Stealing voices with AI

Plus: A game changer open source AI model

April 21, 2023

Hey there,

Global VC funding for new startups is down 53% in 2023, but AI startups are seeing a gold rush!

Imagine you decide to build a startup, but you don’t have an idea yet. Suddenly, within a week your startup is funded and valued at $100 million!

This is not fantasy, it’s a story of four AI researchers who left Google earlier this year to build a new startup, Mobius, and were valued $100M within a week. Read more about them and the AI funding frenzy here.

On to our today’s update:

  • Stealing voices with AI

  • Open source AI model by StabilityAI

Reading time is 4 minutes. Let’s dive in 🤿


Stealing voices with AI

The first job category to be replaced by AI?

What: Tech companies are using AI to clone voices of artists without their consent.

Every human has a unique voice due to minor differences in pitch, timbre, tone, pronunciation and intonation. But now AI can clone your voice pattern to sound exactly like you!

Voice artists, who signed away the rights of their voice in past for a project, are now seeing their voices pop up everywhere from youtube to commercials. Tech companies are exploiting legal loop holes to ‘avoid’ paying royalties to original artist!

Popular artists, like Drake and are getting their voices cloned to generate fake songs (read more). Recently, Joe Rogan’s fake podcast with Trump was an example of how easily disinformation could be spread.

But the problem isn’t AI itself. It’s how humans are misusing the tech.

Bigger Picture: The issue is more than just money and copyrights, voice scams are on rise too. Recently, scammers used AI to clone a teen girl’s voice to sound like she was kidnapped, in attempt to extort $1 million from a family. Read NYP’s report here.

StabilityAI releases open-source AI

An open-source free-to-use AI model is a huge deal

What: StabilityAI, the company behind the popular text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, released a new AI model for text and code generation (aka, a Large Language Model)

The AI model is completely open-source with full commercial rights! You are free to download, modify, fine-tune the AI model for research and commercial use.

The model is available in 2 versions, a lighter version with 3B params and a bigger version with 7B params.

Why it matters: OpenAI is the only AI company right now that has reliable and scalable API for AI models. Almost every new AI product took a dependency on OpenAI.

This is a massive business risk since the core feature is controlled by a third-party:

  1. Increased risk: A change in OpenAI’s policy could make or break your product.

  2. Vendor lock: You are locked into using OpenAI.

  3. No control over your user data: everything needs to be send over to OpenAI for processing.

  4. Expensive: Every API call has a cost associated with it.

StabilityAI’s release is a huge deal because the open-source model can help diversify the risk and lower your costs too!

Misc 🌎
From the corners of the Internet

  • Google is merging DeepMind and Brain teams to focus on development on AI (link)

  • ChatGPT is estimated to cost $750,000 to operate per day! (link)

  • Japanese city, Yokosuka, begins using ChatGPT for gov’t administration tasks - (link)

  • Satellites are built to look at Earth, but Nasa’s satellite captured an actual image of another satellite in orbit - (link)

  • Following Twitter and Reddit’s footsteps, Stack overflow will now charge AI companies for data - (link)

  • Google employees who tested Bard AI chatbot: “Worse than useless”, but Google still went ahead with the launch - (link)

  • Car thieves are using tech disguised as old Nokia phones to steal a car in 30 seconds! Watch a video (link)