Like the Google CEO meme says: AI, AI, AI and AI

3 innovation and digital news in 1 minute. Every Monday. Episode 339

Figure 01, the new humanoid that can lift

Just founded and a new series A financing for Figure — based in the Silicon Valley. They claim: “Figure is the first-of-its-kind AI robotics company bringing a general purpose humanoid to life”. Figure 01 is conceived to carry out tasks like opening doors, carrying packages — above all for difficult tasks in warehouses for example. The idea is a “horizontal” hardware that can be used in may applications, functions. Opinion: Brett Adcock, the founder has gathered a team of ex-”everything that has to do with AI and humanoids”. And a private ticket of $100 million. Figure 01 is tested at Figure’s HQ in Sunnyvale, and still a beta.

An expensive hobby or a game changer?

Lalaland AI models for fashion

Lalaland is a tool to create a “catalogue” photo model, then style her and add infos for e-commerce. Levi’s has been using this recently, with all the many questions about how AI will replace humans behind. The start-up Lalaland is based in Amsterdam and financed with a $3,4m ticket. Opinion: It makes sense — replacing top models by AI, especially for e-commerce fashion — product pages have thumbnail size and a “beauty” shot isn’t necessary. Another company (an agency) has run a now famous billboard for e-commerce brand Revolve, showing only AI-based models.

A revolution for fashion commerce is ahead.

Meta comes out with AI Sandbox, a tool for ad production

AI Sandbox is rolling out (after announcement on May 10th) and consists of an AI-powered “creative asset enhancements” to automatically apply small changes like ‘text variation,’ ‘background generation’ and ‘image outcropping”. For example changing the background (see pic). Opinion: Meta is one of the leaders in AI research, the advertising platform “Meta Business Suite” is in itself a big AI machine. However, Meta has been slow in opening its AI capacity to all. This is the case now with the AI Sandbox — still in a limited scope, but a sign that Meta will deploy its large AI capacities.

Meta in AI? Remember? PyTorch, the leading ML library is Meta.