 AI art and photo editing apps are dominating Apple's App Store charts in the free category. As of last week, viral photo and video editing app Lensa AI has been in the top spot thanks to its new "magic avatars" tool powered by the Stable Diffusion model. More: - In the first 11 days of this month, Lensa's app experienced 12.6 million global installs, up 600% from the previous period of Nov. 20 through Nov. 30, according to Sensor Tower data.
- Though the Lensa app is four years old, more than 17 million people have downloaded it since developer Prisma Labs Inc. launched "magic avatars" in November.
- The data shows that eight of the top 100 apps by downloads in the App Store this month have been AI art apps.
- As of Monday, the "Dawn — AI Avatars" app was second on the charts after Lensa. The free app, from developer Splice Video Editor, enables users to create avatar portraits of their photos using an AI text-to-image generator.
- Aiby's "AI Art — AI Generator" ranked fourth. It also generates images and avatars based on text prompts using an AI model "trained with millions of images from the web."
TECHCRUNCH 
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The Lensa AI app is facing backlash over its AI art generations that are overtly sexualized, particularly for women users, according to The Wall Street Journal. The app is built on the Stable Diffusion neural network, which itself is based on the LAION-5B database of publicly available images scraped from the web. More: - LAION-5B contains 5.85 billion public images, many of them owned by the artists who created them. The images were paired with text to train Stable Diffusion.
- Since the model is based on web images, its art generations are influenced by what's on the internet and reflect its underlying biases and sexual imagery.
- According to the WSJ, Lensa's image outputs often show "exaggerated physical characteristics," particularly along gender lines, and can promote "unrealistic standards of beauty."
- MIT Technology Review reporter Melissa Heikkilä wrote about how her Lensa AI art featured overly sexualized and topless avatars. Meanwhile, her white female colleague did not have the same experience. Heikkilä, who is of Asian heritage, believes the AI was influenced by online anime and video-game characters.
Response: - Lensa's creator, Prisma Labs, acknowledged that the underlying model of Lensa was "trained on unfiltered internet content."
- Prisma apologized to any users whose experiences on the app "did not turn out as expected." The company said it's working to address issues around explicit content.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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The AI Powered Equity ETF, an AI-guided exchange-traded fund launched in 2017, is underperforming and has drawn in a low amount of investor interest, according to Aaron Brown, former managing director of AQR Capital Management. The AIEQ, the only major fund run by algorithms, has experienced returns of only 35.3% versus 70.8% for the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF since October 2017. More: - The model, powered by IBM's AI supercomputer Watson, goes through news stories, regulatory filings, management profiles, valuations, and other market data to make its assessments of U.S. publicly-traded companies daily.
- It's managed by a quantitative model developed by EquBot and run by ETF Managers Group LLC. As of January, it managed about $150M in assets.
- According to Brown, the AIEQ has "lost 3.82% to the S&P 500 each year on average over the last five years."
- He also noted lower returns for another AI product, HSBC Holdings Plc's AI-Powered US Equity Index or AIPEX.
- Since August 2019, AIPEX has returned only 2.3% versus 44.8% for the Vanguard 500 Index.
Conclusions: - Pure investor decision-making based on ML is lagging the market, though firms can still use machine learning in certain cases that have already been demonstrated, Brown wrote in an opinion piece for Bloomberg.
- "Investors should forget looking for a Skynet or Hal 9000 to run their money at the moment," he concluded.
BLOOMBERG
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Chilean food tech company NotCo secured $70M in a series D extension, valuing the AI startup at $1.5B. NotCo developed a patented AI algorithm, Guiseppe, that processes data from the USDA and other sources to help generate plant-based food combinations. More: - Since its formation in 2015, the AI platform has assisted in the creation of NotCo's meat and dairy alternatives, which include Not Mayo, NotMilk, NotBurgers, and NotChicken.
- The startup, which sells its plant-based products in the U.S. and elsewhere, said it's now South America's fastest-growing food tech firm.
- It previously partnered with Kraft-Heinz to develop new plant-based food products using the AI system.
Fresh funding: - The Series D1 investment round, led by Princeville Capital, brings NotCo’s total funding to about $400M.
- NotCo plans to use the new capital to develop a new B2B platform for ingredient companies and manufacturers, which will be able to use NotCo's AI/ML to innovate their own plant-based food products.
- NotCo said it's now planning to go public sometime in 2025.
PYMNTS.COM
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Microsoft and the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) have signed a cloud computing deal worth a minimum of $2.8B. As part of the deal, the exchange will receive a new data infrastructure as well as analytics and modeling services provided by Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft AI. More: - Under the decade-long partnership, the London exchange has agreed to spend at least $2.8B on Microsoft cloud services and products. LSEG will be able to share its analytics and data with Teams and Microsoft 365.
- In a statement, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said advancements in the cloud and AI will "transform how financial institutions research, interact, and transact across asset classes, and adapt to changing market conditions."
- As part of the deal, Microsoft will buy a 4% stake in the London exchange. Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's EVP for cloud and AI, will join LSEG as a non-executive director.
- Microsoft said it will acquire the shares from the Blackstone/Thomson Reuters Consortium, which sold the data and analytics business Refinitiv to LSEG last year for $27B.
- It expects to complete the purchase early next year.
CNBC
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AI Events and Conferences: - AI for Science Workshop: Dec. 12-16, Rabat, Morocco.
- Data Innovation Summit APAC: Jan. 12, Singapore.
- World Artificial Intelligence Cannes Festival: Feb. 9-11, Cannes, France, and online.
- Data Science Salon: AI & Machine Learning in the Enterprise: Feb. 21-22, Austin, Texas, and virtual.
- ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction: March 13-16, Stockholm, Sweden.
- The European Chatbot & Conversational AI Summit: March 15-16, Edinburgh, U.K., and online.
- Ai4 2023: Aug. 7-9, Las Vegas, Nevada.
- AI Hardware Summit: Sept. 12-14, Santa Clara, California.
- Edge AI Summit: Sept.12-14, Santa Clara, California.
- AI & Big Data Expo Global 2023: Nov. 30-Dec. 1, 2023, Olympia, London.
- The AI Summit New York: Dec. 6-7, 2023. New York City.
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- OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot was down as of Monday as the company finds ways to scale its systems to deal with "exceptionally high demand."
- In a tweet thread, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham argued that automation will allow founders to grow their companies with "fewer and fewer employees," leaving only the founders themselves left.
- OpenAI is working on a tool that would watermark text generated by AI models.
- Recruiting tech ROI of 227%? Here's how Okta achieves its hiring goals using Greenhouse Recruiting and Greenhouse Onboarding.*
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 |  | Beth is a writer and editor at Inside.com covering artificial intelligence and daily technology news. You can reach her at Beth.Duckett@inside.com. |   | | Editor | Aaron Crutchfield is based in the high desert of California. Over the last two decades, he has spent time writing and editing at various local newspapers and defense contractors in California. When he's not working, he can often be found looking at the latest memes with his kids or working on his 1962 and 1972 Fords. | |
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