Things I read this week and some personal notes (8/9/17)

Eitan Shay
Aug 9, 2017 · 2 min read

Books:

AI:

  • FB AI Research: Voice Synthesis for in-the-Wild Speakers. Essentially, train a machine with publicly available speech, and let it read out any text you want. Link. paper here.
  • AI creates highly realistic fake videos of Obama using existing audio and video clips of him . Here. paper here.
  • So yes, it’ll soon be possible to create realistic video and audio using software. Sam Lessin writes about the future of truth here.
  • FB announced that all of their translations are now being powered by neural machine translation models, replacing our older, phrase based models here.

Tech News:

  • Snap: Went to work at Snap after 2015? Your stock options are worthless. Less than 100 employees have made any money. Link.
  • The NYTimes added more than 400,000 digital subscribers in the first six months of 2017 alone. Over 2m digital subs. Link.
  • First deliveries of the new Tesla Model 3 took place. Lots of good first impressions.
  • Cryptocurrency: bitcoin fork here.
  • Building self driving vehicles is tough (caption obvious). Insights from John Deere. Link.
  • Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF. Link.
  • A google employer wrote a piece that’s making waves in the valley: “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” here. He was soon fired by Sundar Pichai here which started a whole debate about freedom of speech in America. Susan Wojcicki’s response is pretty solid here.

Music

  • Amerigo Gazaway brings to life an imagined studio session between Chicago’s crowned prince of Hip-Hop, Common, and Motown legend, Steve Wonder. First single here.
  • The Internet Archive has begun to digitize 78rpm discs. 25,887 records are available so far. Go lose yourself here.
Eitan Shay

Written by

Entrepreneur, Petrol head, Geek, Foodie, Student, Music lover, husband, father.

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