Science Business Today
Meta unveils 'make-a-video' – what could possibly go wrong?:
Forget fake news, now we can look forward to fake news with fake video proof!
The siloed information giant, Meta, has launched its Make-A-Video – a state-of-the-art AI system that generates videos from text.
It's not open to the general public just yet, but you can sign up online if your interested.
“Make-A-Video research builds on the recent progress made in text-to-image generation technology built to enable text-to-video generation. The system uses images with descriptions to learn what the world looks like and how it is often described. It also uses unlabeled videos to learn how the world moves. With this data, Make-A-Video lets you bring your imagination to life by generating whimsical, one-of-a-kind videos with just a few words or lines of text.”
The platform can turn text prompts into brief, high-quality video clips, notes the company, using what it called “recent progress in generative technology research.”
As Meta warns, “We want to be thoughtful about how we build new generative AI systems like this. Make-A-Video uses publicly available datasets, which adds an extra level of transparency to the research. We are openly sharing this generative AI research and results with the community for their feedback, and will continue to use our responsible AI framework to refine and evolve our approach to this emerging technology.”
It's in the same space as existing image synthesis tools like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, notes Ars Technica.
The Meta tech “can also make variations of existing videos, though it's not yet available for public use,” says the news site.
"Using function-preserving transformations, we extend the spatial layers at the model initialization stage to include temporal information," Meta wrote in a white paper. "The extended spatial-temporal network includes new attention modules that learn temporal world dynamics from a collection of videos."
Meta has not made an announcement about how or when Make-A-Video might become available to the public or who would have access to it.
Rocket propulsion global market taking off:
So says the latest report on the sector from Reportlinker.com.
It estimates that the market is expected to grow from $4.82 billion in 2021 to $5.29 billion in 2022 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.8%. The rocket propulsion market is expected to grow to $7.67 billion in 2026 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.7%.
Major players in the rocket propulsion market are Aerojet Rocketdyne, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Space Exploration Technologies Corp, Safran S. A. , Blue Origin, JSC Kuznetsov, Yuzhmash, Rocket Lab, NPO Energomash, Orbital ATK, Lockheed Martin, Thales Group, Kongsberg Gruppen ASA, The Raytheon Company, and Roketsan A.
“Asia Pacific was the largest region in the rocket propulsion market in 2021, and it is also expected to be the fastest-growing region in the forecast period,” say the researchers.
“Industries are investing huge capital in space exploration, and product innovation for technology advancements, and government agencies also taking initiatives and allowing them to spend more on research and development and produce more efficient and creative technology,” it advises.
Brookfield to invest up to $2 billion in Scout Clean Energy and Standard Solar:
Brookfield Renewable has agreed to acquire Scout Clean Energy (“Scout”) for $1 billion with the potential to invest an additional $350 million to support the business’ development activities, says a company release.
The investment group has now plowed $3.5 billion in the America clean energy sector this year, and owns and operates nearly 65,000 MW of renewables in the U.S.diversified portfolio of renewables in the U.S.,
Scout’s portfolio includes over 1,200 MW of operating wind assets, including 400 MW managed on behalf of third parties, and a pipeline of over 22,000 MW of wind, solar and storage projects across 24 states, including almost 2,500 MW of under construction and advanced-stage projects.
Brookfield Renewable also has finalized the closing of its $540 million acquisition of Standard Solar.
“We are thrilled to be putting more dollars to work in our U.S. renewables business,” says Connor Teskey, CEO of Brookfield Renewable, adding, “we underwrote both transactions without the benefit of the Inflation Reduction Act so the additional incentives now available represent a significant boost to each business.”
The Scout and Standard Solar acquisitions follow a string of recent clean energy investments by Brookfield in 2022, including:
Urban Grid: $650 million acquisition of a leading solar and battery storage developer with a high quality development pipeline of 20,000 MW of utility-scale solar and energy storage projects across key markets in the U.S. including the mid-Atlantic, Midwest and Southeast.
Carbon Capture and Sequestration: Exclusive right to invest up to $750 million on a project by project basis into Entropy Inc. and a joint venture with California Resource Corporation, two leading carbon capture and sequestration platforms in Alberta and California, respectively.