489: Music's ChatGPT Moment, Suno AI, Discord, Perplexity, Coffee Empire, xAI vs Tesla, Congress Bans MS Copilot, and Beauty

"a thrash metal song about owls"

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.

–Confucius

Made with DALL-E 3 💚 🥃

🛀💭🌅 Where does our ability to perceive beauty come from? Why do we even find some things, people, or experiences beautiful?

I would guess that it starts with the evolutionary cognitive machinery to help us find a mate and reproduce, but what about all the other stuff that isn’t directly related to that?

Did that somehow transfer over to other things? From someone’s pretty face to art to sunsets?

Some of the perception of beauty related to landscapes no doubt also has to do with survival — we tend to find places where resources are abundant beautiful. F.ex. short grass where animals graze, fresh running water, flowers, large bodies of water, healthy trees where we can find fruits, nuts, and seeds, etc.

Some of that probably transferred to all kinds of other things. Some of the same neural circuitry that fires in the Savannah also does when watching a Denis Villeneuve landscape shot, or reading an evocative paragraph by John Fowles.

Art is a way to show our fitness to potential mates — playing instruments, making sculptures, and painting requires a lot of coordination and skill and the free time that resource abundance brings. Similarly to a peacock growing an elaborate multi-colored feather tail, we learn to dance and do other elaborate and complex things to stand out — over thousands of generations, that impulse got encoded in our genes.

Standing out matters. It can even spark a social chain reaction. We’re very mimetic creatures, so once you become widely admired or develop a positive reputation, others will admire you largely because you are admired. This explains celebrities who are famous for being famous.

🥸😅🙃 If you don't feel like an impostor at least once in a while, you're probably not stretching What you're doing may not be big enough.

It’s ok to keep a foot in your comfort zone. Not everyone has to live on the ragged edge. I certainly don’t.

But once in a while, you gotta take your life out for a spin, see what that baby can do out on the open road! 🛣️

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

🤖🎶🎸 Suno AI: The ChatGPT Moment for Music? 🎻🎹🥁

This is 🤯

I’ve heard a bunch of generative AI models capable of producing music — some only instrumental and some with vocals. They’re impressive, but still very much at the StableDiffusion 1.0 phase of development.

Like with early image generation where it was impressive that they could do it at all, but if you looked closely, things fell apart (weird hands and faces, and everything looked a bit like it was melting), most music generation so far was a party trick.

Suno version 3 is still in the uncanny valley, but much closer to emerging on the other side than anything else I’ve heard. And not only is the music generation impressive, but they’ve designed a great *product* around it — they make it easy to share songs, remix them, see lyrics, and they even generate artwork for each song based on the lyrics and style.

Within about 5 minutes of trying it for the first time, I had generated a thrash metal song about owls, a gangsta rap song about one of my friends, a medieval folk song about one of our D&D characters, and a friend sent me an opera about me.

You can listen to many of the current trending songs on the “explore” section of this page. If you heard this without knowing, could you tell it’s entirely made by AI?

I even made a song about this steamboat. It’s cringe, but hey, it’s my first try and I blame the AI 😬 🚢

Suno is good enough to be going viral in group chats and social media. I expect it’ll generate a new wave of “😲 WTF?!” reactions about AI from many normies who haven’t been following progress closely.

I also expect a backlash from the music industry and many musicians. There’s an almost perfect parallel to what happened with many visual artists who saw genAI tools as threatening and devaluing their work.

I wonder when the first AI song will top the charts?

When the first big-budget film with an all-AI soundtrack will come out?

Will my kids listen to custom playlists that aren’t just made by an algo at the playlist level, but where every individual song will be generated for them?

Music was never just about what you hear — there’s the artist, their personality, the stories, the visuals, etc. But I can imagine the whole package being AI-generated at some point.

Tupac hologram At Coachella

A social media presence with photos and videos ✅, interacting with fans in real-time via chat and even video ✅. Maybe even touring thanks to that holographic technology that has been used to revive Tupac, ABBA, and Whitney Houston 🤔 ✅

Even touring isn’t safe from AI! 😯

🌍 🛒 Amazon’s Surprising International Sales (ex-AWS)