Microsoft and Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) have signed a MoU to support the growth of space-tech startups in India. The MoU will provide technology tools and platforms, go-to-market support, and mentoring to space tech startups in order to help them scale and become enterprise-ready.
The collaboration aims to strengthen ISRO’s vision of harnessing the market potential of promising space tech innovators and entrepreneurs in India by onboarding them onto the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub platform for free.
This will include technical support to build and scale on Azure, best-in-class developer, and productivity tools, including Visual Studio Enterprise, Microsoft 365, and GitHub Enterprise. It will also include access to smart analytics with Power BI and Dynamics 365.
According to S Somanath, Chairman, ISRO, ISRO’s collaboration with Microsoft will benefit space tech startups in their analysis and processing of huge amounts of satellite data for various applications with the use of cutting-edge methods like AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning.
Moreover, Microsoft will provide mentoring support to space-tech entrepreneurs in fields including space engineering, cloud technologies, product and design, fundraising, sales, and marketing. In addition, founders will be given access to Microsoft Learn for tailored startup-centric training programs and content to help them build connections with potential customers and the industry.
Microsoft and ISRO will also organize thought leadership and knowledge-sharing sessions by space industry experts for the startups. In addition, the collaboration will benefit founders with technical support, go-to-market strategies, and opportunities to sell their solutions through Microsoft channels and the marketplace.
Baidu is launching MetaStack, a technological stack for its metaverse constructing platform XiRang. With this technological stack, the company plans to build infrastructure enabling developers to create metaverse projects independently, within just 40 days.
The announcement was made by Baidu’s WeChat account, anticipating to release of the XiRang MetaStack on January 10 during its annual developers’ conference. Baidu is targeting mainstream technology companies as primary clients and said, “The metaverse will not only become a new marketing front but also open up the imagination for new consumption and production.”
Generally, metaverse projects are very time-consuming and require a lot of complex technology, labor, and resources. Through its XiRang MetaStack infrastructure, comprising the metaverse client kernel, cross-network transmission service, metaverse world service engine, and operation platform, Baidu wants to make the process easier.
XiRang was launched on January 5 to facilitate metaverse projects. The metaverse platform soon launched a comprehensive suite of Web3 AI tools to enhance brand marketing of metaverse projects developed on XiRang. With MetaStack, Baidu wants to go beyond brand marketing and accelerate metaverse creation altogether.
Palantir Technologies, a leading data analytics company, is excited to announce the release of Palantir Skykit, which is a fully disconnected intelligence center giving soldiers an advantage over adversaries by allowing them access AI technology wirelessly from distressed places.
Palantir Skykit aims to empower soldiers to effectively integrate their data, make decisions, and carry out operations from remote places using the Palantir software which allows users to task and analyze data from anywhere. The Skykit will be released soon at Customer Experience Show 2023. The company has released a YouTube video of the product before the launch.
Skykit has its own secure satellite communications, which means soldiers can access satellite internet for communication from distressed areas. The kit has a ruggedized laptop with pre-installed Palantir intelligence platform software to generate insights from sensitive military data.
It also has a Quadcopter drone, which runs computer vision algorithms via Palantir AI interface platform, to detect any peculiarities from the surroundings. Moreover, the kit includes Trailcam Nano, which is a detachable small camera that also searches the surroundings using detection algorithms.
Skykit is built for disconnected adverse, hostile, and extreme environments to harness the power of AI running onboard. Skykit contains dual integrated monitors, onboard battery packs to power the entire unit for a day fully disconnected, and a secure storage area for the included devices.
Palantir AI interface platform powers the computer vision algorithms to be deployed onboard to send detections from the drone and Trailcan Nano directly to the base station for decision making.
Skykit has a modular design with variants for various use cases. For example, model Skykit L is the lightweight backpack form factor, whereas Skykit S is for sea and maritime use.
Salesforce Inc. announced that it would close certain offices and lay off roughly 10% of its staff, affecting over 7,000 employees, making it one of the recent tech companies to make cost-cutting measures in the face of a slowing economy.
Marc Benioff, co-CEO, wrote to the employees that it is challenging for the company as clients are making more “measured purchasing decisions.” He expects the move to save up to US$1.4b to US$2.1b in charges in Q4 2023.
The Salesforce layoffs have also stemmed from a rapid ‘hiring phase” that the company claims to have gone through. Benioff added that the company hired over 79,000 employees in February 2022 alone.
He said, “As our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that.”
The previous year witnessed several big companies planning or announcing layoffs to cut costs amidst uncertain market conditions, recurring COVID scares, and worldwide recession. The anticipated worldwide recession results from interest rate hikes by several global central banks trying to curb inflationary pressures in the respective countries. Many other companies have also laid off massive chunks of their workforce, including Meta, Datarobot, Amazon, and many others. In fact, Salesforce laid off over 2500 employees in November 2022 due to product challenges and sales performance.
NVIDIA and Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics and technology manufacturer, announces a strategic partnership to develop automated and autonomous vehicles.
As part of the partnership, NVIDIA will be a tier-one manufacturer to produce electronic units (ECUs) based on NVIDIA DRIVE Orin for the worldwide automotive market.
Foxconn-manufactured electronic vehicles will feature DRIVE Orin ECUs and DRIVE Hyperion sensors for highly automotive driving capabilities.
Eric Yeh, Senior Director of the Software Development Center at Foxconn, mentioned that the strategic corporation with NVIDIA can strengthen intelligent driving solutions, and both companies can enable the automotive industry to build energy-efficient, automated vehicles.
The collaboration with Foxconn will enable NVIDIA to scale its efforts further and meet the growing industry demands as more transportation leaders select DRIVE Orin for their intelligent vehicles. By building EVs on the DRIVE Hyperion qualifies sensor set, Foxconn can speed up its time-to-market and time-to-cost strategies.
Rishi Dall, Vice President of automotive at NVIDIA, stated that collaboration with Foxconn can provide OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) developing intelligent driving solutions with a world-class supplier to scale the NVIDIA DRIVE Orin manufacturing platform. Foxconn’s decision to use the DRIVE Hyperion sensor for its EVs will help accelerate production without compromising safety, reliability, and quality.
2022 was the year of generative AI, emerging as one of the most strategic technologies that revolutionized the content creation market. The industry is anticipated to exhibit a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of over 19.80% in the next five years, as per a report by IMARC Group. Generative AI models utilize advanced machine learning to produce text, images, and videos with simple text inputs. These models substantially impact any organization’s marketing, design, and interpersonal communications.
Realizing the enormous potential generative AI holds, many startups have tried to ride this wave, but not all have been able to create an impact. Unlike others, Gan.ai was able to harness the power of generative AI and develop something powerful. Gan.ai is a budding Indian company that offers unique video personalization services using Myna, its first commercially available product leveraging generative AI.
To get a deeper understanding of Myna and more insights into Gan.ai’s technology, we interviewed Suvrat Bhooshan, Founder and CEO of Gan.ai.
The Mind Behind Gan.ai and Myna
Gan.ai, previously known as Gan Studio, was founded by Suvrat Bhooshan, an artificial intelligence enthusiast. He is an alumnus of Georgia Institute of Technology, a Bachelor of Science (CS), and Stanford University, Master of Science (CS). Suvrat is a deep learning expert with experience in software development and research engineering at Facebook AI, New York. He specializes in building large transformer models and has been published in several renowned deep-learning conferences like NeuRIPS and ACL.
Upon returning to India at the end of 2020, Suvrat established Gan Studio in 2021 as an AI-driven personalized messaging service provider. The service created numerous personalized variations of messages using single-input videos. Over the year, Gan.ai advanced to offer more complex video personalizations, like the Zomato ad starring Hrithik Roshan.
The Pretense
Video communication is becoming more and more popular when it comes to content development. But while addressing a broad audience, generating videos is a cumbersome process that limits customization. Gan.ai was founded with the goal of helping organizations optimize and enhance their video creation process and engage with the audience more effectively with personalized landing pages.
While it may seem to work like the standard deepfake technology, Gan.ai’s fundamental difference lies in personalization and not curation. While deepfake is used to replace the person or likeness with another person, personalization only alters certain aspects of the video. For instance, a food delivery agent (like Zomato/Swiggy) sends a personalized video starring an ambassador who surprisingly addresses you by name and mentions your favorites (based on your recent orders).
Build Dynamic Video Experiences with Myna
Myna is the first brainchild of Gan.ai and is a generative AI tool that helps you build dynamic one-on-one video experiences. Its AI engine enables you to curate breathtaking video campaigns that can be tweaked according to user preferences. It takes three simple steps and only a few minutes to produce hyper-personalized videos with choice parameters. All you have to do is shoot and upload your campaign on Myna, select the words that need to be personalized, and just click on generate! The tool has already captured next-level engagement for brands like Zomato, Swiggy, Bajaj, and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Myna has also powered Vivo’s most recent campaign, #vivoVBADay2022.
Suvrat believes that Gan.ai has the potential to be the face of generative AI and can advance existing text-to-video generative models. He said, “Gan.ai is at the forefront of generative AI, working on state-of-the-art text-to-video generative models. Today, we have developed the best-in-class LipSync and AudioSync models all in-house and are working towards general domain agnostic video generation simply by describing what you want to showcase.”
NVIDIA unveils an early access program for NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), where developers and teams can build virtual assistants and avatars to enhance existing workflows in business applications.
Omniverse ACE is a suite of cloud-native AI microservice that makes it easier to build and deploy intelligent virtual assistants and digitals humans at scale. It improvises the avatar development process and delivers the AI building blocks necessary to add intelligence and animations to avatars, which are built on any engine virtually and deployed on any cloud. The AI assistants and avatars are designed for organizations across industries to enhance existing workflows and unlock new business opportunities.
NVIDIA’s early access program provides access to the pre-release versions of ACE animation AI and conversational AI microservices along with:
3D animation AI microservice for third-party avatars that uses Omniverse Audio2Face generative AI to make realistic facial animations from audio files.
2D animation AI microservice, Portrait enables easy animations of 2D portraits or stylized human faces using live video feeds.
Text-to-speech micro service leverages NVIDIA Riva TTS to synthesize natural-sounding speech from raw transcripts without any additional information like patterns or rhythms of speech.
With NVIDIA’s early access program, teams and developers can also access tooling, sample reference applications, and supporting resources, which can help them get started.
The Conversational AI and metaverse company, MeetKai, has unveiled new offerings today at CES 2023, which include MeetKai Reality, MeetKai Metaverse Editor, and MeetKai Cloud AI.
These offerings are the latest additions to its expanding portfolio of conversational AI technologies, enabling more seamless metaverse experiences available from all web-browser compatible devices without any need for specialized hardware.
MeetKai Reality is a software platform that provides support to users in digitizing physical spaces for creating instant 3-D replicas using merely a phone. The tech can bring spaces and objects from the real world into the metaverse without requiring countless hours of custom 3-D modeling or complicated scanning equipment.
MeetKai Metaverse Editor will usher in new ways of metaverse content creation. Unlike other design platforms that struggle with user-friendliness, object physics, or clipping, MeetKai’s new software allows easy virtual space building and construction without complicated tooling.
MeetKai’s Cloud AI will facilitate another level of immersion in virtual spaces by enabling AI-human interactions with the first cloud offering, which is domain-specific, knowledge-driven Virtual Humans.
CEO Andy Jassy stated that Amazon plans to lay off more than 18,000 employees to reduce costs in an uncertain economy. He added that the company hired rapidly during the pandemic, and such a large workforce is not necessarily beneficial at uncertain times. Amazon doubled its global workforce between 2020 and 2022 by hiring to meet an explosion in demand for deliveries.
The sudden announcement resulted from an employee leaking the information externally. It would not have been revealed until as late as January 18, when the employees to be laid off would have been informed.
The company’s management, according to Jassey, is ” deeply aware that these role eliminations are difficult for people, and we don’t take these decisions lightly.” Jassy also briefed that Amazon will support those who are adversely affected by extending severance packages, including transitional health benefits and succeeding job placement aid.
As per Amazon, the layoff is a call for intervention because the company incurred a lot of expenditure across various verticals. The same company has also reached out for a US$8b term loan from certain vendors (undisclosed) to support corporate purposes.
Moreover, the online retailer is anticipating much slower growth as inflation is soaring. Many other companies, like Alphabet, Kraken, Salesforce, Hewlett Packard, and Meta, are also laying off employees to cut costs.
In a move that could spell the end for human narrators, Apple has revealed a selection of books using artificial intelligence-based narration. The move is an effort to disrupt the rapidly expanding audiobook business while deepening scrutiny of claims that Apple engages in anti-competitive behavior.
Since audiobooks have become so popular, technological companies are exploring the domain to have windfalls, especially when the audiobook market is likely to surpass US$35b by 2030.
Recently, Apple reached out to independent publishers, including those in the Canadian market, as potential partners to develop AI-voiced audiobooks. Authors were to sign a non-disclosure agreement to ensure the secrecy of the project at the time.
Many publishers and authors expressed that the project, if successful, could have a significant effect on the market, while many others were skeptical. David Caron, a renowned co-producer at Canada’s largest audiobook publisher, said, “They’re creating something that is different from the print book, but that adds value as an art form.”
Professional voice actors, however, have not taken Apple AI audiobooks positively as they see it hampers their financial incentive, both as writers and voice agents. On the other hand, if analyzed from a publisher’s point of view, a human-voice audiobook takes weeks and costs over a thousand dollars. AI has the potential to cut both time and costs significantly.
