It's almost Christmas in the world of AI, and what else could that mean, other than another step forward in the march toward lifelike text image, rumors of an imminent extra ten years of health span funded by Sam Altman, and new state-of-the-art models being trained behind the scenes, presumably by elves.

But let's start briefly with the new Mid Journey version 6 announced in the last few days. I've been playing about with it for far too many hours, and the main difference that I can notice with version 5.2 is that it adheres to your prompts far more sensitively. I could give you dozens of examples, but take this Roman Triumphal Arch.

I recently saw one of these in person, but the problem with Mid Journey version 5 is that it might capture the main topic of your prompt, but misses out on key relational details, like something being bigger than, next to, or on top of. Version 5 also misses out on parts of the prompt, like here the stream running through the center of the arch.

With version 6, at least one of the outputs will likely adhere to what you're asking for. Of course, the difference with even earlier versions of Mid Journey are even more stark. Look at the progress just since 2022, and that's before I even upscale the v6 output. We really are getting tantalizingly close to photorealism.

But now let me show you the upscaled version of that image using Magnific. Talk about getting pretty close to photorealism. And no, this is not sponsored, but honestly, I found it really fun to play about with Magnific, albeit it's a little bit pricey. Basically because all you have to do is drag and drop your Dali 3 or Mid Journey v6 image into the top left, and then basically scroll down.

I don't even think you have to change any of the settings to get amazing results, and then you just go to upscale, and then it's done. It takes less than a minute and it turns the AI slightly glossy images into something much more lifelike, photorealistic. But while we're on the topic of tips, here's another one that I found really useful.

Instead of adding words like photorealism or 4k, 8k to your Mid Journey prompt, try --style raw, and you'll notice that the images go from, again, a kind of glossy, clearly AI style image, and they become much more photorealistic already, before you even try Magnific. Dali 3 is still, for me, a little bit better at text, but they try to avoid photorealism.

My guess is because OpenAI want people to know if an image is AI generated, and is of course watermarking its images. Now yes, I did experiment with putting Dali 3 images through Magnific, and it kind of works. So I put Dali 3 Roman Arch over a quiet stream, and then this is after one round of upscaling.

And of course, with the magic of the new Suno AI web app, you can turn your prompt into a backing track. Then throw in a bit of runway ML to get some movement. And at this point, it doesn't take much imagination to see where the industry is going. Photorealism has almost reached text to image, and it's coming for text to video.

But there are a few more things to get to before the end of this Christmas episode of AI Explained. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, yesterday came out with this list of the things he wished someone had told him. I'm just going to pick up on three of them as they relate to new stories that have broken in the last few days.

The first one being how he mentioned concentrating his resources on a small number of high conviction bets. And it seems on this front, Sam Altman is putting his money where his mouth is. He has personally invested $180 million on healthy lifespan extension. The life extension company, Retro, is quick to point out that that's not about living forever.

It's about adding 10 good years to your life. It was a fascinating read in Bloomberg, and of course, I can't get to all the details, but the company has just one investor, that's Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, who's invested that $180 million. Now I don't know how I missed this, but back in March, MIT Technology Review reported that Sam Altman had emptied his bank account betting on energy and extended lifespan.

He said, "It's a lot. I basically just took all my liquid net worth and put it into these two companies." Retro is betting on five different tracks, thanks to Sam Altman being willing to do something different and throw lots of money at a bunch of things in parallel. Their main bet is on partial cell reprogramming, and I read several papers to understand it before making this video, but I still can't fully summarize it.

Nevertheless, here's my best attempt. In a nutshell, what it's doing is reprogramming mature cells by introducing a set of what's called transcription factor genes, basically full of special instructions, which turn those mature cells into something more youthful without changing their type or function or making them stem cells. A bit like changing the code of a program, not the function.

Now, any biologists watching this can let me know if that was a good summary, but the main purpose of including this article in this video was this paragraph. Retro, the company, and its peers really do think that this time is different. Many researchers in the field contend that the science behind cell reprogramming in particular has been solved and that therapies are now an engineering problem.

They see full-on age reversal as not only achievable, but also perhaps imminent. Sam Ullman thinks what's needed is an open AI type effort in longevity. Now, I'm old enough to have been reading longevity research for over a decade, so I have heard claims like this before. In fact, I remember reading an article about Calico Company being formed over 10 years ago.

That was funded in part by Larry Page. They've been working on increasing healthy lifespan for over a decade, and I haven't seen much literature on the success of their work. And even the Bloomberg article reports that Sam Ullman will not be able to fund this all the way, according to the Retro co-founder.

Getting to the final products will require more investors and going public at some point. But I haven't seen language like things being imminent before. And even the PubMed article that I read while researching for this video used language that was pretty interesting. In the final sentence, it said, "It remains to be seen whether cycles of epigenetic rejuvenation by age reprogramming could confer biological immortality in mammals, including humans." But as many of you may know, it's not just Sam Ullman in big tech who's focusing on longevity and also, by the way, personally taking metformin to boost his own health span.

There's also Jeff Bezos, who has pumped billions into Altos Labs. One of the leaders of that lab is also using some dramatic language. He said last year that within two decades, we will be able to prevent diseases and ageing. Now, of course, the point of this Christmas video is not to go deep into the science and test out all of these theories.

It's more to describe the shift in language that I've been seeing in recent months and years. As I say, I've been following the literature for more than a decade, and it's the first time I've heard things like imminence being seriously spoken of. And even setting aside the possibility that something like AGI could speed up this research, the 2030s are more and more being spoken of as the decade that could be revolutionary for healthspan.

That's healthy lifespan as opposed to just living longer in your hundreds, decrepit. Of course, not everyone shares the excitement of living indefinitely. Here's one OpenAI employee who might have an interesting chat with Sam Ullman. He said, "In the pursuit of immortality, we are losing the benefits of Darwinism. Things dying and new things being born brings health to the ecosystem.

I feel that for the misguided quest of stability, we often keep things alive longer than they should be." And it does seem like there is a big split in big tech about whether the goal of living for longer is one that we should pursue in the first place. I personally wonder what Santa Claus has to say, who is himself presumably immortal.

Anyway, back to Sam Ullman who said, "Fight BS and bureaucracy every time you see it and get other people to fight it too. Kind of ironic in the light of what happened with the OpenAI board, but nevertheless, do not let the org chart get in the way of people working productively together." And there is one more point on this list which nicely dovetails with the next news item that I wanted to mention.

Toward the end, Sam Ullman wrote this, "Compounding exponentials are magic. In particular, you really want to build a business that gets a compounding advantage with scale." And that was straight after saying that scale often has surprising emergent properties. The question of course though, is whether it's OpenAI who will get that compounding advantage of scale, or maybe is it going to be that old titan, Google?

Just this week, we learned from the information that according to one person familiar with the matter, Google is already training its next big model, Gemini 2. So they're training Gemini 2 before they've even released Gemini 1 Ultra. But how does Gemini 2 relate to compounding scale? Well, according to a report from Semianalysis, the compute power available to Google is set to far outstrip OpenAI in the near future.

As they put it, "Even when giving OpenAI every benefit of the doubt, Google's compute capabilities make everyone else look silly." Google will quite literally have more TPUV5s, that's Tensor Processing Units that they're using to train Gemini 2, than OpenAI, Meta, CoreWeave, Oracle and Amazon will have GPUs combined. They go on, "Of course, on performance per chip, there is a significant deficit for TPUV5 versus H100.

But even when shaking that out, OpenAI's compute is a fraction of Google's, and that the incredible TPUV5 build-out is going to drive significantly more training and inference capacity than anyone else on the planet." So it seems certain that whether we're talking about Gemini 2, GPT-5, Healthspan or Photorealism, 2024 looks set to be interesting.

One thing we can all agree on though, is that working with great people is one of the best parts of life. And for me, that's all of you who watch these videos, even if you don't like or comment. I really do appreciate every view, every comment in this Christmas season and all year.

A special thanks of course to all of the AI Insiders and Legendary Supporters who keep the channel going on Patreon. A massive and enduring thanks to all of you. So from me, thanks for watching all the way to the end. Have a very Merry Christmas and a wonderful day.