DALL-E 3 is a thing now
OpenAI, the company behind the wildly successful ChatGPT large language model (LLM), has announced DALL-E 3, a much-improved text-to-image AI generator that’s supposedly safer, smarter, and can leverage ChatGPT to create prompts on the fly.
DALL-E 2 is still one of the more sophisticated generative AI platforms out there, and even then, it gets things wrong – ignoring specific prompts or just making things look plain weird. OpenAI reckons those issues will be far less prominent, with DALL-E 3 being more understanding of situational context.
Aside from understanding user prompts better, DALL-E 3’s coolest addition is probably its ability to pair up with ChatGPT. Rather than waste valuable time thinking up a semi-legible prompt, just have ChatGPT do it for you. You’ll still need to think up the general idea, but ChatGPT will turn that idea into a longer-form paragraph, giving DALL-E more to work with, thus creating better results.
You won’t be able to fiddle with DALL-E 3 just yet. Only ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise users will get the chance to poke around DALL-E’s innards in October, with a later release planned for research labs and the OpenAI’s API service sometime before Spring’s end. OpenAI is being rather coy about a public rollout and didn’t commit to a release window.
Even Uber Eats is jumping on the AI bandwagon
Uber Eats has confirmed that it’s bringing AI into its food-delivery app because of course it is. This is 2023, after all. It’s called a bandwagon for a reason. Uber’s gone down the ‘AI assistant’ route here, though South Africans might have to wait their turn before getting to experiment with the artificial intelligence, with the feature first hitting the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK.
The AI assistant, which is powered by Google’s PaLM 2 LLM, is about as safe as an AI model can get. It’s got about as much functionality as Samsung’s Bixby did back in 2019, with the whole idea being to ask the chatbot for help finding restaurants or specific food items nearby while taking other contexts into consideration.
Want curry for under R100, and to be delivered in under 30 minutes? Uber’s assistant will try its best to help you out, answering in a somewhat human-like way to feign sophistication. Uber reckons that discussing your potential food order with a machine will cut down on scrolling through the app aimlessly in search of what to eat for lunch that day. It’s possible we’re being slightly too cynical, not having tested the AI assistant for ourselves. But unlikely. If TechCrunch’s demo is anything to go by, it looks like we are right.
Internet is restored!
Léon Thévenin, the cable-laying ship responsible for repairing three broken subsea cables, has finally completed work on the Sat-3 cable, after previously repairing the Ace and Wacs cables earlier this month, according to Telkom subsidiary, Openserve (via TechCentral).
“Openserve is pleased that the restoration on the Sat-3 undersea cable, which experienced a break recently, has been completed. The completion of this work is good news for internet users as this means that there is more available capacity and improved network resiliency,” the company said.
It’s not yet confirmed what caused the three undersea cables to fall into disrepair, though many believe that a rockfall off the coast of the Democratic Republic of Congo was responsible for the damages. Whatever the case, with the repairs complete, South Africa should no longer be suffering poor internet speeds and connections. If you’re still having issues… you might want to take that up with your ISP.
You’ve got a Pal in me, Instax
Here at Stuff, we’re fans of Instax. The company’s Mini 12 film camera was the most recent product to capture our hearts (and ugly mugs). Now, the company is moving towards a more kid-friendly line-up, with the Instax Pal being the first to enter your child’s sticky hands once it launches in October for $200.
The Pal is tiny. Like, really tiny. So tiny that it’ll fit into the palm of your hand and doesn’t feature a built-in viewfinder or any sort of printing functionality. That’s a job for the included Instax Mini Link 2 printer, which talks to the Pal through a companion app. For a device that’s supposedly geared toward kids, Instax is making the process rather more complicated than it needs to be.
It starts to make a little more sense once you get a look at what a ten-pack of Instax film costs. The digital printer’s inclusion allows for more trial and error, meaning kids won’t be burning through a ten-pack every couple of minutes. The Mini Link 2 also allows for filters, stickers, and custom-shutter sounds – all features in other words that’ll be most appreciated by someone on the younger side.
Even so, $200 is a lot of money. Local pricing and availability for the Pal is yet to be confirmed, though we’re bracing ourselves for a R4,000+ price point, accounting for the Mini Link 2’s R2,000 price.