--- type: "article" title: "Smokebox: AI, Nuclear Power & a Facebook Public Service Announcement" summary: "Welcome to this week’s Smokebox! A weekly digest of some of the most interesting AI-related news items each week:\n\n * Benedict Evans outlines many of the key questions around AI and Copyright. No good answers yet, but good questions. I plan a full post on this in the future, but I agree with him that it’s important to realize that an LLM is more like an inference engine than it is a database. In the meantime, some of the biggest stars are seeing the potential in licensing the rights to digital t" newsletter: "Steampunk AI" newsletter_handle: "steampunkai" newsletter_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/steampunkai" author: "Steven Willmott (@njyx)" published: "2023-09-01T08:00:17.000Z" canonical_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/steampunkai/a/smokebox-ai-nuclear-power-a-facebook-public-service-announce" markdown_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/steampunkai/a/smokebox-ai-nuclear-power-a-facebook-public-service-announce.md" chat_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/steampunkai/a/smokebox-ai-nuclear-power-a-facebook-public-service-announce/chat" source_url: "https://www.steampunkai.com/smokebox-ai-nuclear-power-and-a-facebook/" body_source: "imported" likes: 0 replies: 0 body_words: 451 --- # Smokebox: AI, Nuclear Power & a Facebook Public Service Announcement Welcome to this week’s Smokebox! A weekly digest of some of the most interesting AI-related news items each week: - [Benedict Evans outlines many of the key questions around AI and Copyright](https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/8/27/generative-ai-ad-intellectual-property). No good answers yet, but good questions. I plan a full post on this in the future, but I agree with him that it’s important to realize that an LLM is more like an inference engine than it is a database. In the meantime, some of the biggest stars are seeing the potential in [licensing the rights to digital twins](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/dont-put-your-head-in-the-sand-stars-are-quietly-inking-deals-to-license-their-ai-doubles?rc=xe76d1). - [Venture fund Andreesen Horowitz announced an open source grants fund to support AI projects that will help key projects with no equity involved](https://a16z.com/2023/08/30/supporting-the-open-source-ai-community/). There’s no doubt support is needed, and it’s great to see an initiative like this. On the other hand, it seems like a much bigger problem: maybe there should be a bigger global fund for key open source and not just in AI. - [Ideogram, a new high-powered image generator, opens for full access](https://ideogram.ai/publicly-available). Ideogram’s main touted differentiator over Midjourney and Stable Diffusion is that it is much better at rendering in image text. It’s amazing how fine-grained competition has already gotten. This is super hand if you’re making logos, stickers, or signs, however - today’s reimagined logo comes courtesy of Ideogram: [![generation](https://www.steampunkai.com/content/images/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f6c0e8520-7ebb-42f3-89e3-f5666681aa15_1024x1024.jpg)](https://www.steampunkai.com/content/images/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f6c0e8520-7ebb-42f3-89e3-f5666681aa15_1024x1024.jpg) - [The big money number of the week belongs to OpenAI, which is projecting $1B in revenue this year](https://www.reuters.com/business/chatgpt-owner-openai-projects-1-billion-revenue-by-2024-sources-2022-12-15/). This was widely reported and shows a real market pull for LLM services. The [compute costs are eye-watering](https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599669571795185665), though, so the economics are undoubtedly tough. It will also be interesting to see how much other large LLM players will fragment the market. ([AI21 Labs just raised a further $155M for its LLM.](https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/30/generative-ai-startup-ai21-labs-lands-155m-at-a-1-4b-valuation/)) - If you’re of a nervous disposition, you might want to skip this last one: Earlier in August, [Nuclearn.AI announced a new $2.5M funding round for AI in the nuclear industry](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nuclearnai-announces-2-5m-series-seed-round-led-by-arizona-focused-venture-fund-az-vc-301896428.html). Hopefully, there’ll be some vigorous testing and verification involved! No doubt there will be: my father, in his early career, actually helped write control code for a nuclear power plant. This was a scary proposition even for conventional code, but there were a lot of safeguards in place. As a last item this week, a Public Service Announcement. If you are a Facebook user, you might want to request an opt-out of their Generative AI Data sharing. The form is here: [https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/1266025207620918](https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/1266025207620918). It’s unclear precisely what the data is being used for or who it is shared with. It appears to only apply to third parties, not Facebook itself. These types of data-related terms of service changes are appearing everywhere at the moment. Wishing you a great weekend! [Subscribe now](#/portal/signup) *** ## Discussion No replies yet.