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Nvidia ( NVDA ) has no current plans to release Fugatto technology

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Fugatto can modify audio, like changing the spoken accent

By Stephen Nellis

Nov 25 (Reuters) - Nvidia ( NVDA ) on Monday showed a

new artificial intelligence model for generating music and audio

that can modify voices and generate novel sounds - technology

aimed at the producers of music, films and video games.

Nvidia ( NVDA ), the world's biggest supplier of chips and software

used to create AI systems, said it does not have immediate plans

to publicly release the technology, which it calls Fugatto,

short for Foundational Generative Audio Transformer Opus 1.

It joins other technologies shown by startups such as Runway and

larger players such as Meta Platforms ( META ) that can generate

audio or video from a text prompt.

Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia's ( NVDA ) version generates

sound effects and music from a text description, including novel

sounds such as making a trumpet bark like a dog.

What makes it different from other AI technologies is its

ability to take in and modify existing audio, for example by

taking a line played on a piano and transforming it into a line

sung by a human voice, or by taking a spoken word recording and

changing the accent used and the mood expressed.

"If we think about synthetic audio over the past 50 years,

music sounds different now because of computers, because of

synthesizers," said Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied

deep learning research at Nvidia ( NVDA ). "I think that generative AI is

going to bring new capabilities to music, to video games and to

ordinary folks that want to create things."

While companies such as OpenAI are negotiating with

Hollywood studios over whether and how the AI could be used in

the entertainment industry, the relationship between tech and

Hollywood has become tense, particularly after Hollywood star

Scarlett Johansson accused OpenAI of imitating her voice.

Nvidia's ( NVDA ) new model was trained on open-source data, and the

company said it is still debating whether and how to release it

publicly.

"Any generative technology always carries some risks,

because people might use that to generate things that we would

prefer they don't," Catanzaro said. "We need to be careful about

that, which is why we don't have immediate plans to release

this."

Creators of generative AI models have yet to determine how

to prevent abuse of the technology such as a user generating

misinformation or infringing on copyrights by generating

copyrighted characters.

OpenAI and Meta similarly have not said when they

plan to release to the public their models that generate audio

or video.