newslounge.co · Feb 22, 2024

Good Morning. 

This is newslounge, where VFX and AI collide – a beautiful chaos.
AI is taking over the world. It’s everywhere - music, movies, you name it.
There are more AI crossovers than when Allen Iverson was dominating the NBA. :)
🤿on that note, lets dive in today’s dose of madness!!

on Today’s menu:

• Sora AI & The Global Economy

• Houdini / ComfyUI Case Study

• What Was Sora Trained On?

• Framestore Studio’s AI Drama and more..

-Ardy

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HEADLINE

Will Sora AI Change The Global Economy FOREVER?

AI technologies like Sora AI are set to bring about significant economic transformations, offering both opportunities and challenges.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), AI is expected to impact almost 40% of jobs worldwide, with the potential to both replace some jobs and complement others. This dual nature of AI means that while it can enhance productivity and boost global growth, it might also contribute to job displacement and deepen inequality among workers, especially in high-skilled jobs that AI can affect

⚡Generative AI, a subset of AI technologies, holds particular promise for transforming business functions such as customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering, and research and development.
 

OpenAI valued at over $80B

😲Interesting new evaluation for OpenAI being valued at 80 billion dollars or more tripling the value of the company in the last 10 months.

🚨But what is interesting is the new deal that allows them to have the evaluation, which is:

“The company would sell existing shares in a so-called tender offer led by the venture firm Thrive Capital. The deal lets employees cash out their shares in the company, rather than a traditional funding round that would raise money for business operations.”

The company, which has nearly tripled its valuation in less than 10 months, is one of the world's most valuable tech startups, per data tracker CB Insights.

-AA

What was Sora trained on?

OpenAI has barely shared anything about its training data. But in order to create a model this advanced, Sora needed lots of video data, so we can assume it was trained on video data scraped from all corners of the internet. And some are speculating that training data included copyrighted works. OpenAI did not immediately respond to request for comment on Sora's training data.

CASE STUDY

Stacking Animation Layers in ComfyUI

The Art Of Chocolate and Coffee

Primary Objective:
The goal of this experiment is to breakdown the shot into various modules layered upon each other and process them individually through the AnimateDiff workflow to enhance details and increase stability.

💡I have received some questions recently that we can quickly address here:

✔What is the checkpoint VAE do exactly? And why is there a switch?
Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are components that complement your Stable Diffusion (SD) checkpoints and can enhance various aspects of the image, including colors, shapes, hands, and faces. While some checkpoints include an integrated VAE, others do not. However, given the limited number of VAEs available, you can download them separately and instruct Comfy to utilize these external VAE files instead of the ones embedded within the checkpoints.

✔Curious why you are using the beauty pass to generate line art in Comfy? I thought you rendered the wireframe pass to use as your lineart?Preprocessors offer significant advantages over the wireframe pass. You cant generate WF for particles and it can give you many congested lines depends on the complexity of your mesh.
Additionally, when incorporating an image into the background(in Nuke), It’s necessary to process the lineart to seamlessly integrate the background into the Stable Diffusion embedding.

✔Why are we stacking AnimateDiff nodes?
I use the first Animatediff to have an overall animation based on my prompt. Then, for the second AnimateDiff, I employ masks to iterate on top of my primary animation to incorporate additional detail, guided by text prompts and reference images.
I applied this technique separately for the chocolate bars and then for the coffee.

🚀 Youtube Tutorial: here
🎁 Project Breakdown + Download: here

🙋‍♂️Additionally, if you prefer not to work with Nuke or other compositing software, you can do a quick A over B compositing in ComfyUI. I'll cover this in an upcoming video!

💡Here is the comparison I made using different checkpoints.
Spoiler!!! EpicRealism blew my mind!!

What do you think??

-AA

We are seeking:
full-stack software engineer
web developer
social media marketing expert

[email protected]

SNIPPETS

📺YouTube said American TV viewers now average more than 1 billion hours watching YouTube every day

⚡Midjourney Website Alpha is available for users who have generated over 1000 images! As the website stabilizes, it will be accessed to more existing members.

👾Google is planning to revamp the login page for its products and services, aiming for a more modern look.

💲Nvidia reported its fourth quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday, beating analysts' expectations on the top and bottom lines.

👩‍💻Reddit puts its users’ data up for sale, as the company signs a $60M content licensing deal with an AI company, reports Bloomberg.

Investors pour billions into chip clusters to lure startups.

Imagine the irony of spending money just to have the chance to spend even more money. This is the challenging scenario faced by numerous investors and venture capitalists, who find themselves in a costly race to invest in AI chips, all with the aim of attracting startups.

Is This the Most Beautiful Orange Juice Ad Ever?

The spot, produced thru Venice, CA, agency Cartwright, is a beautifully lit CG piece with a live-action pour and select product shots crafted over a 10-week schedule by Elastic with a 1-day table-top shoot helmed by director Rikky Fernandes at Her Studio.

AROUND THE WORLD OF AI

VFX Studio Framestore Clarified Its Stance on AI

🚨A few days ago, VFX studio Framestore came under scrutiny when its job advertisement for a generative AI artist surfaced on the internet.
In response to the criticism, Framestore issued a statement clarifying the responsibilities of the AI artist position and its stance on machine learning.

-AA

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