Apple Releases OpenELM, Ray-Ban AI Capabilities

April 25th, 2024

Before diving into today’s news on AI, VR, Crypto, and Robotics…

I just started a YouTube channel where I talk about business, tech, and a bunch of other cool stuff. I dropped a video earlier this week on AI content creation. Click the link below to check it out now:

P.S. I just launched this YouTube channel last week. If you could shoot me a quick follow I’d really appreciate it 🙏. I’m going to send $500 to one lucky subscriber once my channel hits 1,000 followers.

Read Time: 10 Minutes

Today’s Menu

  • Meta’s Ray-Ban’s Add New AI Capabilities

  • Apple Releases OpenELM

  • Square (Block) Payments Allow You To Convert Retail Sales to BTC

  • Flexport Raises $260M From Shopify

  • How To Make Short Form Video Content From End to End with AI

TODAY IN VR

Meta’s Ray-Ban’s Add New AI Capabilities

Meta’s Ray Ban smart glasses launched last fall. Although they have their issues, smart glasses are much more practical for day to day use than a virtual reality headset.

(it’s much easier to walk around with a pair of Ray-Bans on than a Vision Pro)

Meta now allows for multimodal AI in their smart glasses. Basically what this means is that it can process multiple types of information like photos, audio, and text.

For example:

Let’s say you take a trip to Brazil (but you don’t speak a single word of Portuguese). You’re looking at signs and trying to navigate your way around the airport. The Ray Ban smart glasses would be able to translate signs from Portuguese to English. This would be one immediate use case for these glasses.

I haven’t tried these out yet but will likely purchase a pair soon.

TODAY IN AI

Apple Releases OpenELM

Apple just released OpenELM, which is a cohort of 8 open source LLM’s. According to their data, OpenELM offers similar performance to other LLM’s but with less training data.

Apple has historically been an extremely secretive company. They keep their acquisitions hidden. They work on projects behind the scenes for extremely long periods of time (like self-driving cars and virtual reality).

The big elephant in the room right now is the fact that a very large percentage of the world carries an iPhone in their pocket that they spend most of their day glued to.

Apple will have a major advantage over other LLM’s (like OpenAI and Google) because they can build it specifically for the iPhone. Which will likely increase user adoption significantly.

OpenELM information has been pretty vague so far, but more will come shortly.

TODAY IN CRYPTO

Square (Block) Payments Allow You To Convert Retail Sales to BTC

Jack Dorsey, the original Founder of Twitter and the current CEO of Square (rebranded to Block), is QUITE the advocate of crypto.

Block is a platform that allows merchants to process payments in retail locations.

Block recently announced that merchants can convert revenue directly into Bitcoin using Cash App.

Block is also working on creating its own Bitcoin mining system.

This could be HUGE for the widespread adoption of crypto for businesses.

TODAY IN ROBOTICS

Flexport Raises $260M From Shopify

Flexport raised $260M from the online e-commerce platform Shopify. Robotics and AI are going to play a major role in streamlining supply chain/logistics/operations for e-commerce brands over the coming years.

Flexport is a freight forwarding and logistics platform that helps to simplify the complexity of international shipping and supply chains.

They offer services like freight forwarding, data analytics and insights, warehousing, fulfillment, insurance, and also custom brokerage services.

Many e-commerce brands, who run on Shopify, struggle with managing their inventory, returns, and other things of that sort at scale.

Flexport is going to help e-commerce brand owners to solve these problems.

While we’re on the topic of e-commerce…

Sovereign’s goal is to bring awareness to the importance of:

  • Owning Multiple Passports

  • Purchasing Crypto Assets

  • Creating Online Income Streams and

  • Building a life of Sovereignty

The Future

How To Make Short Form Video Content From End to End with AI:

I have FINALLY pieced together how to make unlimited amounts of short form video content from end to end using strictly AI (and after reading this short article, you’ll be able to do the same).

Short form video seems to be the direction that most social media platforms are headed.

YouTube is pushing shorts. 

IG is pushing reels.

TikTok’s entire platform is short form video.

(I’m not on LinkedIn but I’ve heard that LinkedIn is rolling out short form video capabilities as well).

Short form video is a skillset in itself (and a great one to add to your arsenal).  

I’ve dropped several posts over the last few months related to this topic, but in today’s article I want to integrate everything together so that you can see it from end to end.

There’s 4 main pieces to make this work:

  1. Custom GPT

  2. Heygen

  3. Eleven Labs

  4. Captions

First and foremost - you’re going to want to create a personal custom GPT for yourself.

This custom GPT is going to be used to make content in your own voice based on your expertise.

Using the custom GPT, you can knock out unlimited amounts of content for yourself. 

I’ll drop a link in the comments to a previous article where I explained how to create custom GPT’s.

Some of you may like writing your own content (I personally prefer to do so). 

However, I will say from several years of experience that consistently doing content every single day can be difficult to maintain. 

Especially as your business ramps up and things get crazy.

Writing the content for short form video is the most time-consuming part of the process.

Using a few basic prompts, you can spit out IG reel scripts in seconds that are in your voice after you’ve set up your custom GPT.

Plus you can use your custom GPT to create captions for the video as well.

Second:

You’re going to use Heygen to create a custom video avatar of yourself.

I’ve tried a few different custom video platforms and I personally find Heygen to be the best one.

It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s pretty good and it’s only going to improve with time.

After you’ve completed the IG reel script inside your custom GPT, you’re going to feed it into your Heygen avatar to create the video.

This is great for 30 second IG reels, talking head TikTok’s, and other content of this sort.

Third:

You’re going to use Eleven Labs to do custom audio of yourself.

You want to use the professional account ($22/mo) to create this audio format that speaks in your voice.

Then you’re going to set up an API with Heygen.

That way your Heygen avatar will immediately apply the custom audio onto the avatar and speak in your voice.

(although Heygen has custom audio, it’s not the greatest. Eleven Labs has a much better product and setting up the integration is very simple).

Lastly:

You’re going to use the Captions app to put captions onto the video and make it stand out on social media. 

You simply download the video from Heygen (I’d recommend using the landscape video rather than portrait). 

Then you’re going to upload the video into the captions app.

The captions app will automatically put eye-catching subtitles and captions onto your video.

From here you should be good to go.

I’ll drop a video walkthrough in the comments so you can check it out.

I’m personally very excited about using this to grow an IG page for myself and I think that this will cut out an enormous amount of time.

Have you been able to create short form AI video content for yourself?

Shoot me a reply back.

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