"This week in the ➡️ #Metaverse" #40
July 24, 2023
"This week in the ➡️ #Metaverse" #40
Hurray! we are celebrating the #40 issues of this newsletter. During the last year, this newsletter has grown so much, from a small group to a beautiful community of over 250 people! This is all you! Thank you so much for being there week after week, opening the emails, reading, and sending your words of encouragement!!!
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This week I wanted to ask you a personal favor, if you can, please share this newsletter with one person to help us grow and get the message out there!
As always, happy to bring you the relevant trends, regulatory developments and policy insights, about the metaverse, AI, crypto, neurotech, and gaming. With memes! Let’s begin!!!
😩I’m exhausted, just give me “the weekly snapshot”:
The White House invited top AI companies, including Meta, Google, and OpenAI, to pledge responsible development by investing in cybersecurity, discrimination research, and AI-generated content watermarking. The agreements have no immediate consequences for non-compliance, and the Biden administration is working on an executive order to address AI-related risks. Meta canceled its high-end mixed-reality headset and Twitter rebranded as "X." Meta promised to make its Threads app compatible with W3C open standards and the decentralized protocol underlying Mastodon, leading to debates in the open source community. A robotic dog named A.I.C.C.A generates art critiques, and OpenAI's ChatGPT moat is challenged by the launch of Llama 2. Ubisoft faces criticism for suspending and deleting inactive accounts, and Neopets moves away from NFTs and the metaverse. Our ending nugget reflects on the monetization of internal human experiences.
👁️🗨️Now the full version, what's going on:
👀 => Meta, Google, and OpenAI promise the White House they’ll develop AI responsibly
The White House has invited seven top AI companies, including Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, to voluntarily promise to protect users by investing in cybersecurity, discrimination research, and implementing a watermarking system for AI-generated content.
These agreements have no immediate consequences for non-compliance, and the companies are expected to work on implementing the promises immediately.
Additionally, the Biden administration is working on an executive order to address AI-related risks across federal agencies, and lawmakers have been discussing AI regulation following the launch of Senator Schumer's SAFE Framework.
More on =>theverge.com
What We Do in The Shadows gets it right, they speak the BS. During the growing years of the Internet, we have seen our fair share of self-regulation promises. Good intentions that diluted amidst the heat of competion and shareholder pressure. Policymakers are often presented (and scared into believe) a binary and opposite choice of “innovation vs regulation”. Back in the day, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has been credited as the Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet.
The “pinky promise” of “don’t be evil” might not (and most certainly should not), do the trick this time.
Meta cancels Quest Pro, stops development of Quest Pro 2
The company is reportedly cutting back on some of its projects, including its most high-end, mixed-reality headset, the Meta Quest Pro, by nixing the project and discontinuing work on a Quest Pro 2.
More on => zdnet.com
Twitter is being rebranded as X
X.com now redirects to Twitter.com, following a tweet from Twitter owner Elon Musk today, and an “interim X logo” will replace the Twitter bird logo later today.
More on => theverge.com
A half cooked rebranding, as some Twitters (Xers?) users are showcasing. Meta promised to make Threads compatible with W3C open standard for social media.
Meta promised to make Threads compatible with the decentralized protocol underlying Mastodon. Proponents of interoperable social media can’t agree whether to welcome or fear it.
The World Wide Web Consortium has a web standards body, which maintains a protocol for connecting social networks called ActivityPub. ActivityPub is designed to allow users of different apps to not only interact and view each others’ content, but also move their digital identity from one service to another.
The constellation of small apps and personal servers that currently use the protocol, known as the Fediverse, is marked by an ethos of sharing and openness, not profit-seeking or user bases denominated in the billions.
More on => wired.com and arstechnica.com
The World Economic Forum published new reports on the Social Implications of the Metaverse and its Privacy and Safety.
🤖I Am Not A Robot: AI news
Meet A.I.C.C.A., Artist Mario Klingemann’s New A.I.-Powered Robot Dog That Generates—and Poops—Art Criticism
As reported by Artnet News, German artist Mario Klingemann has found himself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of art that has been generated by A.I. His solution—or more likely, riposte—is, well, more A.I. To help people better interact with art, A.I.-generated or otherwise, Klingemann has developed a robotic dog, which can algorithmically generate critiques on visual artworks so you don’t have to.
The end of OpenAI's ChatGPT moat: the launch of Llama 2
The free version of ChatGPT was the fastest-growing internet app of all time when it arrived in November, with 100 million users in just two months.
But this week, in partnership with Microsoft, Meta announced the launch of Llama 2, a huge new "open source" AI model, promised to be freely available to developers for research and commercial use.
But the open-source community disputes whether Llama 2 is open-source at all,because companies with more than 700 million monthly active users will need to get special permission from Meta to use it per the terms and conditions. That essentially blocks Meta's biggest competitors from using the model but puts it at odds with open-source definitions set out by the nonprofit Open Source Initiative.
More on => bussinessinsider.com
Apple is creating its own AI-powered chatbot that some engineers are calling “Apple GPT”
And according to Fortune, that added $71 billion to Apple market value after news came out.
Researchers Chart Alarming Decline in ChatGPT Response Quality
In a recently published paper “How Is ChatGPT’s Behavior Changing over Time?”, academics found that “It is worthy noting that LLM services did not uniformly make better generations over time. In fact, despite better overall performance, GPT-4 in June made mistakes on queries on which it was correct for in March. This underlines the need of fine-grained drift monitoring, especially for critical applications”.
More on => tomshardware.com
Maybe showing off an AI-generated fake TV episode during a writers’ strike is a bad idea
While the actors and writers strike goes strong, and authors are signing a letter urging AI makersto stop using works as training material, Fable Studios, announced via tweet that it had made public a paper on “Generative TV & Showrunner Agents.” They embedded a full, fake “South Park” episode where Cartman tries to apply deepfake technology to the media industry.
More on => techcrunch.com
Stability AI Team Introduces FreeWilly1 and FreeWilly2: New Open Access Large Language Models (LLMs)
FreeWilly1 and its successor FreeWilly2 are powerful new open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) developed by Stability AI’s CarperAI team. Both models perform exceptionally well in reasoning competitions using many different metrics. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) in the industry-standard Alpaca format was used to fine-tune the FreeWilly1 model, built on top of the original LLaMA 65B foundation model. FreeWilly2 uses the LLaMA 2 70B base model to achieve performance on par with GPT-3.5 on some tasks.
More on => marktechpost.com
🤦The WTF award of the week goes to…
McDonald’s Opens McNuggets Land in The Sandbox
McDonald’s is celebrating the 40th anniversary of Chicken McNuggets by opening something called McNuggets Land in metaverse platform The Sandbox.
More on => coindesk.com
And also honorable mentions to Someone Used ChatGPT to Finish the Game of Thrones Book Series and to the poor soul that bought the NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, originally purchased for $2.9M, that now is worth less than $4 in today’s market.
😬Meme corner:
🎮Gaming news
The X3 came and go, and… was lonely out there
The E3 era might be gone, but the Web3 Gaming expo happened last June around the same dates, and as reported by Axios, “lonely”: “The number of people here to do something creatively fulfilling, not who were there just to use it as an easy way to raise funding, is down to one hand.”
Neopets is moving into a ‘new era’ — and leaving NFTs and the metaverse behind
Neopets, the virtual pet website launched in 1999, has undergone changes as it spins off into an independent company, promising a "new era" for the game with updates to fix old games, a new homepage, and plans for new games. Despite Neopets being nearly 24 years old, the site still sees a fair bit of traffic with “close to a million” monthly active users, and that number “has been really consistent” over the past few years. The new direction does mean that Neopets is moving on from a Neopets Metaverse game.
More on => TheVerge.com
Your Ubisoft account can be suspended and subsequently permanently deleted for 'inactivity,' taking your games library with it.
Last year, it was reported how a large number of 2010s Ubisoft games had their online components discontinued, which also impacted their DLC, even on Steam.
This is all a source of well-earned consumer angst right now, but it also has long-term consequences. Ephemeral digital libraries could very well inflate the ranks of the 87% of games that are unplayable without piracy, a potentially difficult-to-find physical copy, or archive access.
More on => pcgamer.com
🧠Neurotech:
Neurotechnology shows impressive fingerprint biometrics accuracy in NIST evaluation
A fingerprint biometrics matching algorithm submitted by Neurotechnology has topped the leaderboard of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Minutiae Interoperability Exchange (MINEX) III.
More on => biometricupdate.com
✍️Ending nugget:
“Humans can experience internal states so unprecedented we don’t have even approximate labels for. Pleasures new to the most jaded, horrors addictive in their cruel novelty.
Incredibly monetizable thoughts and feelings, in short. Inevitably the same neuroengineering that made it possible for brains to experience them was used to monitor and enforce new and profitable forms of intellectual property. Disney multiplied by fifty the size of their neuroscience department. Neuromarketing returned a greedy wraith from the ever-unquiet graveyard of fads. Rooting your brainphone became a federal crime.”
“Bad Feelings”, by
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading!
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