This weekend in Generative Media

Black Forest Labs gets $100M; EA's genAI game idea; Possible pretrial GenAI decision

News and Events

• Grok’s image generator, Black Forest Labs, is raising $100M at a $1B valuation, say sources (TechCrunch)

• EA shows off AI system that lets you dream up an entire video game from scratch. (Futurism)

• Judge May Decide Generative AI's "Fair Use" Defense Pre-Trial (Peter Csathy on Substack)

• The hottest AI startups are raising back-to-back funding rounds. Suddenly, it's feeling very 2021 in Silicon Valley for a chosen few (Business Insider)

• Today, THE MASSIVE AGENCY, an AI Creative Agency brings some of the world’s greatest AI creatives and technologists together (X)

• Tokyo ComfyUI Meet Up. Friday September 27, 5-8pm, Tokyo, Japan.

Software

• Cogstudio [NVIDIA Only] Advanced Web UI for CogVideo (GitHub)

• Using synthetic training data to improve Flux finetunes (Replicate blog)

• Diffusers Fast Inpaint: Draw the mask over the subject you want to erase or change and write what you want to inpaint it with. (HuggingFace)

Research

• SPARK: Self-supervised Personalized Real-time Monocular Face Capture (SIGGRAPH Asia 2024, project page)

• Monkey See, Monkey Do (MoMo) (SIGGRAPH Asia 2024, project page)

• DreamBeast: Distilling 3D Fantastical Animals with Part-Aware Knowledge Transfer (project page)

• MoRAG - Multi-Fusion Retrieval Augmented Generation for Human Motion (project page)

• Quality-aware Masked Diffusion Transformer for Enhanced Music Generation (project page)

• VI3DRM:Towards meticulous 3D Reconstruction from Sparse Views via Photo-Realistic Novel View Synthesis (arXiv)

• Spectral-GS: Taming 3D Gaussian Splatting with Spectral Entropy (arXiv)

• LEMON: Localized Editing with Mesh Optimization and Neural Shaders (arXiv)

Misc

• After signing the deal with Runway, Lionsgate said to the WSJ that they had felt pressured by impending deals being made by competitors (X)

• Curious about how NeRFs can revolutionize fruit picking? (X)

• Testing out a Gen3 video to video creature driven by a rough animation in procreate dreams. (X)

• The sky's the limit when you blend classical visual effects with generative ai (Threads)