Public Art in the Age of AI
đź“° News Roundup
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OpenAI Shuts Down… for a week: OpenAI is shutting down, essentially for a “mental health week” for their engineers. This comes off the back of Meta poaching many of Open AI’s talent, which is now public, and the grief shared by engineers losing them. OpenAI engineers are reportedly currently working 80 hours a week and management are worried about losing more, with chief researcher Mark Chen stating “it feels like someone broke into our home and stole something”.
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Faceoff Denmark: Denmark is working on a bill that would give all citizens ownership of their own image, facial features, and voice, giving power to individuals to remove deepfakes and other digital manipulations that were shared without their consent. The Danish Culture Minister Jakob Engel-Schmidt states: “Human beings can be run through the digital copy machine and be misused for all sorts of purposes and I’m not willing to accept that.”
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META AI is trying to access your camera roll: As reported by TechCrunch and The Verge, Instagram users have started seeing warnings stating the app will “select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on a regular basis” and that accepting will allow “AI to analyze media and facial features”.
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Billion Dollar Burn Rate: If you’re ever worried about your burn rate, just know that Musk’s is now $1 Billion a month for xAI. In a report from Bloomberg the company is now looking at a $13 Billion loss for 2025 as it doubles down on building advanced AI models and infrastructure. Investors have been told that revenue is projected to be $500 million, rising to $2 Billion next year.
🚨Just Dropped: Our NY Summit Conversation on Embodied AI, Public Art + Robotics, and Human Creativity
We’re thrilled to share that one of the most unique talks from our oversubscribed New York summit back in April has now dropped on our Youtube.
Join Grace Kasten (Pace Capital) in conversation with Sebastian Marino (Monumental Labs), Chloe Ryan (Acrylic Robotics) and Eric Wollberg (Prophetic AI) as they explore the edges of what’s possible with embodied intelligence as it relates to enhancing human art, craft, and inspiration—from neural interfaces that inspire humans through lucid dreaming, to democratizing art and opulence to the public using robotics. These visionary founders dive into how hardware and AI co-evolve, the aesthetics of augmentation, scarcity, craft and public art in the Age of AI and what it means to co-create (and lucid dream) with embodied systems – don’t miss it!
Get excited to dive deeper into this topic at our upcoming LA Summit this November.
🛠️ Tool Of The Week: Cursor
With Vibe Coding still heavily impacting the coding world, this week’s tool is Cursor, an AI code editor. Integrating with Sublime, Slack, and so much more, imagine Cursor as predictive email, but for code. Predicting and writing out the code as you begin to write it, as well as cleaning up code, doing rewrites and more. For any developer or CTO this is a must-have tool, with Cursor’s clean UI making it a joy to use.
You can download Cursor HERE and learn more about its features HERE.
đź‘ľ Spotlight: Runway is now targeting the gaming industry.
Runway has announced that users will be able to make games from prompts within the next year, launching a beta of a new platform. The beta right now only supports text and image generation, but is slated to begin allowing creating games from prompts within the next year. Runway is already holding talks with gaming companies to access their datasets for training the new tool. Once more, Runway has a plethora of creator economy talent ready to deploy the new tool once it’s ready, including Runway creative partner, artist, and friend of AATM CEEJ VEGA who is already prototyping a game off the IP built up by the AI series.
Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela states: “If we can help a studio make a movie 40 percent faster, then we’re probably gonna be able to help developers of games make games faster,” he says. “They’re waking up, and they’re moving faster than I would say the studios were moving two years ago.”
👨‍💻 Spotlight: AI Engineers Are Being Traded Like Sports Athletes (and the internet is ready with the memes).
After we reported that AI researchers are being offered $100 Million deals last week, it’s not just the money that matches professional sports athletes. Now PR and social media are following suit, treating AI engineers as sports trades. It all kicked off with a post from Alexandr Wang (the chief AI officer at Meta) leaking who Meta had recently poached from OpenAI, which X users soon turned into a trading sheet. From there users began making AI mockups of trading cards featuring engineers like Jiahui Yu.
The talent race at top AI companies has exploded so much that these engineers are being treated like actual rock stars. Jiahui Yu is rumored to have been given a $5 Million sign-on bonus at Meta. Meanwhile, continuing the professional athlete theme, OpenAI has just announced it’s giving all its engineers a week off, like a mid-season break.
What’s more evident than ever is that the sudden humanisation of the engineers behind the code has shown the emotion, hard work, passion, and sometimes grief that is going on behind the scenes.
An engineer at OpenAI Cheng Lu posted: “Not too many people outside the company know how talented and hardcore they are. Such a huge loss to OpenAI and I feel really disappointed that the leadership didn’t keep them.”
The 2025 AI season continues…
Til next time,
Dani Van de Sande (Founder), James Joseph (The Weekly Newsletter’s Editor) & the Artist and the Machine team.
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Paige Piskin is an award-winning AI and XR creator, known for pushing the boundaries of digital makeup, character design, and augmented reality experiences. With AR effects generating more than 300 billion impressions, shared 2 billion times, Paige has worked with major brands like Netflix, Bratz, Warner, and Coldplay, bringing immersive storytelling to life. She has also been a guest judge for Netflix, consultant, and 2x hackathon winner, recognized for her innovative work in AI-driven AR experiences. Paige is passionate about blending generative AI with character design, expanding the possibilities of digital self-expression and interactive storytelling.
Claire Silver is an anonymous AI-Collaborative artist that works with oil, acrylic, collage, photography, and different digital mediums to create her work. She often blends the classical style and mythos into her art, collaboratively producing work that feels at once familiar and strange. Her work explores themes of innocence, trauma, the hero’s journey, and how our view of them will change in an increasingly transhumanist future. Claire’s art can be found in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has been at Sotheby’s London and Christie’s New York and in galleries, museums, and festivals all over the world. Featured in the New York Times, WIRED, Fortune, NPR, and countless podcasts, Claire takes every opportunity to explore her unending fascination with AI, fight for visibility for this budding art movement, and wonder at the magnitude of this moment in history. She often feels like a caveman painting fire. Claire is vocal in her belief that with the rise of AI, for the first time, the barrier of skill is swept away and that in this evolving era, taste is the new skill.