🛩️ AI Fighter Jets Are Flippin Wild

Hello, fellow nerds 🧙

Oh doctor, our fellow nerd Henry Cavill lit up YouTube after a trailer dropped for a new James Bond film called “Bond 26”, raking in 2.8 million views in mere days.

But there’s a catch. Bond 26 doesn’t actually exist. The entire trailer was done with AI and, honestly to our surprise, you can hardly tell. Outside of the usual signs, albeit very minor—eyes looking weird, wacky lip sync— this trailer was legit. Check it out.

Here’s the daily quests in AI to complete today:

• 🛩️ AI Fighter Jets Are Flippin Wild

• 📦️ Amazon Loses 10 Million Pounds

• 🎨 F2P Friday - InstantMesh

• 🎲 Actual Dice Are So Last Year

AI Fighter Jets Are Flippin Wild

Military and AI is as chaotic of a topic as you can imagine, but that’s not stopping DARPA from giving AI wings. 

Apparently over the course of 2 years, they’ve been training the X-62A (an F-16 with AI crammed into it) in the art of offensive and defensive aerial combat. And if you couldn’t have guessed, the X-62A is a calculated killer. During a VR simulation, the X-62 crushed its competition 5-0 with DARPA saying “the machine performed aggressive and precise maneuvers that the human pilot couldn’t match” —aka that noob got deleted.

Now you could argue, hey, that was only a VR simulation. Of course the computer will win. But what about a real fight? How will it do in a legit dogfight? Well, DARPA gave the X-62 that chance. The results? They never released the winner.

Hmm, curious. 

This act of secrecy could be for a multitude of reasons, but if we were to place bets on who won, we’d throw all our dollars at the X-62.

We did touch on the potential of having AI wingmen last week, but this new info makes the idea of AI fighter jets controlling the skies much, much clearer. Which, can’t say for sure whether that’s a good or bad thing. But with any military application, you just hope that ours is better.

P.S. if you wanna scratch your aviation itch, here’s a little 9 minute mini doc on the X-62A

Amazon Loses 10 Million Pounds of Waste

Ever wondered how much waste you’d end up with if you were shoving 20 million packages out the door each day?

There’s no one size fits all Amazon box, although they wish there were. Between airbags and bubble wrap, boxes are lucky to be half filled.

But what if they deployed some serious machine learning muscle to whip those packaging pipelines into eco-friendly, profit-preserving shape? That's exactly what Amazon did by designing the "Package Decision Engine" AI model.

We're talking an algorithm properly trained up on stuff like natural language processing, NLP, and computer vision to scrutinize each individual order with obsessive perfection.

Using deep learning magic, the model can precisely determine if your new dinner plate set merits a heavy duty box or if that cozy blanket can make the journey sans bubble wrap and just a lil bag. No packaging undersized or oversized, no errant airbags burped into the ecosystem, just AI meticulously optimizing the material footprint for each order.

The stats are pretty staggering too!

Amazon claims this algorithm has helped them cut over 2 million tons of packaging waste since 2015 by streamlining distribution practices. Well I’ll be dipped, that's enough rescued cardboard to re-roof every McMansion from Milwaukee to San Diego.

Do experts think these AI efforts will single-handedly curb our global addiction to excessive packaging and material waste?

Oh hell naw, there's only so much one machine learning model can do against the myriad of human overconsumption habits but on the bright side, the Earth just got a little lighter.

F2P Friday

Where we share an up-and-coming AI freebie to keep an eye on.

InstantMesh - 3D Modeling from a Single Image

Rendering 2D models to 3D has never been easier. Simply upload an image, click generate, and away we go.

Now, the model has a lot of training and upgrading to do, but in the right hands, it could create DnD miniature masterpiece

Daily Delight

Just something fun and interesting around the web.

Dice are still our preferred way of rollin’ but we had no clue something like this even existed…

What’s happening inside the Realm

A list of side quests to explore and more.

• 📱 Snapchat is looking for ways to inform their users of AI images, so they’ve settled on watermarking images going forward that seem a little AI-suspect

• 🎧️ The AI hardware space is growing faster than our backyard weeds. Nothing’s released a new set of headphones that you can simply tap twice to talk to ChatGPT

• 🎥 The first-ever AI-generated romcom, “Next Stop Paris”, needs larger training wheels.

• 🔑 Meta just released its free and open-source LLM to compete with ChatGPT-4. Although you may use the model’s sleek user interface for free, without logging in, you must log in if you’d like to generate images.

That’s all the quests we have for today. Check back tomorrow for more!

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