, into its future vehicles.

GM believes that this AI assistant could revolutionize the way we interact with our cars.

According to GM Vice President Scott Miller, ChatGPT is going to be everywhere. “It could help us with anything from opening our garage doors to planning our route to the doctor's office and even reserving a charging spot for us when we get there.”

GM is keeping the specifics under wraps, but they're confident that ChatGPT could make our driving experience more fresh, exciting, and comfortable by integrating with emerging technologies.

MORE ON THIS: Teslarati, ShackNews.

New Book Details AI’s Impact on Global Warfare

In his new book ‘Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence’, author Paul Scharre explores the international competition to secure the most powerful artificial intelligence technology, which he believes will determine the next global superpower.

Scharre argues that AI technologies are extremely powerful tools for shaping global progress, and that the stakes of the global battle for AI dominance are high.

Not only does he argue the competition is about economic, military, and political power, but it also concerns the spread of China's model of governance, techno-authoritarianism, through adoption of their AI systems.

Scharre also warns of democratic backsliding in countries where China's laws and norms for using technology for surveillance and repression are being emulated.

The author highlights the four key battlegrounds of global competition in AI as data, computing hardware, human talent, and the institutions necessary to successfully adopt AI systems.

AI has incredible potential in intelligence applications. Military operations can also benefit from AI in logistics, readiness, finance, and personnel.

AI will no doubt transform traditional warfare, and its widespread application will have second and third order effects on national power.

This book is worth checking out if you’re interested in the global implications of AI from the perspective of a strategic advisor.

MORE ON THIS: Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Business Insider interview.

Animate With AI From a Single Photo

Introducing PHORHUM: the revolutionary new method that creates stunningly detailed and lifelike 3D models of humans using deep neural networks.

With just a single image input, PHORHUM generates a 3D model of a person that captures their shape, surface color, and lighting with remarkable accuracy.

This is thanks to its unique pixel-aligned approach, which estimates both 3D geometry and surface color at the same time.

PHORHUM goes above and beyond by introducing a patch-based rendering loss, ensuring that color reconstruction is of the highest quality.

This addresses some of the limitations of previous methods that struggled with accurately representing geometry, albedo, and illumination effects.

Its photorealistic reconstructions will revolutionize fields such as virtual reality, gaming, and film, opening up a whole new world of possibilities.

MORE ON THIS: PHORHUM GitHub.

Relighting Photos with ClipDrop

You can now relight photographs using AI to detect the structure of a face, casting accurate shadows as if your photographs were a 3D model.

The Relight tool from Clipdrop allows you to relight your pictures in post-production dynamically, conforming around three dimensional features in your image.

How it works

The app uses highly accurate depth and surface normal maps to compute the illumination by common reflection models.

Depth maps are grayscale images that show how far or how near each pixel in the image is. Surface normal maps, on the other hand, encode the normal vector of each pixel in red, green, and blue channels. These maps are crucial to determine how the image pixels should be illuminated.

The process of predicting high-quality depth and surface maps from a single image is known as monocular depth estimation.

To address this, ClipDrop has created a dataset containing thousands of diverse human models with a variety of clothes, poses, body types, facial expressions, hair styles, and more.

The models trained on this synthetic dataset have been optimized to outperform the current state-of-the-art methods for monocular depth estimation, allowing users to relight images in post-production that accurately reflect dynamic lighting variations.

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