Apple's secret AI product

Plus: AI attacking Hollywood and potentially you

Welcome to this week's edition of The AI Breakdown.

Here’s the big three stories of the week:

  • Apple’s secret ChatGPT competitor

  • Hollywood actors and writers facing an existential AI crisis

  • WormGPT, the hacker's dream version of ChatGPT

All the key players are now on the field.

Apple has been secretly working on project AJAX, a chatbot similar to ChatGPT. The company has been using it in-house and has plans to launch a public version. However, the release isn't planned until next year.

Apple is the last major tech company to announce it is working on AI technology.

It seems they are trying to avoid too much AI hype, just in case things don’t go as planned.

Image Credits: Nicholas Kamm / AFP / Getty Images

The Screen Actors Guild union is in a dispute with Hollywood studios over the use of artificial intelligence in film and television, specifically the creation of AI-generated 'synthetic' actors. Actors are worried that their past, present, and future work will be used to generate these synthetic performers.

The Writers Guild of America is currently on strike, and AI is a major point of contention for the same reasons. And rightly so.

A company recently created an entire fake “South Park” episode using AI technology, which included numerous fake celebrity cameos, including a fake Meryl Streep.

Moreover, someone cloned Johnny Cash’s voice to produce a new song where he sings Barbie Girl.

Therefore, it's safe to say that the Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild have legitimate concerns.

Image Credits: REUTERS/Mike Blake

There's a new AI threat on the scene: WormGPT. This is the dark web’s version of ChatGPT, trained on a diverse array of data sources, with a particular emphasis on malware-related data.

It lowers the barrier to entry for cybercriminal activities. Hence, even a novice can quickly create sophisticated attacks or aid non-English speaking criminals in formulating very convincing email-based phishing attacks.

Sometimes I hesitate to share information like this, due to the fear and potential of giving more publicity to a malicious tool.

However, it's essential to stay updated on all the security-related technology emerging in relation to AI to protect yourself from attacks.

🌎 Around the Web

Here are some interesting stories and tools that caught our attention this week:

  • Cruderra - Creating docs and architecture as code for developers (link)

  • Chitchat - A simple LLM chat front-end that makes it easy to find, download, and mess around with LLM models on your local machine (link)

  • Airstrip AI - Legal made easier for every Startup (link)

  • Neum AI - Improve your AI's accuracy (link)

  • Excel formula bot - Write Excel Google Sheet formulas in seconds with AI (link)

  • Taskade - AI-powered productivity tools, including mind maps and project manager (link)

  • BlogSEO micro tools - Free AI-Powered SEO Tools (link)

  • Layernext - Unified infrastructure for Computer Vision data (link)

🛠️ The Best Open Source Tools

More and more power is getting into the hands of the common developer. ColossalAI makes models cheaper and faster to train and run. Plus, big news from Meta; they've open-sourced Llama2.

🖼️ AI image of the week

Ridiculous AI images and memes from around the web.

Thanks for reading this issue of The AI Breakdown. If you haven’t already, subscribe to get the next issue in your inbox and tell your friends about us. Additionally, if you have any interesting projects or ideas, find me on Twitter/𝕏 @jjordanwade or Linkedin 

Until next time, take it easy 👋
— Jordan Wade