Today's tech breakthroughs are making artificial intelligence more human-like while becoming surprisingly accessible to everyday researchers and creators. From language models that can process book-length texts, to speech recognition systems that can be trained on a single laptop, to cameras that can see colors more like human eyes do, we're witnessing a democratization of technology that once required massive computing resources and budgets. Links to all the papers we discussed: Thus Spake Long-Context Large Language Model, VideoGrain: Modulating Space-Time Attention for Multi-grained Video Editing, DICEPTION: A Generalist Diffusion Model for Visual Perceptual Tasks, Slamming: Training a Speech Language Model on One GPU in a Day, Audio-FLAN: A Preliminary Release, GCC: Generative Color Constancy via Diffusing a Color Checker