Maybe some? But the circle today will be 160 miles wide or about the same width as Switzerland and Denmark. So I'm not sure how much shadows would help you pinpoint a specific location in an entire country worth of mountains.
Thanks! Yeah, I unfortunately can't shell out a straight $20k donation, but I saved the $25k over the year from my e-commerce business and justified it as a marketing expense if worse case scenario happens and it's found earlier than the math predicts. But if we get past break even then can't wait to write that check to help out the communities around here that are still recovering.
This one's going to be out of left field, but last Thursday I launched Countdown Treasure (https://countdowntreasure.com)
It's a real life treasure hunt in the Blue Ridge Mountains with a current total prize of $31,200+ in gold coins and a growing side pot.
I modeled it off of last year's Project Skydrop (https://projectskydrop.com) which was in the Boston area.
* Shrinking search area (today, Day 5, it will be 160 miles, on Day 21 it'll be just 1 foot wide)
* 24/7 webcam trained on the jar of gold coins sitting on the forest floor just off a public hiking trail
* Premium upgrades ($10 from each upgrade goes towards the side pot) for aerial photos above the treasure and access to a private online community (and you get your daily clues earlier)
* $2 from each upgrade goes towards the goal of raising $20k for continued Hurricane Helene relief
So far the side pot is $6k and climbing.
It's been such a fun project to work on, but also a lot of work. Tons of moving parts and checking twice and three times to make sure you've scrubbed all the EXIF data, etc.
I think this is technically "image variations" and I think image variations are still only dall-e 3 for now (best I could tell earlier today from the API)
I started Accomplice v1 back in 2021 with this goal in mind and raised some VC money but it was too early.
Now, with these latest imagen-3.0-generate-002 (Gemini) and gpt-image-1 (OpenAI) models – especially this API release from OpenAI – I've been able to resurrect Accomplice as a little side project.
Accomplice v2 (https://accomplice.ai) is just getting started back up again – I honestly decided to rebuild it only a couple weeks ago in preparation for today once I saw ChatGPT's new image model – but so far 1,000s of free to download PNGs (and any SVGs that have already been vectorized are free too (costs a credit to vectorize)).
I generate new icons every few minutes from a huge list of "useful icons" I've built. Will be 100% pay-as-you-go. And for a credit, paid users can vectorize any PNGs they like, tweak them using AI, upload their own images to vectorize and download, or create their own icons (with my prompt injections baked in to get you good icon results)
Do multi-modal models make something like this obsolete? I honestly am not sure. In my experience with Accomplice v1, a lot of users didn't know what to do with a blank textarea, so the thinking here is there's value in doing some of the work for them upfront with a large searchable archive. Would love to hear others' thoughts.
The other day I noticed shipitsquirrel.com was available, so I spent a couple evenings pair programming with ChatGPT to make a fun little Missile Command style game where you help Ship It Squirrel ship by blowing up distractions ;)
Etc etc. AI can make all this stuff easier. And you have a sense of ownership over what you create. All in one place where you can collaborate on all of it with your team. I feel like that's valuable. It's certainly a tool I've always wanted.
But, also, as a bit of an aside – if the Googles and OpenAIs of the world are just going to bite every artist's style anyway with a mostly black box service and training set… it feels like the option for an artist to train/finetune their own model, promote it and possibly make money off of that is worth trying.
Update: Ah, found the "Tracking" setting in Sendgrid that I thought I had already turned off. Off for sure now. Thanks again for the heads up!
The confirmation link should only be going to accomplice.ai unless Sendgrid is doing some link tracking that I've just forgotten about. Could you forward that email to adam at accomplice dot ai if you get a chance. Thanks for letting me know!
I'm currently working fulltime on AI-powered design suite Accomplice (https://accomplice.ai) and if you ask me on a good day I would tell you I do think there's already huge commercial potential. On a bad day, though ;)
My current approach is a "model marketplace" (https://accomplice.ai/models) where the most popular open source text-to-image models (VQGAN+CLIP, Disco Diffusion, DALL-E Mega coming soon…), sit alongside the most popular open source style transfer models, and then finally I have the ability for a user to finetune their own models using a simple drag-and-drop tool (https://accomplice.ai/no-code-model-training).
So theoretically if there were a searchable marketplace of 100s of different finetuned models people could choose from, they would use it much like an iStockPhoto and be able to create the kind of images they want instead of just downloading them.
But it's of course a constant work in progress. Slowly growing though and lots of promising stuff ahead!
Hard Work Montage (https://hardworkmontage.com)