JD Vance says he used Grok to help make a customized children's book
Vance said that he used Grok, the AI chatbot created by Elon Musk's xAI, to generate images for a customized version of the "Who Would Win?" children's book that he wrote with his kids.
"We actually made a 'big cats' version where we wrote it ourselves, but I used Grok to make the actual images," Vance said on a podcast hosted by Katie Miller, a former aide to Musk.
"Who Would Win?" is a series of short illustrated children's books depicting fights between different predatory animals, such as bears, dinosaurs, and snakes.
"Some of them are completely deranged," Vance added, referring to the images he generated. "It's like, a jaguar with its fang through the skull of a tiger. And it's like, 'This is really gruesome shit.' But here we are. The kids loved it."
Vance has three young kids with his wife Usha: Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabel.
The vice president isn't the only prominent figure who's used AI to generate illustrations for children. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last year that he and his young daughter, August, used Meta AI to create illustrations for a book she wrote called "The Mermaid Crystal."
Some politicians have been using ChatGPT and Grok for speechwriting and research. Others have avoided it, telling BI that they're worried about falling for AI hallucinations or losing their own cognitive skills.
Vance, asked by Miller what he'd most recently searched with AI, indicated that he didn't use it much.
"I'm actually not a big AI guy," Vance said.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time Magazine
2 minutes ago
- Time Magazine
Elon Musk and Sam Altman's AI Feud Gets Nasty
A long-running feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman spilled out into the open this week as the AI billionaire heavyweights publicly fought over their rival companies. The latest round in the battle between the X CEO and the CEO of OpenAI began when Musk claimed that Apple had been favoring Altman's AI app over his own in the Apple Store rankings. 'Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation,' Musk said on X on Monday evening. 'xAI will take immediate legal action,' he added, referring to the AI company he leads. Earlier in the day, Musk called out Apple for not putting his X app or its generative AI chatbot system, Grok, on its recommended lists: 'Hey @Apple App Store, why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your 'Must Have' section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps?' he asked. 'Are you playing politics?' Apple said in an earlier statement that the 'App Store is designed to be fair and free of bias.' Read More: 'We Are the Last of the Forgotten:' Inside the Memphis Community Battling Elon Musk's xAI Altman, who founded OpenAI with Musk in 2015 before Musk left the company, responded on X: 'This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn't like.' Altman included a link to a Platformer News article, which claimed that Musk had manipulated the X algorithm so that his tweets would be displayed more prominently to users and favor his interests. The two got into it in the replies, with Musk accusing Altman of lying— 'You got 3M views on your bullshit post, you liar, far more than I've received on many of mine, despite me having 50 times your follower count!' To which Altman responded: 'skill issue.' Altman then said he would apologize if Musk signed 'an affidavit that [he has] never directed changes to the X algorithm' in ways that hurt his 'competitors.' Before falling out, Musk and Altman were once business partners. Musk has sued Altman and OpenAI twice since he departed from the company in 2018, for allegedly violating OpenAI's founding mission to build AI in a way that benefits 'all of humanity.' Since then, the two have been increasingly at odds. After leaving OpenAI, Musk created his own AI company—xAI—which built Grok as a rival to OpenAI's ChatGPT language model.
CNET
an hour ago
- CNET
Gemini Is Going to Start Learning More About You. Here's How to Turn That Off
The more you chat with Google's Gemini, the better it will get to know you, thanks to a new learning feature in the generative AI chatbot, Google announced Wednesday. Gemini has already been able to recall past conversations if you ask it to, but new functionality will allow it to learn your preferences and interact with you in more personalized ways, Google said. And if you don't want an AI to learn about you, you can turn it off. AI chatbots have seen their memories grow longer this year. Other tools, like OpenAI's ChatGPT and xAI's Grok, also offer forms of memory, allowing you to refer to older conversations or save certain information for future reference. Things like your name, or what city you live in (so it doesn't give you restaurant recommendations in Denver when you live in Miami). But these memory features come with their own problems -- personalization can change the behavior and output as a large language model tries to do what it thinks you want rather than what you ask it to do. You also may not want it to save (and regurgitate) private or sensitive information. What's new in Gemini's memory features The Gemini app will default to saving information about you and learning from it. When that feature is turned on, it'll remember things you share and incorporate them into how it answers future prompts. Unlike the previous memory feature, you won't have to specifically ask it to do this; it'll do it on its own. That feature will begin rolling out Wednesday, starting with the 2.5 Pro model in select countries and expanding to 2.5 Flash in the coming weeks. Read more: AI Essentials: 29 Ways You Can Make Gen AI Work for You, According to Our Experts You can turn off the feature by going to Settings in the Gemini app and toggling off the features under "Personal context." You can also delete certain chats from its memory. If you plan to have a conversation you don't want to be saved, but you'd prefer not to turn the feature completely off, you can create a Temporary Chat. Think of it like browsing in an incognito window -- it won't be saved in the long-term memory and you won't have to hear Gemini talk about it again. You'll also be able to control whether a sample of uploads to Gemini can be used by Google to improve services. The setting currently labeled "Gemini Apps Activity" will be renamed "Keep Activity," and you can turn the setting off or use Temporary Chats to ensure your conversations won't be shared with Google.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Meta Looks Strong Now, But Long-Term Growth May Hit a Ceiling
Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ:META) is undeniably a very prominent company today. It has already built enormous moats and, quarter by quarter, manages to prove that there is still a lot of shareholder value to be generated, both through increased revenue with maturing initiatives and increased efficiency. As a result, the prospects for the company are very positive and even reliable, which, with a reasonable valuation, initially makes Meta seem like a good alternative for compounding. However, even in this positive scenario, it is necessary to explore the relevant risks of the thesis, which, in my view, are mainly related to growth expectations that have a natural limit. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 6 Warning Sign with META. When we look at Meta's revenue, almost 99% is related to the family of apps, and this revenue is almost entirely composed of advertising. This is one of the risks that will be addressed in the next section, but it is also a positive thing, as the company is an expert in ads. The breakdown of advertising revenue is the same as the formation of various other types of revenue, basically, the volume of ads and the price of ads. Although the volume of ads is also one of the points of uncertainty in the thesis in the very long term, it is possible to be bullish in the short term. For a few quarters now, the ad impressions KPI has been growing in the mid single digits, due to an increase in users, but also to the greater number of ads on Meta's platforms. The main argument supporting the idea that this indicator will continue to advance in the coming quarters is that there is still a lot of monetizable space in the company. Meta Presentation Meta knows how to reinvent itself, and it is still possible that it will create new ways to monetize the company, including in apps that are not monetized or are under-monetized, such as Threads and WhatsApp. But that's not the only thing that should keep revenue momentum going. The main thing, actually, is the price of ads. With AI, the company is becoming increasingly efficient in advertising, which is good for all stakeholders. It is good for advertisers because ads are more efficient, it is good for users because they are receiving more relevant ads, and it is good for Meta because it is able to charge more money for the same space. As mentioned in the Q1 earnings call, the company continued to advance in AI-driven advertising, and the new models are bringing better conversion rates. The result was a 10% YoY price increase. Well, we have already established that revenue has very strong prospects for the coming quarters, and that's not even counting some optionalities such as the advancement of forms of monetization for WhatsApp that are not through ads, smart glasses such as those made in partnership with Ray-Ban, and other opportunities. Yet, margin expansion remains a trigger for shareholder value. In this regard, Meta continues to show that it is capable of moving forward. Even though it is already very consolidated and has billions in revenue, it still shows that there is operational efficiency to be captured. In Q1 2024, SG&A represented 9% of revenue, and in the most recent quarter, this fell to 5%, with the company continuing to capture scale, advancing in automation and the like. Although R&D remains at high levels to support all initiatives, the trend toward increasing automation is strong and very reliable. Meta Presentation In other words, net income should continue to grow at a rapid pace in the coming quarters and quite possibly in the coming years, and this pace (which should be close to double digits) would justify a slightly higher valuation even without positive surprises. The problem is that there are significant uncertainties in the long term, and the valuation has recently begun to reward the good performance of the last few quarters. Meta is a company with very broad ownership, with several passive and active funds and ETFs with significant exposure. This is reflected by its high institutional ownership of 68%, and being a core holding in several funds and indexes. One of the consequences of the stock having recently become a consensus is its high valuation, since much of its estimated growth is already priced in because everyone is so convinced that it will happen. In addition, Mark Zuckerberg has already sold a few hundred million Meta shares, and already has plans to sell another $166 million in Meta shares, which may also suggest a more cautious tone. And in fact, when compared to other mag-7s, this premium valuation is not actually that high. When compared to Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL), which is another company very focused on advertising, the price-to-earnings ratio is indeed higher. But compared to Microsoft (MSFT), Nvidia (NVDA), or Amazon (AMZN), there is still a significant discount. GuruFocus But the problem is that companies like Microsoft and Amazon have a more diversified business model and a more reliable long-term outlook. Over the past five years, Meta's mean price-to-earnings ratio was 25x and is now 27x, and even though this is not a substantial premium, the company has already shown significant growth. In my view, Meta's revenue growth has a long-term limit. The number of users has a natural limit, and the company has already reached 3.4 billion Daily Active People on its apps. Adding a more detailed context, this growth in more mature markets like North America is already close to a ceiling. Even in emerging markets, penetration is no longer low; in Brazil, for example, Instagram had 134 million users in 2024, or around 62% of the population. So there's a dependency on these markets becoming even more mature, and it also creates an execution risk. The main obstacle to high and sustainable growth in the long term is advertising impressions. The first reason for this is that there is a very high competition for attention today. Even if people don't stop using Instagram or Facebook, TikTok and YouTube can erode the time spent on these other Meta apps, and new apps will continue to emerge, as well as new ways to spend time, such as games, movies, streaming, live streams, and the like. This creates uncertainty as to whether these impressions can continue to increase in a sustainable manner. Another very relevant point is the monetizable space. Today, there are spaces that are under-monetized, but most are already quite mature. Instagram reels, for example, already have tons of ads. In my view, there is limited space to increase ads in this regard. This risk of saturation becomes even more evident when we look at high ARPU. In North America, Meta's ARPU is a highlight, above peers like Snapchat and Reddit, which is reasonable given the company's good execution and scale, but this ends up putting a real question mark of how much higher it can go, mainly in its most profitable regions without affecting the user experience and engagement of its platforms too much. 1 ad for every 10 reels may be reasonable, but if 5 out of every 10 are ads, this can be detrimental and end up reducing the time users spend on Instagram. In other words, this maturity means that Meta has to be increasingly creative to find new ways to capture engagement and monetize new spaces, while running the risk of saturating if it continues to increase the number of ads in already mature spaces. The pressure on free cash flow due to CapEx is also relevant. Even if this proves to be a strategic investment over time, the truth is that today it is a pressure and that there is a significant level of uncertainty. Investments in the Metaverse, Reality Labs (which still shows a loss), and the like may never materialize and never have a high ROIC, i.e., they are only optionalities but have a cost of capital. My intention here is not to say that Meta's growth is over. In fact, I believe that the company will be able to continue increasing its revenue and margin for a while, but that this growth will slow down at some point, and this needs to be priced into the stock, as well as its uncertainties. Meta is a good company with excellent prospects for the near/medium term, at least. For an investor who wants exposure to a company that has a lot of value to be unlocked through AI, new technology development, efficiency gains, and heavy exposure to advertising, Meta should be on the radar. With its moats, it should be able to achieve good compounding in its financials over the years. The problem is that the current valuation does not exactly match the uncertainties that exist in the long term, and this should be considered when investing. Because of this, I do not believe that Meta is currently the best alternative in the tech environment. This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
