Self-driving cars and AI voice and image generation lead ZDNET’s Innovation Index

Despite plenty of non-AI stories and trends bouncing around the headlines this week, ZDNET’s Innovation Index panel again voted AI into the No. 1 slot — and again three of the top four stories were AI as well. 

Just to recap, each week ZDNET’s editorial leaders narrow down the top 10 trends of the week, and then our panel votes to rank the top four. There were three hardware stories and multiple non-AI stories among the top 10 again this week, but only one of them attracted enough votes to make the final four. Our panel of journalists and analysts is always looking for the developments that are the most innovative and will have the biggest impact on the future. That has bolstered AI to the top of the leaderboard for the past five weeks. Here’s the link to last week’s report as an example.

This week’s leading trends were:

1. OpenAI’s Voice Engine can now clone a voice from a 15-second clip
2. Waymo self-driving cars start delivering Uber Eats orders
3. Apple releases ReALM AI model to outperform GPT-4
4. DALL-E now uses prompts to edit AI-generated images

OpenAI revealing a tool that can clone your voice with as little as a 15-second clip was by far the runaway number one trend of the week from our panel, with nearly twice as many votes as the second pick. Number two was technically the only non-AI story of the week — Waymo’s autonomous vehicles dropping off orders from Uber Eats — but of course self-driving cars themselves are one of the most complex implementations of AI.

Next on the leaderboard was Apple’s research team publishing its ReALM AI model, which the company claims can outperform OpenAI’s popular GPT-4. We’re all closely watching this development since Apple CEO Tim Cook has already telegraphed that the company will be unveiling its AI plans at WWDC in June. 

The fourth trend of the week was an update: OpenAI’s DALL-E image generator can now let you select part of an image and use a voice prompt to edit and adjust the image. 

That’s a wrap for this week. Check back next week for the latest set of trends.