With the surging demand for generative AI, this week saw preparatory developments for the next wave of AI. Companies are fast-tracking the development of AI products, and generative AI tools are closer to becoming consumer products than ever before. They are already becoming powerful assistants for writers and programmers and rapidly taking on more challenges. The open-source community is also making significant progress in running local LLMs. For instance, Facebook's LLama model has continued to be a focal point for building in the academic and open source community following the leaked weights on 4Chan.

UK/California-based tech startup Stability AI has launched Stable Diffusion Reimagine, an image-to-image AI that generates brand new pictures inspired by one uploaded by a user -- and it's going to be open sourced. The background: 2022 saw the release of a number of impressive text-to-image AIs -- programs that can create images based on text prompts -- with one of the most popular examples being Stability AI's Stable Diffusion. A major reason for this popularity was that, unlike DALL-E 2 and most other text-to-image AIs, Stable Diffusion was open source -- users could access the code and make unique models, such as ones that only generated Pokémon or artwork in their personal style. Stability AI has now announced the release of a new tool called Stable Diffusion Reimagine; instead of generating new images based on text prompts, it creates ones inspired by uploaded images. Stable Diffusion already had a feature called "img2img" that allowed users to upload images along with a text prompt to guide the AI.