Friday Links: AI Glasses, Edge Domination and AI Tools for Screenwriters

Here are this week’s most exciting links:

• The Hollywood screenwriter’s strike ends, including clauses on AI. The core of the agreement seems to enable and regulate writers using AI (though studios can’t force it). That’s a strong positive - humans and AI combined will likely be the most powerful and rewarding combination for a long time. It will certainly lead to smaller teams, though (there are minimums in place, but I wonder how long they’ll hold). Hopefully, the smaller teams will also enable more creative works to be produced so that overall employment in the industry goes up rather than down due to automation.

• Apple’s AI Moat. Ksenia Se of Turing Post has a thoughtful article about Apple’s potential AI Moat, which is being able to run more and more “AI” on edge devices rather than as cloud services. I agree that Apple, Google (and Maybe Meta - see the next item) could end up with dominant positions as AI leaders by exploiting their personal hardware strength. Everyone seems to be focused on server-side AI market advantage at the moment, but “on-device” AI might become the obvious default for many users for simple functions, searches, etc. That, in turn, might control many of the servers that users talk to.
• Meta and Rayban make smart glasses cool again. Meta’s announcements this week included a tie-in with Rayban for smart glasses with an integrated AI assistant & the ability to live stream from the device. Some people will question the utility of this (remember Google Glass?), but the voice/button interface and the stylish form factor could actually work. You can pre-order for November delivery in the US, UK, and a few other markets (not Europe at the moment). I’ve had two generations of the Snap glasses and loved them for in-the-moment image/video capture. This looks like a 100x upgrade.
• The Information (Paywalled) has a story on Jasper’s internal valuation cut (down 20%). The focus is on ARR projections slowing and risk of businesses that are primarily wrappers to underlying models such as OpenAI. Those factors undoubtedly contribute, but so does the extreme frothiness of AI Venture Valuations. Potentially, the Jasper team thought they had more time before ChatGPT became available to all, but all involved should have been pricing in more competitive risk. A 9-12 month lead in many of these markets might not end up meaning much.
• AI Emoji Generator (emojis.alexandru.so/p/pvmnvOl). When everyone goes high (fidelity), go low (fidelity). Integrating this into Slack for on-demand emojis seems like it would be a lot of fun. The project is available on GitHub (https://github.com/pondorasti/emojis).

Have a great weekend!