Good morning. Looks like Night at the Museum is becoming a tad more realistic.
Cambridge University’s Museum of Zoology is using AI to let dead animals, like a cockroach and a fin whale skeleton, tell their own stories. “Part of the experiment is to see whether, by giving these animals their own voices, people think differently about them,” assistant director Jack Ashby told the Guardian.
Maybe, but that AI-infused dodo faces some tough conversations about the fate of its species.—David Meyer
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OpenAI’s employee retention challenge
OpenAI took a big hit when its longtime chief technology officer, Mira Murati, abruptly left earlier this month. Now the buzzy AI company is facing another Murati-related crisis: She’s reportedly trying to poach current OpenAI employees for her next gig.
What that gig involves is unclear, according to tech news site The Information, which cites two anonymous sources. Murati hasn’t told the potential hires whether the job would be at an existing company or a planned startup.
Mysterious, right?
The intrigue comes as OpenAI’s research division undergoes a leadership shakeup that has prompted several researchers to request transfers to other teams. Adding to the upheaval is the fact that another researcher recently left the company.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is also trying to fend off an exodus of employees to a startup created by OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, who announced his exit in May.
Of course, OpenAI isn’t always on the losing end of the recruitment wars. On Monday, Microsoft said Sebastien Bubeck, its vice president of generative AI research, was leaving to join, yes, OpenAI, in which Microsoft is a major investor. —Kali Hays
Apple’s cheaper Vision
Do you find $3,500 an excessive price for Apple’s Vision augmented-reality tech?
According to Bloomberg, Apple is preparing a $2,000 little sibling to the Vision Pro—and as you might guess, they’re cutting a few corners.
The biggest omission would be that of the “EyeSight” feature, which shows (not very convincing) representations of the user’s eyes on the headset’s exterior. The materials would apparently be cheaper and the processor “inferior,” Bloomberg reports.
The Vision Pro hasn’t been a massive commercial success, and Apple needs to show it’s a worthy competitor as Meta makes inroads into the lower-priced portion of the headset market with its Ray-Ban smart glasses. And now that Meta has given a preview of its next-generation Orion smart glasses, with augmented reality lenses, Apple can’t afford to sit still.
The cheaper (though still expensive) Apple Vision headset could apparently go on sale next year. —DM
SpaceX’s “magical” catch
SpaceX has made history yet again.
On Sunday, Elon Musk’s space outfit launched one of its giant Starships for the fifth time—and then caught the returning rocket booster.
The Super Heavy booster came back down to the Mechazilla launch tower from which it came, with Mechazilla’s robotic arms capturing the hovering Super Heavy in a “chopstick” maneuver.
“Even in this day and age, what we just saw—that looked like magic,” said SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot.
Or just darn good science. This has huge implications for rocket reusability, and they got it right on the first try. That’s genuinely impressive. —DM
Adobe’s baby steps into AI video
Adobe is joining the wave of companies pushing into AI video. Kind of.
On Monday, it introduced its Firefly video model across several new tools, as a test.
One tool is called Generative Extend, which lets users add up to two seconds to their existing videos or make small adjustments to them. Video makers can use it to add more footage of someone walking or to fix the tilt of their head, for example—all without having to reshoot the scenes. The tool is available through Adobe Premiere Pro.
Adobe also debuted tools for creating up to five seconds of video by entering text prompts and also for turning still images into video. These two tools, available as a test through Adobe’s Firefly app, compete with products from Runway and with OpenAI’s Sora, which has been showcased publicly, but isn’t yet available.
Clearly, users won’t be able to make full-length movies, or even short-form ones, with Adobe’s new AI video tools. But it’s a start.—Sharon Goldman
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a tech IPO!
Just when you thought tech IPOs were dead, along comes Horizon Robotics.
The company, which is expected to make its public market debut this week, seems purpose-built for the moment.
AI bona fides: check! Triple-digit revenue growth: check! Big name backers: check!
But don’t look to the Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange for this listing. Horizon Robotics is a Chinese company and it’s listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange.
According to Bloomberg, Chinese tech giants Baidu and Alibaba have already committed to buying shares in the offering, which is expected to raise $800 million and value Horizon at $6 billion. China and the U.S. may be locked in a cold war over AI chips and technology, but when it comes to IPOs, it’s advantage Beijing. — Alexei Oreskovic
More data
—Google likes nuclear too. Following in the footsteps of Amazon and Microsoft, the search giant announced a plan to get nuclear power for its datacenters.
—U.S. weighs capping exports of AI chips from Nvidia and AMD to some countries. Rationing to avoid China diversions.
—Inside Amazon’s massive robot rollout—a grand labor experiment with so much at stake. Droids don’t unionize (yet).
—Teenage social media use strongly linked to anxiety and depression. Oxford University researchers publish timely data on a controversial subject.
—Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn wants you addicted to learning. “The good news is, at the moment, the AI features are not bringing us new users.”
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