The AI XR Podcast.

This Week the hosts are talking about OpenAI's Voice Engine, which can be trained on fifteen second recording, creating profound questions about privacy and security. The guest this week is Maureen Fan, co-founder and CEO of Baobab Studios, which for eight years has been creating original content for VR, the Metaverse, and traditional media. The company's co-founder and Chief Creative Officer is Eric Darnell, director of Dreamworks' Madagascar movies.

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The hosts are joined by Liz Hyman, President and Chief Executive Officer of the XR Association (XRA), the trade association promoting the dynamic growth of the XR industry. First up in the news, Amazon doubles down on Anthropic AI as it adds $2.75B to its previous $1.25B investment. OpenAI's text-to-video generator Sora goes to Hollywood, but what will - or can - it really create? Databricks creates a competitive LLM for just $10M. Liz Hyman joins us to talk about the immersive industry associations' legislative accomplishments and the challenges facing the industry, including copyright, trademark, and patent regulations - and enforcement. 

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This Week in XR "Dear Tim" episode, an SXSW (South by Southwest) feature session was recorded live in Austin 3/12/24, featuring guest Joanna Popper, former CAA, NBC and HP executive. 

With the launch of the Meta Quest 3 in November, and the Apple Vision Pro in early February, we now have two competing approaches on spatial computing. The comparison to the iOS - Android mobile duopoly should be lost on no one. Many questions about the future of spatial computing are now up for discussion. What are the killer apps? What will storytellers do with the spatial medium? How quickly can Apple get to an accessible price? What wildcards are out there and, perhaps most importantly, what impact AI will have on spatial computing? https://schedule.sxsw.com/2024/events/PP

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Ted and Charlie welcome guest Weili Dai, co-founder Marvell Technologies, Silicon Box, and MeetKai. In the news, Saudi Arabia to invest $40B in AI, Nvidia revealed its new Blackwell AI computer at its GTC Conference, which it calls "AI Woodstock." They also showed off AI for robots. The State of Unreal was the main event at the Game Developers Conference a few dozen miles up the bay in San Francisco. Fortnite paid $320 for user generated content. Apple eyes Google Gemini AI for iPhones. Our guest Weili Dai is probably the most powerful person we've had on the show. Her new company, Silicon Box, is opening factories in Singapore and Italy to make a new kind of semiconductor they call a Chiplet. She is also attacking this new AI architecture through the software startup MeetKai.com. 

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Charlie and Ted, having recovered from SXSW, are back in their respective man caves, while Rony is on cell, driving through Alabama. Our SXSW panel talk will be posted in three weeks but can be found right now on the SXSW site. After a brief overview of three AI funding stories, we turned our attention back to SXSW, but other topics intruded: the potential of a TikTok ban, social media algorithms, and the ongoing OpenAI copyright mess. Our guests this week are SXSW XR experience Jury Prize Winner, Matthew Niederhauser, co-director of The Golden Key. Also joining us is Laura Mingail, a former Entertainment One executive and consultant who has been advising SXSW on XR since its beginning. 

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Charlie and Ted, having recovered from SXSW, are back in their respective man caves, while Rony is on cell, driving through Alabama. Our SXSW panel talk will be posted in three weeks, but can be found right now on the SXSW site. After a brief overview of three AI funding stories, we turned our attention back to SXSW, but other topics intruded: the potential of a TikTok ban, social media algorithms, and the ongoing OpenAI copyright mess. Our guests this week are SXSW XR experience Jury Prize Winner, Matthew Niederhauser, co-director of The Golden Key. Also joining us is Laura Mingail, a former Entertainment One executive and consultant who has been advising SXSW on XR since its beginning. 

Thank you to our sponsor, Zappar!

Don't forget to like, share, and follow for more! Follow us on all socials @ThisWeekInXR!

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Charlie is solo at SXSW while Ted and Rony are in transit. We'll be posting our Tuesday panel on the future of XR in the age of Apple Vision Pro at the end of next week. Not a big news week. The Sora freakout continues as they drop more tests on the socials. In AI, Haiper emerges from stealth with $13.5 M to take on Runway. Jabali raised $5M to use AI to prompt video games into existence. My guest is Lucas Martell, the Austin-based CEO of Mighty Coconut, producer of the hit VR game "Walkabout Mini Golf," which has released over two dozen courses, or DLCs, including one based on "Wallace and Gromit," which was announced today. 

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Charlie and Ted are without Rony, who is driving across the country. We'll convene at SXSW in Austin to do our show live on stage with Joanna Popper in a session titled "XR in the Age of Vision Pro" on March 12th. In the news, $675M for Figure AI's humanoid robots, powered by ChatGPT, and a new text-to-video tool, Ideogram. Our guests this week are Hugh Forrest, head of programming for SXSW and Blake Kammerdiner, head of XR at SXSW who give us a wide-ranging look at this year's show. To say Ted and Charlie are fanboys would be putting it mildly. 

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The hosts are in fine form as they dissect the AI boom, which will have an internet-like impact on the economy, society, and culture as the Internet, and will happen much, much faster. Nvidia's explosive earnings are a bigger news story than the US returning to the moon. That's how big it is. To discuss the complications and opportunity AI represents to higher education, our guest is Katie Conrad, Professor of English at the University of Kansas. She is the author of A Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights for Education. 

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This week our guest is Susanne Haspinger, COO of Hololight. Rony's at an AI Medical conference. The big news is OpenAI's reveal of expanded memory for ChatGPT and the tease of the next Dall-E upgrade, a text-to-video app called Sora, which is capable of generating up to a minute of video from a single prompt. Nvidia, now the world's third largest company, introduced Chat RTX for PCs that will search across local files. The legal battles of OpenAI may be breaking in its favor. Susanne, who was one of the co-founders of Hololight, talks with us about Hololight's work in cloud streaming XR content and working with automakers and defense contractors on their use of the industrial metaverse, which she predicts will have major ROI and other breakthroughs in 2024. 

Thank you to our sponsor, Zappar!

Don't forget to like, share, and follow for more! Follow us on all socials @ThisWeekInXR!

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