Our New LAIKA Team & New AI Frontiers!
Team LAIKA - Unite!
After lots of bureaucratic wrangling, we’ve finally got our team together to build our creativity tool LAIKA for the next while! At the top of our first “official team picture” here, you can meet our new team members Riddhi Raj and Wioletta Gluza:
Riddhi Raj (born 1990 in India) moved to Denmark to do his Master's in Computer Science and now lives and works there. His professional interests lie in the fields of data science, machine learning, backend design and server administration. His other hobbies include cooking, baking and travel.
Wioletta Gluza (she/her, born 1992) is originally from Poland but has been rambling around since 2011 between various countries. Professionally interested in Frontend development but wishes to find some time to learn how to be a better video editor. Working from home while not at home.
We’re so excited to welcome Riddhi and Wioletta to the team, and our work is progressing at a much faster rate now that we have doubled the team and can spend more time on LAIKA ourselves also. We’ll have more to share here in the coming weeks - stay tuned!
New AI Frontiers
And while we’ve been hard at work on LAIKA, it’s been a wild few weeks out there in the wider world of artificial intelligence. First, Google announced PALM, an immensely large language model (with 540 billion parameters!). Then the very next day OpenAI came out with Dall-E 2, a new AI system that can create amazing images from descriptions. It feels like every week the field is advancing faster and faster, bringing new innovations almost too fast to keep up with!
I led a workshop last night for game developers, in which I was showing various techniques from procedural generation and artificial intelligence for generating inspiration and creativity. As with every time I introduce the latest innovations to people who haven’t seen anything like this before: you can see the bright sparkle in their eyes, reminding me of this quote from Arthur C Clarke that I’ve always loved:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
We’re really in that stage right now with artificial intelligence, in terms of both text and images. And it’s that sparkle in the eyes that we’re chasing as we work on LAIKA every day: our mission is to give non-technical creatives friendly and approachable access to the power of cutting-edge machine learning and procedural generation.
I felt the magic yesterday too, as I just got access to an amazing AI visual creation tool called MidJourney. As a taster, I fed it with the description of LAIKA from the paragraph above and it gifted me this wild beauty:
So these eyes are still sparkling! And for those like me who just can’t get enough of these new frontiers - you are very welcome to join us in our Discord server, where we chat and experiment and share work with fellow travellers! You can join here (invite link will expire in 7 days, just email me at charlene.putney@gmail.com if you want to join after then!).
Until next time!