Meet Botto, The AI ‘Machine Artist’ Making Millions Of Dollars
Botto, described as a “decentralized autonomous artist,” has made more than $5 million since its inception in 2021.
Generative artificial intelligence is making huge waves across industries and services from finance to human resources and spending on the technology is growing fast. And the art world is no different — some artists are using it to help generate work, and others are shocked by its capabilities.
Now, a new AI “artist” is making a splash, bringing up central questions around the nature of art, its creation and ownership.
Botto, described as a “decentralized autonomous artist” on its website, has produced around 150 images, or “works,” which together have fetched more than $5 million via auctions since 2021. Botto’s work is influenced by a group of people who vote on the image that will be auctioned each week, and in turn help to determine what it creates next.
“If there’s, kind of, a purpose of Botto, it’s first to become recognized as an artist, and I think second is to become a successful artist,” said Simon Hudson, Botto’s operator and co-lead, in a video call with CNBC.
“A successful artist, you can look at from a lot of different lenses: commercially successful, financially successful, culturally successful, spiritually successful — if it’s really having that kind of deep impact on people,” he said.
More about Botto the decentralized autonomous artist on CNBC
Kara Swisher And Meta's Yann LeCun Interview | Hopkins Bloomberg Center
Johns Hopkins University and Vox Media have teamed up to present the On with Kara Swisher podcast at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center. The partnership, featuring live recordings of Swisher's groundbreaking podcast in the Hopkins Bloomberg Center theater, is part of the Center's new Discovery Series that hosts deep and insightful conversations on a single topic at the intersection of tech, science, and public policy.
xAI Is Testing A Standalone iOS App For Its Grok Chatbot, And A Grok Website Too
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is testing out a standalone iOS app for its chatbot, Grok, which was available only to X users until now.
The app, currently live in Australia and a few countries in beta, can access real-time data from the web and X, and offers generative AI features like rewriting text, summarizing long paragraphs, a little bit of Q&A, and can generate images from text prompts, too.
“Grok is an AI-powered assistant designed to be maximally truthful, useful, and curious. Get answers to any question, generate striking images, and upload pictures to gain a deeper understanding of your world,” the listing reads.
xAI is also preparing a dedicated site, Grok.com, to make the chatbot accessible on the web. Currently, the site says “coming soon” when you log in with an xAI account.
More on xAI’s iOS app and dedicated website on TechCrunch
Text To Speech, Dubbing, Sound Effects And More With ElevenLabs New AI Audio
ElevenLabs is an AI Audio research and deployment company. Our research team develops AI Audio models that generate realistic, versatile and contextually-aware speech and sound effects. Our product team makes these models accessible for everyday users, prosumers, and businesses to create & localize content.
Our technology is used to voice audiobooks and news articles, animate video game characters, help in film pre-production, automate localization processes in entertainment, create dynamic audio content for social media and advertising, and train medical professionals. It has also given back voices to those who have lost them and helped individuals with accessibility needs in their daily lives.
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Masayoshi Son’s Quest to Become The Next Nvidia In Booming AI Marketplace
The billionaire SoftBank founder promises to invest $100 billion in the US as part of a sweeping redemption plan.
When Masayoshi Son made a surprise appearance at Mar-a-Lago alongside Donald Trump last week, the founder of Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. vowed to invest a stunning $100 billion in the US over the next four years. The president-elect joked that perhaps SoftBank would like to double that target to $200 billion. Not to be outdone, Son replied with a wide smile, “I will really try.”
That may not be an exaggeration. The Japanese entrepreneur is quietly plotting one of his trademark bet-the-company moves that’s likely to cost as much as his initial pledge — and perhaps a good bit more. Over the past few months, according to people directly involved, Son has developed a singular obsession: how to build the next Nvidia Corp. with his own chip and rake in some of the tens of billions of dollars being spent on artificial intelligence hardware.
It's a strategy that could lead to wide-ranging investment in chip production, energy capacity and related technologies. Son's aim is to have the first batch of shipment-ready AI chips by 2026, with a prototype available as early as the summer of next year, according to people familiar with the details.
The 67-year-old sees himself as a trailblazer in AI, and yet he’s watched Nvidia emerge as the most powerful player in the field. The US chip company holds a near-monopoly on the semiconductors used to train AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, lifting its market valuation to more than $3 trillion. Now, with a sprawling portfolio of startups and a 90% stake in Arm Holdings Plc — whose chip designs won a near-monopoly for smartphones because of their energy efficiency — Son is ready to become a serious contender.
More on Masayoshi Son AI aspirations on Bloomberg
O3 Model ChatGPT Release | Sam Altman
CEO Sam Altman describes o3 as “the beginning of the next phase of AI,” highlighting its breakthrough capabilities in reasoning and problem-solving OpenAI’s o3 model demonstrates significant performance improvements compared to other models:
Benchmark Comparisons
AIME 2024: o3 scored 96.7%, compared to o1’s 83.3%
GPQA Diamond: o3 scored 87.7%, while o1 scored 78%
ARC-AGI: o3 achieved 75.7%, with a high-compute configuration reaching 87.5%
SWE-Bench Verified: o3 scored 71.7, which is 22.8 points higher than o1
EpochAI Frontier Math: o3 solved 25.2% of problems, compared to just 2% for existing models
Codeforces: o3 achieved an Elo rating of 2727 Unique Features
Offers adjustable reasoning levels (Low, Medium, High)
Demonstrates ability to adapt to novel tasks dynamically
Designed with “deliberative alignment” for improved safety
Startup Latimer AI To Launch Bias Detection Tool For Web Browsers
Bias is in the eye of the beholder, yet it's increasingly being evaluated by AI. Latimer AI, a startup that's building AI tools on a repository of Black datasets, plans to launch a bias detection tool as a Chrome browser extension in January.
The company anticipates the product could be used by people who run official social media accounts, or anyone who wants to be mindful of their tone online, Latimer CEO John Pasmore told Business Insider.
"When we test Latimer against other applications, we take a query and score the response. So we'll score our response, we'll score ChatGPT or Claude's response, against the same query and see who scores better from a bias perspective," Pasmore said. "It's using our internal algorithm to not just score text, but then correct it."
The tool assigns a score from one through 10 to text, with 10 being extremely biased.
Patterns of where bias is found online, are already emerging from beta testing of the product. For instance, text from an April post by Elon Musk, in which he apologized for calling Dustin Moskowitz a derogatory name, was compared to an August post from Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. Musks' post scored 6.8 out of 10, or "High Bias," while Graber's scored 3.6 out of 10, or "Low Bias".
More on Latimer AI’s bias detection tool on Business Insider
Gartner | When Not To Use Generative AI
As we continue to incorporate AI into our own work, it’s worth considering when GenAI is not appropriate — and in those situations, which, if any, other AI techniques are.
In this ThinkCast episode, Gartner Senior Director Analyst Leinar Ramos, whose work focuses on artificial intelligence, explains that generative AI is not the silver bullet it’s often made out to be. While indeed game-changing, GenAI is only one aspect of a much larger and more fruitful AI landscape.
Thats all for today, however new advancements, investments, and partnerships are happening as you read this. AI is moving fast, subscribe today to stay informed.