A scrappy startup challenges OpenAI's Sora

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Welcome back, Superhuman

In a field dominated by well-funded tech giants, a scrappy startup called Hotshot is proving that innovation and smart thinking can go a long way. Find out how a four-person team built a leading video model in just four months.

Today’s Insights

• A scrappy startup challenges OpenAI’s Sora

• Tutorial: Creating realistic, lip-synced videos with AI

• A new AI analyst interprets thousands of documents at once

• Everything else you should know today

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• AI-Generated Images: Remote homes

NEXT IN AI

The four-person team behind the next big AI video tool

OpenAI has thousands of employees and offices scattered across the globe, from Tokyo to Dublin to NYC. But it has yet to open up its long-awaited text-to-video model, Sora, to the public. Meanwhile, a startup called Hotshot just beat OpenAI to the punch — with a team of just four employees. 

A growing roster of companies — including Runway, Luma, and Pika — have released publicly available text-to-video generators this year. But with its tiny crew and just four months of training time, Hotshot might just be doing the most with the fewest resources. And it claims that 70% of users prefer its latest model over the competition.

What’s it capable of?

• The latest version can create 10-second videos with advanced motion effects at 720p

• It “excels in prompt alignment, consistency, and motion,” according to the team

• Creators are already combining Hotshot’s generations with other AI tools to create highly realistic clips

• You can generate videos in different styles, including comics and video games

• Hotshot predicts AI-generated YouTube videos are around the corner, along with “longer durations, higher resolutions, and more modalities”

• You can try the beta version for yourself here

Why it matters: This is just the latest example of a scrappy AI company doing a lot with relatively few resources. As the barrier to creating new AI products continues to lower, we'll likely see an explosion of diverse options on the market, empowering creators to choose the tools that best suit their needs.

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THE AI ACADEMY

How to create lifelike lip-synced videos with AI

1. Go to RenderNet’s website and sign up to get started.

2. Click on the Try Narrator button to go to the creation page.

3. Upload your source video. You will need a subscription to upload your custom video or you can use the already given sample.

4. Upload a clear picture of the face for best results.

5. Select a voice from the list, write your script in any supported language, and click on the Generate button.

6. You can edit composition, styles, parts of images, and much more once the video is generated.

Use it to generate videos with unique characters and endless visuals while maintaining consistent features and style.

Get more AI tutorials →

AI & DATA

A new AI tool can analyze thousands of studies with near-perfect accuracy

How much of your work day gets eaten up by grueling, yet necessary tasks? A startup called Reliant found that predicament is especially common in the biotech industry, where new research relies on all of the studies that came before it.

With $11.3M in seed funding, Reliant set out to create a model called Tabular that automates the tedious process of searching through studies, giving scientists more time to focus on the experiments themselves.

How it works: 

• You can provide the model with thousands of documents, then ask it to find information hidden within them

• It presents the data in an easy-to-read database that can be sorted and edited to match your needs

• In one experiment, it generated no errors, compared with an 11% error rate from ChatGPT

Why it’s important: You have to provide most LLMs with highly organized data in order to generate meaningful results. Tabular is different in that it can interpret even unstructured data with high levels of accuracy — a development that has implications far beyond the biotech world.

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

• Defying the odds: Meta’s ad business beat expectations, generating more than $1 million per employee, thanks in part to new AI tools that give clients greater control over their content.

• Tactical maneuver: A startup called Defcon AI raised $44M to build a military-focused model that gives logistical suggestions during complicated missions and rescue scenarios.

• Hovering Helpers: IKEA is expanding its fleet of AI-powered flying drones, which manage inventory inside its sprawling warehouses.

• Multimodal Master: Salesforce unveiled a new open-source model called xGen-MM that excels at understanding interleaved data — including documents that contain both text and images.

👷 Outside the Toolbox: A startup called Trunk Tools is building an AI model that can help construction workers quickly find information related to their projects. Founder Sarah Buchner, who started working as a carpenter at the age of 12, said the model can interpret blueprints, drawings, and spreadsheets, letting workers ask questions via an easy-to-use chatbot interface.

🧠 Brain Food: Meta’s research division has found a novel way to train LLMs on synthetic data with the help of other LLMs — no human evaluators required. The new Self-Taught Evaluator could help cut down on costs and dramatically boost efficiency.

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

✅ Tome: Review contracts, negotiate terms, and draft privacy policies with the help of an AI-powered legal expert.

✅ Clerkly: Ask regulatory questions in everyday language, and find answers from official US sources.

✅ Ellipsis: An AI developer tool that automatically reviews code and fixes bugs on pull requests.

✅ Coldreach: An AI platform that recommends new leads with evidence, so you know why they are ready to buy.

✅ Ocode AI: Create webpages from images or text instructions, preview the output, and deploy the page on the go.

PS: Want more? Check out our Top 100 AI Tools.

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PROMPT OF THE DAY

Product descriptions for your Etsy listings

Prompt: Create a simple outline to help me write an Etsy product description. Consider the following aspects:

Product Name: [Product Name]

Product Type: [Product Type]

Materials: [List Materials Used] (Optional)

Dimensions: [Provide Dimensions] (Optional)

Colors/Patterns: [List Available Colors or Patterns] (Optional)

Key Features: [Highlight Unique Selling Points]

Main Task: Provide a simple outline to help me write an Etsy product description based on the provided aspects.

You can adapt the prompt to your specific needs.

_{Source: Scaz}

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Remote homes

Midjourney Prompts: 

ultra minimal, serbian house next to a beautiful turqoise lake, vibrant iridescent cloud arching overhead, ambience

ultra minimal, italian mansion in the cypress forest, night, dark ambiance

ultra minimal, matte black a-shaped house surrounded by tall red sequoia trees, great view

ultra minimal, matte black victorian house deep in the woods, dark forest, ambience

--ar 2:3 --style raw --v 6.1 --stylize 500 --personalize 1ygu72c
 

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Until next time!

Zain & the Superhuman AI team

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