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Humanoid Robots & the birth of an avatar 🤖
AI hardware frenzy, and a community member's personal story: the birth of an avatar, Gavuitar
Dani Van de Sande
August 08, 2024
Image creds Jeremy Welt//Gavuitar
Happy Thursday, Cyborgs.
It’s been a roller coaster with the markets, to say the least. We’re all in it together, though - let’s keep our head up :)
Meanwhile, the number of AI hardware updates this week are significant - from Figure 02 (the challenger to Musk’s humanoid robots), to the viral announcement of new AI hardware companion, Friend, & OpenAI’s Opal investment…lots in hardware land (psst we’re planning an event about this, btw - stay tuned 😋)
Also, this week I’m very excited to spotlight a dear friend, Jeremy Welt, as he shares with us the personal story of bringing to life his own avatar, Gavuitar. What started as an experiment has become a powerful from of artistic and self expression - in his own words “my avatar represents a piece of me that once felt small and undernourished; only as its own being could this piece of me grow.“
Please enjoy this week’s jam-packed edition and as always, do let us know what you want to see more of, love & don’t love 🙃
Today’s rundown:
TLDR: This week in Future + Culture
3x AI hardware updates 🤯
Major platform updates
Community Shares
NYC Virtual Beings Event invite - Sept 11 @ Neuehouse Madison Square & Save the date Sept 25th in Venice Beach
Community Spotlight: Creator of the Week Jeremy Welt shares his personal journey creating his avatar, Gavuitar
🆃🅻🅳🆁
OpenAI-backed humanoid robot Figure 2 steps into the field
Another player joins the humanoid robot space to challenge Elon Musk’s upcoming humanoid robot release. Figure 2 is capable of full speech-to-speech reasoning and human conversation, completely autonomous work in complex environments like a BMW factory, and 360 degree vision to navigate the real world.
Why we care: The humanoid robot race is happening as we speak. We are already living in the future 🤯 how will our existence as humans evolve, as humanoid robots come to life?
AI “Friend” viral announcement
After disappointing reviews of overhyped Humane and rabbit devices, we’re skeptical. But could this one be different?
“Vibes-based” rather than productivity-focused. Founder Avi Schiffman started friend to solve his own loneliness.
Design partnership with Bould (behind Nest thermostats)
$99 and no subscription
GenZ founder is still at Harvard
Why we care: This is about more than just hardware. This is the double-edged sword we’re constantly entertaining with future tech- while AI companionship can help the loneliness pandemic, what will it hurt? That said, Friend is definitely not the only company playing in this space. There are several emotional companion AI startups popping up and we’re keeping tabs.
PS. We’re actually working on an event that will look at the pitfalls & opportunities of AI hardware. Who’s interested? Stay tuned.
OpenAI invests $60M into Opal, which is developing webcams & AI-powered consumer devices
Yet another hardware-focused AI company, that OpenAI teams are reportedly very excited to integrate their Voice AI models into
Major platform updates
An anonymous chatbot has been floating around the interwebz, which has more advanced reasoning than any other AI model released. Rumor has it this is OpenAI’s potentially groundbreaking project strawberry teased before release.
Amazon updates its AI image generator, Titan, to support image conditioning, taking in a reference image and focusing on specific visual characteristics in that image, like edges, object outlines and structural elements. The model can also be fine-tuned using reference images like a product or company logo, so that generated images maintain a consistent aesthetic.
We’re seeing a rise in search usage within social media platforms like Tik tok and IG over Google search especially with younger audiences, and unsurprisingly Reddit teased that it may integrate AI search features during earnings.
Character.ai signed a non-exclusive licensing deal with Google to use its LLM technology, plus ingest more funding.
Bytedance launches Jimeng AI for Chinese users, competing with OpenAI’s unreleased Sora model, following a series of similar releases in China over the past months.
👫ᴄᴏᴍᴍᴜɴɪᴛʏ ꜱʜᴀʀᴇꜱ👫
Tatiana Koffman, founder of renowned Myth of Money newsletter, just released her first book on pre-sale, currently ranked #1 on Amazon Books Venture Capital, #2 Business & Finance.
Myth of Money is a thrilling blend of personal stories from the financial world, coupled with clear explanations of how things really work—from investment banking and stocks to venture capital, macroeconomics, and cryptocurrencies.
We can’t wait for the finance book we actually want to read 🥰 check it out!
😺ᵤₚcₒₘᵢₙg ₑᵥₑₙₜₛ😺
We’re back in salon-mode this Fall with Virtual Beings NYC edition at Neuehouse Madison Square, on Sept 11! This event topic was such a hit at our last event this June in LA, we had to make sure we hosted round 2 on our other coast. We’ll feature a panel of subject matter experts and a world renowned artist, sharing their process of envisioning and creating virtual beings. We’ll explore the role of virtual beings in relation to humans, different types of AI-powered avatars, sample use cases, and more.
I’m already blown away by the speakers we’re lining up...announcing soon. In the meantime secure your spot, we expect high turnout :)
And don’t worry, LA - we’re announcing our September 25th event at Neuehouse Venice Beach again soon, save the date 🙂
💡 ᴀ&ᴍ ᴄʀᴇᴀᴛᴏʀ ꜱᴘᴏᴛʟɪɢʜᴛ💡
A personal story: the birth of a Virtual Being
ᴳᴬⱽᵁᴵᵀᴬᴿ by Jeremy Welt
I have spent the last two decades at the intersection of music, media, and emerging platforms. As a successful executive in traditional media at Warner Bros Records, to an exit at creator-led startup Maker Studios, to virtual entertainment visionary Wave XR, I’ve worked closely with artists, creators and companies to grow their brands.
In parallel, I've been a musician myself since I was 5 years old, first with classical violin via the Suzuki method and later with guitar. My music increasingly became more of a personal pursuit as I climbed the corporate ladder to the c-suite. Nevertheless I continued to play guitar, practicing and recording my solos through the years. I’m proud of this work, yet I've always been afraid to share my own music, consumed by some natural deep-seeded insecurity that revealing “my music” would invite judgment from my professional peers. Always a nagging desire…how could I combine these worlds? In the midst of the COVID lockdown and the explosion of virtual influencers, I decided to create my own avatar-based character and start to release my music anonymously.
Gavuitar was born.
While initially crude, making my first content as an Avatar became the much-needed catalyst. I could separate this “artist” from myself” and ignore any assumption about how I needed to look or sound. I could focus on the music without the insecurity of “exposing” myself. However I still wanted to capture my emotions, movements, and details of how I play, my look and feel, without it being "me".
To become Gavuitar, I also wanted to keep it accessible, using only my laptop and a camera, so the music and creativity could evolve in whichever way the inspiration struck. I developed a 2D capture using a custom Snap desktop lens on Snap Camera, which captured the face, guitar, and hands, and I fed that live into OBS capture. Once in OBS, I used a few plugins and effects to create layers and then exported to Premier, where I used additional plugins to soften the edges from the lens and give it more of a filmed look. This final file allowed me to place Gavuitar in any scene or background, getting a lot of mileage out of a simple 2d avatar. I was amazed at how collaborations unfolded when sharing this output with other visual artists. And now, the advent of AI tools breathes new life into this setup.
Gavuitar's initial mission was to use an avatar to showcase my guitar solos. An integral aspect of Gavuitar's format is reinterpreting Hip Hop songs I grew on, with guitar melodies - everything is a mix of digital and human, classic and new.
Gavuitar's home world, a blend of nature and technology, is a story with a mix of guitar gear and salvaged tech that powers his sound and avatar, constantly changing and adapting to his music. With some tech magic and simple hacks, Gavuitar often teleports his 2D form into other worlds inside his proprietary 3D gear.
As I discovered and explored Gavuitar, so did actual fans, the music resonating with people who seemed captivated by genre-bending solos enshrouded in a mysterious presence. The growth of Gavuitar brought immense personal fulfillment, providing an outlet for my creativity without facing my fears. As its popularity and profile grew faster and became more prominent than my individual accounts, I experienced a dual life, working in music and tech, while my music, funneled through Gavuitar, reached people worldwide. Occasionally, someone I knew liked a Gavuitar video, and the positive feedback, without knowing who I was, made it all feel all the more authentic. I could express parts of myself, things that make me unique, that I had never fully expressed to those close to me.
After 3 years of publishing with a regular cadence, I discovered my digital identity was not just about artistic freedom but a new art form. I discovered that my avatar can collaborate with artists and fans in new ways that hadn’t yet been defined, while allowing AI and other technology to plug directly into how I appear and sound.
What started as a “safe” creative outlet and a way to shield my identity became a template for how humans can organically create within the growing space of virtual beings and worlds. I love my regular IRL life, yet my avatar represents a piece of me that once felt small and undernourished; only as its own being could this piece of me grow.
Gavuitar continues as a vital passion project. I am working on the next iteration, inspired by meeting others who have been moved by their own experiences with and as digital beings. Where I once needed to explore Gavuitar in anonymity and isolation, I now find the community around avatar-based music and entertainment the very thing that drives Gavuitar’s growth.
Special thanks to the few who were on the inside with me and Zak Nordgren for his visual and conceptual collaboration, Please reach out to me if you want to collaborate or learn more.
xx Dani Van de Sande