The Generative Edge Week 24
Generative QR codes are beautiful, MusicGen lets you generate music right now and Falcon is the newest and best open language model you can run yourself.
Welcome to week 24 of The Generative Edge. We took an unplanned sick leave last week, but now we're back in full swing! Here is the gist in 4 bullet points:
Generative QR codes offer novel design opportunities while retaining functionality, with the process currently being technical but expected to simplify soon.
Meta's MusicGen is an open-source AI music generator that outperforms other models in generating high-quality music samples.
TII's Falcon-40B is the best open language model available, allowing full commercial use and offering various flavors for different applications.
Other AI news includes NVIDIA's new AI hardware (again), OpenAI's ChatGPT plugins now generally available, and a fun 2D platform game utilizing generative AI.
For the details, let’s hop right in!
Generative QR codes
You might have seen these in your social media feeds. Generative QR codes have been popping up left and right. It started with a post on the Stable Diffusion subreddit, where someone showed off a ControlNet model trained to generate QR codes. That person has since taken everything down (presumably to use it commercially), but the community has stepped up and figured out alternative workflows. These QR codes are striking, and beautiful, while still retaining their core functionality: you can scan them and be redirected to a URL:
More examples:
Generative QR codes open up a novel design opportunities to make these QR codes look interesting, engaging and to have them mesh with whatever design you’re looking for
Right now the process is still somewhat technical and complicated, involving different ControlNets and Stable Diffusion parameters; expect an easy one-click solution to pop up soon
If you want to give it a try, you can follow this tutorial: https://stable-diffusion-art.com/qr-code/
MusicGen
Meta’s AI team has been on a roll. While other large players are starting to close up their public research (e.g. Google, OpenAI), Meta has done the opposite and has published many models as open source. The newest is MusicGen, an AI music generation model. We’ve talked about MusicLM by Google a few weeks ago, which is still behind waitlist... MusicGen, on the other hand, you can use yourself, today, right now.
MusicGen can create custom music based on text or melody inputs, using a single language model.
It simplifies the process by using a single-stage transformer and efficient token patterns, rather than multiple models.
MusicGen outperforms other methods in generating high-quality music samples.
You can try it here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/facebook/MusicGen
Some examples:
Input (German National Anthem):
Prompt:
Synthwave house, melodic, with a dropOutput:
Input (Boléro by Ravel):
Prompt:
A cheerful country song with acoustic guitarsOutput:
Prompt (no input audio):
90s rock song with electric guitar and heavy drumsOutput:
Falcon - the best open language model
Open language models have been proliferating, from Meta’s LLama to Dolly, RedPajama, MPT and a slew of other models. All have their strengths and weaknesses, most can’t be used commercially due to licensing issues.
The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), located in Abu Dhabi, has created Falcon-40B, a fully open source large language model that is currently the best available open model out there. And the gravy on top? Full commercial use is granted, which means this model can be incorporated into internal workflows and operated internally!
Falcon-40B is objectively the best open language model out there, and it’s at the top of Hugginface’s Open Language Model leaderboard
It comes in various flavours, instruct-finetuned (think ChatGPT), quantized (so it can run on lesser hardware) and a small 7B model that you can run locally
It has been trained on various languages, and in our internal tests it’s performed surprisingly well on a variety of tasks.
It is highly likely that we’re going to use Falcon in our projects.
You can try it here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceH4/falcon-chat
… and what else?
NVIDIA publishes new AI hardware (again):, OpenAI opens up plugins to all ChatGPT+ subscribers, a 2D platform game that makes novel use of generative AI
And that’s it for this week!
Find all of our updates on our Substack at thegenerativeedge.substack.com, get in touch via our office hours if you want to talk professionally about Generative AI and visit our website at contiamo.com.
Have a wonderful week everyone!
Daniel
Generative AI engineer at Contiamo
