Hello from the queue. (Full of anticipation for Midjourney / Luma generations.) I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix leading concept through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups.
Since last week: Liveblocks 2.0 is out, and so is the news—it’s my latest investment at Matrix! We also shared Matrix’s new look: https://matrix.vc…welcome to the deep blue sea.
And now, five fragments that stuck with me.
It’s important to know that the style the baseline sref code generates can be molded - most of the time. For example, a baseline style that looks like an illustration can be prompted to generate a photograph. Some srefs are more malleable and some are more stubborn to changes.
– Alie Jules, AIIQ Midjourney Style Reference Index “About” page, accessed June 17, 2024. Thrilled that one of my dreams from 2022 is coming true—“aesthetic consistency across every prompt is going to be valuable—a ‘house illustration style’ that can be tuned. Ideally at the level of hex codes, even.”
In the book, you get to Will Wright, Sim City, and Maxis about halfway through. First comes everything that led to them—radical city-modeling for school kids, system dynamics, cellular automata, graphical interfaces, Santa Fe Institute, early computer games, and the people that made them, and why, and how.
– Stewart Brand on Twitter/X, June 12, 2024, in a “brief book report” for Building Sim City: How to Put the World in a Machine. Of course I downloaded the book right away.
What’s perhaps most interesting about Luma is its inherent ability to tell a story and introduce relevant plot twists to the context. In this case, I uploaded an image and went from image-to-video. I never use any text in the prompt box when working with images, it just determined all of this on its own. Kind of unique how the model interprets your story based on visual queues, kind of love how it feels like exploring the story rather than ‘telling’ the story. We are explorers of latent space, love seeing it visualized + actualized.
– Kiri on Twitter/X, June 14, 2024. Luma (a Matrix portco) launched Dream Machine last week and it’s hypnotizing.
In distinction to the Abstract Expressionists with whom she identified, who agonized over the decision to say work could be called finished and whose works were often visibly painted and repainted, [Agnes] Martin’s methods were like scripted performances (athletics might also serve as a comparison): each undertaking involved the execution of a predestined program from which there was no turning back, and no salvaging unsatisfactory efforts. Each canvas was a new test.
– Nancy Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art, June 2015. Visited SFMOMA last week and was struck again by Martin’s work—orderly and still lively.
Typically, the biological Acevedo’s absence is explained as a first-ever one-off, due to overwork, in turn due to the great success of the research. This explanation appeals to the emulated Acevedo's scientific sensibilities.
– qntm, “Lena,” 2021. A speculative short story written in the style of a Wikipedia entry about “the earliest executable image of a human brain,” shared by Celine Nguyen in her roundup of short stories she loves. Glimmers of The Age of Em and Permutation City.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com
p.s. If you’ll be around for Config next week, I hope you’ll let me know!
p.p.s. The generation is complete.