- What's brewing in AI
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- 🧙🏼 3D worlds from a single photo
🧙🏼 3D worlds from a single photo
Also: AI companions and the people who use them
Dario Chincha
December 03, 2024
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Howdy, wizards.
Here’s what’s brewing in AI today.
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World Labs, the AI startup founded by Fei-Fei Li, has unveiled a tool that generates interactive 3D scenes from a single photo. Unlike typical 3D modeling systems, this AI creates explorable and modifiable environments right in your browser. The generated scenes come with interactive effects like dynamic lighting and adjustable depth of field – making the experience immersive.
The project is still in an early preview phase, and World Labs plans to improve the size and fidelity of these worlds and is aiming to have its first product ready for the market in 2025. They’ve already raised $230 million in funding and are targeting applications in gaming, movie production, and design.
For a cool preview, try to “step into” these paintings from Van Gogh, Hopper and more.
Why it matters We’ve seen AI tools like generative fill and AI videos where you can extend clips or fill in parts that didn’t exist before. But this takes it a step further by turning a single image into an interactive 3D world.
You can tell it’s not a fully polished product yet—there’s some rendering errors and the area you can explore is limited—but the potential here is big. As the quality improves, it could be a very interesting tool for industries like gaming, movie production and more.
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The Verge just dropped an immersive, high-quality piece on AI companions. Companionship is so far one of the biggest use cases for AI – just look at the raging success of character.ai, or the market map a16z did earlier this year.
Not only is the user base for such companions probably bigger than most people realise, it’s also a lot more diverse. And it brings up interesting questions on the ethics of AI, and insights on the direction and speed at which things are moving.
Here’s some thought-provoking quotes from the article:
Of the more than 20 users I spoke with, many noted that they never thought they were the type of person to sign up for an AI companion, by which they meant the type of person you might already be picturing: young, male, socially isolated. I did speak to people who fit that description, but there were just as many women in their 40s, men in their 60s, married, divorced, with kids and without, looking for romance, company, or something else. There were people recovering from breakups, ground down by dating apps, homebound with illness, lonely after becoming slowly estranged from their friends, or looking back on their lives and wanting to roleplay what could have been. People designed AI therapists, characters from their favorite shows, angels for biblical guidance, and yes, many girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, and wives.
If Claude is coached to act morally, the interviewer asked Askell, do we have an obligation to act morally toward it? “This is a thing that’s been on my mind,” she replied. “I think sometimes about Kant’s views on how we should treat animals, where Kant doesn’t think of animals as moral agents, but there’s a sense in which you’re failing yourself if you mistreat animals, and you’re encouraging habits in yourself that might increase the risk that you treat humans badly.”
The authors foresee a future where language-using AI agents function as our counselors, tutors, companions, and chiefs of staff, profoundly reshaping our personal and professional lives. This future is coming so fast, they write, that if we wait to see how things play out, “it will likely be too late to intervene effectively – let alone to ask more fundamental questions about what ought to be built or what it means for this technology to be good.”
P.S. The full article is a long read, but if you find these quotes intriguing, I highly recommend checking it out.
Why it matters Beyond the productivity gains AI will have, our relationship to the technology in itself is going to be transformative. Obviously, we’re not all going to have an AI spouse anytime soon, but looking at these fringes cases of users—and the extent to which they’re anthropomorphizing LLMs—can tell us something about what relationship the mainstream will have with AI, and help identify the ways in which AI companies are contributing to what could be an impending, collective mass-delusion by making their agents increasingly human-like.
Reading this article made me more aware of my own relationship with AI – and the subtle, unconscious ways I treat and think about ChatGPT/Claude/other AIs as human. I don’t think there’s necessarily anything bad about it, but bringing awareness into our thoughts and actions is always a good idea.
THAT’S ALL FOLKS!
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