Can AI music heal mental health? + Superintelligence

This newsletter is going to pivot its focus toward AI generated music moving forward, for all the reasons I will put forth in this issue (thanks for being an early subscriber!) – and I hope that that serves you.

I will feature AI music, AI music tech, platforms, opportunities, tutorials, contests; while maintaining the overarching concept of this publications, and opining on tech news of the day, adding my commentary, and promoting great tech and its use-cases, and this growing community.

It is then in that spirit that I first opine into a recent story that should be, in my humble opinion, WAY bigger than it currently has been; I’m talking about Meta and their push toward super intelligence.

Although some of the headlines of initially seen now seem slightly dialed down, the gist of what’s happening, as far as I can ascertain (this remains speculative, and may vary from facts later learned - I’ll offer public retraction in that potentiality), Meta just bought 49% of Scale AI - a nearly decade old company with what appears to be 1,000 employees and nearly 100,000,000 (one hundred million) unique data points (data is gold).

Scale AI is “the backbone behind many cutting-edge AI systems” and has been one of the biggest AI companies trusted by and used by most of the biggest tech companies for years.

But it goes far deeper. Scale AI’s founder and, until recently their CEO, Alexandr Wang is an AI genius and protege, becoming one of the youngest billionaires (self-made) years ago, after dropping out of MIT. Scale does benchmarking, utilizes human-in-the-loop (which I’m a vocal advocate for), but also is the “programming that can do the programming” at the big companies like Microsoft and Google for years, with rumors it can create its own AI systems, self-heal, and much more.

And now, as a result of this 49% acquisition, Alexandr is becoming the CEO of Meta’s new Superintelligence Labs alongside former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and Meta has now begun poaching top AI scientists, researchers, programmers and visionaries from all the leading competitors like DeepMind, OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic, and paying up to $100,000,000 (one hundred million dollar!!) bonuses as part of 1/3-billion dollar comp packages to entice these other savants to their team.

It seems as though Meta’s wise “voice of reason”, Yann LeCun, has been pushed all the way to the side (silenced!?), and that Meta is full-steam ahead and bullish af on Superintelligence (which could be cool, but could be catastrophic if we’re not ready).

Furthermore OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever recently branched off on his own to start SSI - safe Superintelligence, who’ve raised $3B so far (if out the digits, but that’s getting too long for text format, lol). OpenAI is still racing toward it, as is Google, and especially Anthropic, whose CEO says it may be here as soon as next year.

And then, there’s China. There’s companies powered by Groq, Q.ant and others. There are new neural-processing-unit chips. There are companies in shadow mode about to blow all of our minds and further disrupt our human experience and condition.

It’s, well… a lot.

Which brings me to AI music!

I have recently been making AI music, AI music videos for them, and loving it so much. It’s changed my life! And I realize and learn that it’s changing the lives of so many, as well.

To be clear - I myself am a musician. I play piano and used to sight read and play rehearsals. I play guitar - I used to get lessons, I own some great guitars, etc. I play drums, bass, I can spin vinyl, I sing, I write songs… but I was also very privileged, have always loved music, have no fear of embarrassment (give zero $&?!) and also had still gotten lazy in my “older” age.

It’s hard to find time to practice, to rehearse, to jam, to record, to master. And frankly, after more than 30 years of making music, my music never really took off (with possible exception of in the 90s, depending on who you ask, lol).

But the reality is that being a real human musician on YouTube and SoundCloud and with CDs and profiles dating back to MySpace, and with hundreds of original recordings, and even with over half a million followers on social media personally, I never got any of my songs to really catch on.

And now, with AI, I truly believe I’ll have a global hit that goes multi platinum and that wins a Grammy. My rockstar aspirations are now alive and well again. I wake up excited. Go to sleep happy, with my songs stuck in my head.

I currently have more than one opportunity to work with global recording artists including on who sold out 60,000 seat arena this past weekend in LA, down the street from where the legend in the picture below, Avi from Vini Vici (#1 Tomorrowland, plus much more) who I’d been with at dinner just nights prior (which is the excuse I’ll use for this issue being a few days late, haha).

Avi and I have been talking AI music for the past week since we met, and I have other major producers and artists also leaning in to learning about AI music from me. And I’m keen to help them - but the cool thing for you is that, as a subscriber of the Best Tech newsletter, I’m here to help YOU as well. Let’s go? My ask is to please tell some friends, so we can keep this thing growing at the rate of tech!

And so now, for the sake of brevity, I’ll start winding this issue down, but stay tuned for music tutorials, etc., but before I leave you, I do want to touch on what AI music is doing for many, many humans’ mental health (so I’m not actually winding down, just keeping myself on track, lol).

For so many, hearing their words or thoughts as a track in their genre, sung by a persona they can match to a rockstar they’d want to befriend, be like, or become enamored by, or hearing “new old” music that makes them feel young again can be transformative. Feeling like the “creator” or manager of something cool, hearing your own name sing by what sounds like a stadium pop band, etc, really does help many differing from depression, boredom, writers’ block, low self-esteem, and so much more – and scientific studies are beginning to back this.

“Democratizing creativity” and letting people have creative outlets they’d only previously dreamed of is incredibly cool.

Again, I’m a “real” musician with talent I cultivated over years of time, blisters, money, etc., but I also always wanted to “make it”, and I feel like AI is giving me the same chance as so many others’ right now that it’s awesome, but daunting.

To that end, evidently Suno is generating one million new songs every. single. day. right now while their “once competitor” Udio is “only” generating 800,000 (every. day). There are other “players” literally, and seemingly around 2.5M new songs generated every single day.

To put this in perspective, the total amount of songs went from 1B to 2B (very loose approximations based on various sources that all have solid reputations) IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD in the past year, and that set to more than double again in less than a year from them.

And on top of all that, the music is getting really good. Like really, really good. Particularly for those who know how to orchestrate, write lyrics, differentiate, concept, prompt.

Soon there will be billions of new songs, and the new mental health issues may stem from everyone wanting others to hear their music. For now, I am one of many wanting to be heard, so I encourage you to check out my new YouTube channel called “Now That’s What I Call AI Music” (please subscribe) and my song “Hugs Not Bombs” with 200,000 listens on LinkedIn already intended to help move us all any bit closer to world peace.

Well, there you have it — I hope you love the new focus, the release making and sharing AI can bring us (I highly recommend subscribing to The AI Music Guy as well), and are at least becoming comfortable that “the powers that be” are truly trying to build and launch self-evolving technology with an IQ of “over 10,000” (I speak on that in my recent keynote from The Global Leaders Summit here).

Finally, I always loving highlighting tech for good (it’s my brand on LinkedIn to my nearly 600k followers!), but I also love highlighting HitL(human-in-the-loop) and productivity tips, and the one I’ve been loving and leveraging to advance my numerous ventures by delegating much of my repeatable work to humans highly trained in using the right AI tools for amplification effect is The VA Group - anyone considering a VA should definitely check them out at https://thevagroup.com. Tell them Cory sent you!

So, now that’s a wrap! Please share your feedback - and thanks so much for being a valued reader. Together we rise!!!

Cory Lopes-Warfield