A new speech-to-speech translation architecture, UnitY

UnitY translates source language speech to the target text and the corresponding discrete acoustic units in the two-pass way.

Animoca Brands Unveils $2B Metaverse Fund

Hong Kong-based blockchain gaming giant Animoca Brands is all set to roll out a massive $2 billion fund, dubbed “Animoca Capital,” to invest in metaverse businesses, according to co-founder and executive chairman Yat Siu.

While speaking to Nikkei Asia, the exec revealed that the upcoming metaverse fund, which will make its first investment in 2023, will focus on digital property rights. It also seeks to provide opportunities to access Web3 companies.

Meanwhile, its portfolio boasts over 380 investments, including Colossal, Axie Infinity, OpenSea, Dapper Labs (NBA Top Shot), Alien Worlds, and Star Atlas, among others.

Crypto trends for 2023 by Messari - must read

Someone implemented a framework to allow you to train PaLM (Google’s 540B parameter LM) using the same reinforcement learning strategy as ChatGPT!

Open source strikes again.

No U.S. tech company that IPO'd in the last decade now ranks in the top 250 global companies by value. Airbnb is the most valuable of the bunch, at ~$54B, coming in at #270.

The previous decade (2002-2012) included the IPOs of Google, Tesla, and Facebook, now worth $1.15T, $389B, and $314B, respectively -- or about 21, 7, and 6 times Airbnb, respectively.

In other words, despite the torrent of investor optimism unleashed by Facebook's IPO in May 2012, the U.S. tech industry has not produced any publicly traded corporations since that event that come anywhere close to being the "next Facebook".

Note that Stripe and SpaceX are not publicly traded, and may break this trend if and when they decide to IPO.

Also it's worth noting that the most valuable publicly traded companies that have IPOd in the last decade are in fairly quotidian industries -hotels and taxis.

Btw, that some huge Chinese companies (Alibaba, for instance) IPO'd over the past decade, and Bitcoin and Ethereum was created during this time and is now worth $149B.

In 2023 the Japanese Financial Services Agency may lift the ban on the circulation of stablecoins issued overseas (such as USDC USDT, etc.) in Japan, and the remittance limit will be set at 1 million yen ($7,500) per transaction.

Mental image reading: "MinD-Vis is a framework for decoding human visual stimuli from brain recording."

SOTA model. Has 24% top-1 out-of-100 accuracy.

Paper page: mind-vis.github.io
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2211.06956

How USD can become an open 3D standard of the metaverse

USD is a 3D file format that can be like a lingua franca that makes those assets compatible, with a chance to unify both user experiences and developer workflows. It could be a standard that enables the metaverse — which many see as the next version of the internet — just like HTML enabled the Web.

Richard Kerris, vice president of the Omniverse platform at Nvidia, said: “We think of USD as the HTML of 3D. The connective tissue that we experience the web through today is HTML. That’s what makes it seamless from website to website, device to device. It wasn’t always that way. But those of us that are old enough to remember what extension do you have loaded? What browser?”
He added, “Once that got remedied with HTML, everything’s been smooth sailing. USD is going to do that for 3D so that we can go from virtual world to virtual world seamlessly.”

To make the metaverse happen faster, Kerris believes everybody needs to align around a standard.
“We’re seeing that happen more and more with USD,” he said. “I think every 3D company out there today either supports USD or has a plan to support USD in one way or another, whether it’s exporting out to it or creating a live bidirectional connector to the platform. But that takes time. And it takes everybody working together for it. You don’t want to have walled gardens around this. It doesn’t work on the internet. It’s not going to work in the metaverse. You want to have everything be open and accessible.”

The Scientific Singularity: Vision for The Future of Research with IP-NFTs

Med-PaLM a large language model aligned to the medical domain to generate safe and helpful answers

This work advances SOTA in 7 medical question-answering tasks, including achieving 67% on MedQA USMLE improving prior work by >17%.

Kraken announced that it will withdraw from Japan market at the end of January 2023.

On December 1, Kraken announced that it would lay off 1,100 people worldwide, accounting for about 30% of its total workforce.

ChatGPT came up with a cool UX enhancement. AI automatically names the thread for you (and its good). This should be in all AI-first products -- subject lines, Notion page titles and icons, thread names, etc.

Design principle: don't make me think.

Must read: Possibly the best researched 2023 forecast for Web3, Blockchain and Crypto that you’re ever going to find

If 2022 felt like a long, slow slide into uncertainty and FUD: fear not! 2023 has a lot of good things to offer.

The good people at The Block have compiled 199 pages that can give us all a sense of excitement for the future of Web3 and the year ahead.

1. Bear markets don’t last forever.
2. Blockchains are immutable.
3. And open source code is available to all.

This report includes:
- What happened in 2022
- Crypto Financial Services
- Infrastructure
- NFTs and Gaming
- Trading
- Web3
- Data and Analytics
- Multi-chain Future
- Unicorns
- Largest VC Raises
- M&A
- dApps
- And some thoughtful and amusing final conclusions and guidance

This document is a beast.

China to Launch First National ‘Digital Asset’ Marketplace

China is launching its first state-backed non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, the latest sign of embrace for a technology that’s occupied a legal gray area within the country’s notoriously strict regulations on cryptocurrency.
A ceremony celebrating the launch of the marketplace will be held in person in Beijing, the country’s capital, on Jan. 1.
The platform will be run by a trio of state-owned and private entities: China Technology Exchange and Art Exhibitions China, both of which are government-backed, and Huban Digital, a private company, according to a report by Chinese state media outlet China Daily.

The marketplace, whose name translates to “China Digital Asset Trading Platform,” will also be used to trade digital copyrights and property rights along with collectibles.

TSMC held a 3 nanometer (3nm) volume production and capacity expansion ceremony at its Fab 18 new
construction site in the Southern Taiwan Science Park.

12 creative AI startups that investors think could make an impact in the future

Yepic AI speeds up the process of producing professional videos without the need for specialised training. The process involves the user writing a script and choosing an avatar to read it out — and the software generates a talking heads video from those prompts.

Creaition is looking to help product designers discover and develop new products by generating unique inspiration images which users can save, edit and combine, or morph with existing designs. 

Stability AI is developing open-source solutions to put generative AI tools in the hands of users and developers.

Skippr is looking to automate parts of the process of designing products to increase efficiency and cut costs, while also freeing designers up from menial aspects of the job to focus on the elements of the process they enjoy the most.

VoiceMod started as a voice modifier for gaming, but then became an AI voice generator that can be included in live streams, games and social media. The voice filters create “sonic identities” that are created by professional actors, and though the software has been designed to suit English, other languages are also supported. 

Read more here.

TSMC's top 10 customers, including MediaTek, AMD, Nvidia, have cut orders as industry weakness finally hits the foundry giant.

TSMC's fab utilization rate is expected to collapse in the 1st quarter, as revenue falls 15% vs Q4 and inventories pile up.

7/6nm process utilization is expected to hit 50% in Q1, while 5/4nm and 28nm also drops, while TSMC's wafer bank (storage) has reached a new high, noting 6% price hikes for 2023 have kept Q1 revenue from falling further.