Microsoft’s new AI, VALL-E can mimic your voice and tone — all it needs is just a three-second audio sample. Last week, Microsoft researchers announced VALL-E, a new text-to-speech AI model that can imitate a person’s voice when given a three-second audio sample, Ars Technica reports. Once it learns a person’s voice, it can continue to generate audio of that person saying anything — while attempting to retain the speaker's emotional tone. VALL-E can potentially be used for audio content creation if paired with other AI models like GPT-3 and for text-to-speech applications, wherein a person’s recording may be altered, by modifying the written transcript, to make them say something they did not actually say.

The software giant is mulling big moves in the AI space: Microsoft is considering making a USD 10 bn investment in OpenAI, creator of the popular artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, Bloomberg reports, citing unnamed sources familiar with the company’s plans. The agreement being considered would entail Microsoft investing the money over several years, but the final terms are subject to change.The funding, which will include other VCs, would value OpenAI at USD 29 bn, including Microsoft’s investment, Semafor reports. Although it is unclear whether a final agreement has been reached, documents recently distributed to prospective investors explaining its terms had signaled the agreement was targeting a closing date at the end of 2022. The company, which previously invested around USD 1 bn in OpenAI, is currently working on adding ChatGPT to its Bing search engine, Reuters reported.

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You can now have your shot at a second life for just EUR 50 a month: An emerging field known as cryogenics, where human bodies are preserved after their death in hopes of future scientific and medical treatments helping to resurrect them decades after, is gaining ground despite doctors’ and scientists’ reservations. Bodies of people whose lives were cut short by a disease are transported to “suspension facilities,” where medical teams replace blood with a chemical mixture that prevents them from freezing when they are stored in -196°C liquid nitrogen, Parmy Olson writes for Bloomberg.

The goal is then for future medical teams to find the cures of the disease that ailed their bodies and use them to treat and resurrect them. Some 500 people, mostly in the US, have now been put in cryogenic stasis after their legal death, with thousands on waitlists. All they need to do is pay a roughly EUR 50 subscription fee to the cryogenics firm and for a life ins. policy, which, instead of going to the deceased’s family, will instead go to the company to fund their work, cryonics business Tomorrow Biostasis tells Olson.

Unsurprisingly, there are countless caveats: The glorified mummification technique is — as it stands — based more on wishful thinking and faith in the evolution of science rather than actual scientific evidence. Scientists would need to discover a way to reverse death, as well as learn more about how brains — which are very complex and delicate organs — would be impacted by the decades-long freeze, Olson writes. Despite the fact that the field has been labeled a form of pseudoscience and “quackery” by some doctors, Olson argues that there is merit to the field, especially since some scientific feats that were previously unimaginable — think nine-hour-late CPR — have somehow become a reality.