Alibaba's new AI turns images into singers

🤖 Meet EMO (short for "Emote Portrait Alive").

Alibaba is showing off its newest AI tool that transforms still portraits into moving, lifelike actors and singers.

Imagine a single picture coming alive, the face emoting and singing along to your favorite song. EMO accomplishes by taking a single portrait image and combining it with audio input like speech or singing.

This results in an animated avatar video complete with realistic facial expressions and head movements.

While AI video generation isn't new, successfully combining audio and achieving natural lip sync has been a major challenge. Traditional methods had a hard time capturing the full range of human expressions and little facial details.

🖼️ 250 hours and 150 million images to train

EMO was trained with a dataset of over 250 hours of footage and 150 million images encompassing various languages, speeches, movies, and singing performances.

It allows EMO to not only generate smooth facial movements and head poses but also adapt to different artistic styles, including photographs, paintings, and even anime characters.

One example showcased by the team involves taking an AI generated image of a man in a tracksuit rapping “Rap God” by Eminem. Because of this, EMO has potential for creating engaging content across different fields like education, entertainment, marketing and e-commerce.

A drone company goes bankrupt

🕊️Fly high, SkyDrop

SkyDrop, one of the original pioneers in the drone delivery industry, has sadly flown its final course. The filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, leaving behind a legacy of "what ifs" and valuable lessons learned.

In 2015, it made history with the first-ever FAA-approved drone delivery in the US, delivering essential medical supplies to a remote clinic in Virginia. The feat was even commemorated at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

🎏 Too many drones up there

However, SkyDrop's journey wasn't smooth sailing. Unlike well-funded competitors like Wing (backed by Google), Amazon and Walmart, SkyDrop had to constantly hustle to stay afloat.

While Wing expanded its services to SkyDrop's home turf of Australia, SkyDrop ventured to New Zealand, partnering with Domino's Pizza for drone deliveries. This venture, though a what seemed like a good idea at the time, couldn't secure the company's financial future.

💸 Bankruptcy

Despite this promising future, SkyDrop struggled to secure funding and partnerships needed to compete.

SkyDrop's attempt to open-source its technology ultimately proved unsuccessful. In the end, the company ran out of funds and was forced to shut down its team.

$100 million to deliver faster in India

Shadowfax, a big name in India for super fast and on-demand deliveries, just received $100 million in funding.

Led by TPG NewQuest, the funding round will help them change the delivery game in India: a country where getting things from point A to B can be tricky.

The problem? Deliveries in India are often slow and unreliable, especially in cities. Shadowfax is stepping up to fix this by making things smoother at the very last part of the delivery journey, called the "last mile."

They already handle over 2 million deliveries every day, working with big companies like Flipkart, Meesho, and many smaller brands that sell directly to customers. With this new funding, Shadowfax plans to:

• Make the middle mile and last mile move faster: This means getting things from big warehouses to smaller distribution centers quicker, so deliveries zip along.

• Reach more places: Shadowfax wants to deliver to all 20,000 pin codes (like zip codes) in India, so no matter where you are, you can get your stuff.

• Help direct-to-consumer brands: Some of the money will go towards making super fast delivery options even better for D2C brands (those that sell directly to customers).