This week in AI and Machine Learning: Shutterstock inks a deal with OpenAI, Argo AI reaches the end of the road, and more.
Author’s Note
Starting tonight, my hometown Philadelphia Phillies and the Houston Astros are hitting the diamond to compete in the 118th World Series. I didn’t win the lottery for a chance to buy tickets, but I’ll be rooting for the Phils from home. Need some between-inning reading? Check out our blog on the ways computer vision is helping enhance statistical analysis for baseball fans.
Happy Halloween!
AI News
Shutterstock Makes a Deal with OpenAI
AI-generated art has created a whole world of discourse throughout 2022. Many artists fear that the advent of solutions like Midjourney, which are capable of creating detailed images from text prompts, could spell their doom. The most ubiquitous and headline-grabbing of the image generating solutions is perhaps OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, which recently became accessible to the general public.
A big development in the ongoing drama arrived this week when Shutterstock announced its new partnership with OpenAI. In a press release, Shutterstock revealed that DALL-E 2 will be integrated into its platform over the next several months. The site has also established a fund to reimburse artists who help contribute to training text-to-image solutions. Shutterstock is also banning users from selling AI-generated content developed without the use of DALL-E 2. Read more about the deal in The Verge’s write-up.
The Latest Iteration of Open Images from Google
When it was first released in 2016, Open Images included labeled visual data covering around 6,000 categories. As the number and types of images have expanded through subsequent releases, so has the variety of annotations. The dataset now includes visual relations, instance segmentations, localized narratives and more. This week brings the release of Open Images V7, which adds new point-level label annotations and an expanded visualization tool for users. The new visualizer provides for deep exploration into nearly 2 million images.
V7 includes more than 9 million labeled images across over 20,000 categories. Learn more about updates to the database and check out the new images, annotations, and features for yourself.
Argo AI Is Shutting Down
Argo AI, an autonomous vehicle startup that made its debut in 2017, is shutting down this week. A TechCrunch report confirms that the organization and many of its more than 2,000 employees will be absorbed by Ford and Volkswagen, its two primary backers.
Ford’s third-quarter earnings report reflects a net loss of more than $800 million on its investment in Argo. The decision to dissolve Argo coincides with a new emphasis on driver assistance technology as opposed to autonomous vehicles. VW will continue working with partners including Bosch and Horizon Robotics to develop additional autonomous solutions. Argo ends its run at a time of both enthusiasm and uncertainty in the world of self-driving vehicles. It had been conducting pilot programs in cities including Austin and Pittsburgh with partners like Lyft.
Join our Community
See you next week! Until then, keep the conversation going on Plainsight’s AI Slack Channel.
About the Author & Plainsight
Bennett Glace is a B2B technology content writer and cinephile from Philadelphia. He helps Plainsight in its mission to make vision AI accessible to entire enterprise teams.
Plainsight’s vision AI platform streamlines and optimizes the full computer vision lifecycle. From project strategy, through model deployment, and ongoing monitoring, Plainsight helps customers successfully create and operationalize vision AI applications to solve highly diverse business challenges.
