Howdy! It’s Barsee again.

Happy Friday, AI family, and welcome back to AI Valley 🐶

In today’s edition:

• Ilya Sutskever’s startup, Safe Superintelligence, raises $1B.

• New AI model creates lifelike Portrait Animations from Audio.

• How to instantly switch outfits for social media posts, profile pics, etc.

• Plus trending AI tools, guides, and resources.

Ready, set, go…

PARTNER 💫

1000’s are ditching their content teams for this – are you next?

Alphana turns videos and podcasts into 30+ pieces of viral content in minutes.

Founders, creators, and podcasters are jumping on board, and here's why:

Create:

• Viral hooks

• Short-form clips

• Blog posts

• Newsletter content

The customizable workflows and ready-to-use templates make it simple yet powerful. Alphana handles the heavy lifting so you can focus on what matters.

📰 MAIN SCOOP

1/ Ilya Sutskever’s startup, Safe Superintelligence, raises $1 BILLION

Ilya Sutskever, former co-founder of OpenAI, has secured $1 billion for Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a new AI company dedicated to creating advanced AI systems with a strong focus on safety and addressing potential existential risks.

Who are the key investors?

Investors backing SSI include Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, Sequoia Capital, SV Angel, and NFDG, which is a partnership run by Nat Friedman and Gross.

What are their current valuation and goals?

The startup, which has garnered significant attention, now holds a valuation of $5 billion, according to a source familiar with the deal cited by Reuters.

SSI, with a current team of 10 employees, has not yet disclosed specifics regarding its research goals, but it revealed plans to allocate the capital toward acquiring computing power and expanding its team.

2/ New AI model creates lifelike Portrait Animations from Audio

Bytedance and Zhejiang University recently introduced Loopy, an innovative Audio-to-Video Lipsyncing Model, that creates realistic facial movements and expressions just from audio.

What makes Loopy unique?

• Enhanced Lip-Syncing: Loopy adds subtle facial expressions beyond basic lip-syncing, including eyebrow movements, eye gestures, and natural head movements.

• Versatility: It adapts to various visual styles and audio types, making it useful for animating both human and non-human images.

How it works?

Loopy uses specialized modules to analyze audio and convert it into detailed facial movements, generating realistic head and facial animations without manual templates. This results in natural and flexible portrait animations directly from audio input.

Here are some examples showing the unrealistic capabilities of Loopy.

3/ Musician charged with $10M streaming royalties fraud using AI and bots

Michael Smith, a 52-year-old musician from North Carolina, has been charged with defrauding streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music.

How was AI involved?

Prosecutors say Smith used AI to create hundreds of thousands of fake songs by fictitious bands, then employed bots to stream them millions of times.

What were the results?

Over seven years, Smith allegedly earned $10 million in royalties. He now faces charges of wire fraud and money laundering, each with up to 20 years in prison.

🤝 THE LATEST IN…

Tech

• Telegram founder Pavel Durov, in his first comments since his arrest, defended the app, saying creators shouldn't be held personally responsible for the misuse of their tools. And he also said that he would be moderating the app better.

• The Internet Archive loses its appeal of a major copyright case. Forced to remove 500,000 books from public access.

• The dawn of a new startup era.

• Advertisers plan to withdraw from X in record numbers.

AI

• Predicting AI in detail. The rise of open source, multimodal models, and some technical parts like improvement in capabilities.

• OpenAI has surpassed 1 million paid business users for its ChatGPT services, a significant rise from 600,000 users in April. This marks a year since the company launched its first business version.

• Anthropic introduced the Claude Enterprise plan, which allows organizations to securely collaborate with Claude using internal knowledge. The plan has 500K context windows and GitHub integration for codebases.

🤔 POLL

🔗 USEFUL AI LINKS

Trending Tools

1. Cramify: Prepare exams, review notes, solve questions, and tackle tailored practice problems for your college course. *

2. Recall: Recall helps anyone build AI voice agents that interact like humans in minutes.

3. Cursor: Cursor is an AI coding editor that helps you write code 10x faster.

4. Weavel: Automate prompt engineering & get the best prompts 50x faster.

5. Wosily: Wosily connects with your website and uses AI to automatically publish SEO-optimized blogs.

6. Jsonify: Never update a spreadsheet yourself again.

7. Persana: AI assistant to help you do sales 10x faster.

Resources / Guides

• Explaining generative language models to (almost) anyone.

🤖 AI TRAINING

1/ How to automatically apply to 1000 jobs in 24 hours

Use this AI bot that will:

• Analyze candidate information

• Examine job descriptions

• Generate unique CVs and cover letters for each job

• Answer specific questions that recruiters ask

• Automatically applies to jobs

This method is incredibly effective at passing through automated screening systems.

By generating CVs and cover letters tailored to each job description, the script significantly increases the chances of getting noticed by both AI and human recruiters.

2/ How to instantly switch outfits for social media posts, profile pics, etc

It’s a really easy process. Just go to this HuggingFace space and upload your image and the clothes you want to wear. It will then generate hyperrealistic-looking images. The more you run it, the better the results will be.

🔍 DAILY DOSE OF CONTENTS

1/ This is the most out-of-touch journalism I have seen recently from Time Magazine.

2/ Everyone is now a startup founder. Thanks to the new AI/Tech products.

✌️ THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY

That’s all for today’s issue, folks!

💡 Help me get better and suggest new ideas at [email protected] or @heyBarsee

👍️ Like what you see? Subscribe here

Thanks for being here.

REACH 90K+ READERS

Acquire new customers and drive revenue by partnering with us

Sponsor AI Valley and reach over 90,000+ entrepreneurs, founders, software engineers, investors, etc.

If you’re interested in sponsoring us, email [email protected] with the subject “AI Valley Ads”.