The people onscreen are fake, but the business value is real; AI comes to classrooms; Regulation is starting to rattle the AI sector; New research highlights global divide in AI infrastructure
UK refocuses its AI strategy on cost cutting; OpenAI grapples with its copyright problems; News websites are saying no to Apple’s scraping; US companies are holding back AI products from Europe
At the end of July, I took a break from Computerspeak so I can spend more time with my family in Canada over the summer but now I’m back in the UK and ready to dive in.
Although I stopped writing, I still kept an eye on AI and noticed a new doomer narrative developing on social media and spilling over into the news coverage. According to some commentators, we’ve reached peak AI and the industry is in a huge bubble because generative AI provides no real benefits to early adopters. Here is their argument: over the last year, Big Tech has made sizable infrastructure investments in AI and VCs have signed large checks hundreds of startups (some with eye-watering valuations) but, so far, we have nothing to show for it. The technology doesn’t work, the products aren’t useful, and the demand isn’t there.
Allow me to disagree. Sure, the numbers are eye-popping, everyone is moving at a scale and speed that we haven’t seen before, and the technology is still maturing. But this isn't a crypto/web3 boom driven by consumers with disposable income looking for a cheap thrill; it's a fundamental shift in how we interact with computers, and that will take time and cash to cultivate.
Remember the early days of the cloud? Critics scoffed at the massive upfront costs but now it's the backbone of our digital lives. Generative AI is following a similar trajectory, but at hyperspeed. The infrastructure required to train these models is staggering. We're talking about data centers that make traditional server farms look like vegetable patches.
But here's where generative AI breaks the mold: it's not just another toy for the tech giants to play with. For the first time in years, we're seeing a technology that's genuinely shaking up the pecking order in the technology industry. Google, long comfortable in its search monopoly, is now playing catch-up. Meta is restructuring entire divisions. Even Apple, notoriously slow to jump on emerging tech bandwagons, is feeling the heat.
Plus, there’s value being created in generative AI—you just need to know where to go looking. Last month, I had the pleasure of meeting Kimberly Crawford, the vice president of human resources and safety at Birchwood Foods, a business that provides beef products to foodservice and retail industries. They’re as representative of a midwestern, family-owned American business as it gets. Birchwood Foods runs a program that helps refugees coming to the United States to get a job in one of their meat-processing plants. The challenge? A lot of those refugees come from South America, Africa or Asia and therefore they don’t speak English and some can’t read in their own language which makes training them using traditional methods incredibly challenging. But when you’re handling food, safety is incredibly important so training to a high standard is an absolute must. So Kimberly and her team turned to Synthesia, an AI video platform, to make training videos for new recruits in the languages they speak. In these videos, computer-generated digital presenters that look and sound just like the people watching the content, deliver courses on food hygiene or workplace safety in a way that resonates with the audience. Here’s the catch: it used to cost Birchwood Farms tens of thousands of dollars and weeks of manual work to make these training materials before. Now they get them done in a click of a button and at a fraction of the cost.
Meanwhile, in Florida, Spirit Airlines is also using Synthesia to convert their written materials about wellness, benefits, and leave policies into short-form videos. Since switching to video, the HR team was able to increase engagement by 6x compared to sharing the same information via text and employee inquiries have decreased by 76%, indicating not just increased information retention but also a significant cost saving, as Spirit Airlines employees spend less time on the phone asking questions about their benefits and more time doing other, more meaningful work.
I can keep going with similar examples and tally up the dollars and the cents, but I want to take a step back. We should stop looking for the true value of generative AI in current market caps and start thinking about its potential to disrupt the way we’ve been doing things. It starts small (see my examples above) but give it time and the exponential curve starts working its magic. In tech, that exponential curve of adoption is worth more than any valuation.
And now, here are the this week’s news:
❤️Computer loves
Our top news picks for the week - your essential reading from the world of AI
WSJ: AI Regulation Is Coming. Fortune 500 Companies Are Bracing for Impact.
Bloomberg: US Tech Is Holding Back Some AI Products From Europe
New York Times: When A.I.’s Output Is a Threat to A.I. Itself
WSJ: OpenAI in Talks for Funding Round Valuing It Above $100 Billion
The Information: The Superintelligence of AI Investor Daniel Gross
Time: New Research Finds Stark Global Divide in Ownership of Powerful AI Chips
The Verge: OpenAI searches for an answer to its copyright problems
Reuters: UK reshapes its AI strategy under pressure to cut costs
⚙️Computer does
AI in the wild: how artificial intelligence is used across industry, from the internet, social media, and retail to transportation, healthcare, banking, and more
MIT Technology Review: How machine learning is helping us probe the secret names of animals
The Guardian: ‘Being on camera is no longer sensible’: persecuted Venezuelan journalists turn to AI clones
TechCrunch: Viggle makes controllable AI characters for memes and visualizing ideas
The Verge: Wyze’s AI can now search your camera footage so you don’t have to
🧑🎓Computer learns
Interesting trends and developments from various AI fields, companies and people
The Guardian: Ethically dubious or a creative gift? How artists are grappling with AI in their work
Reuters: Nations building their own AI models add to Nvidia's growing chip demand
The Economist: Digital twins are fast becoming part of everyday life
Reuters: Meta says its Llama AI models being used by banks, tech companies
Axios: OpenAI says ChatGPT usage has doubled since last year
VentureBeat: Alibaba releases new AI model Qwen2-VL that can analyze videos more than 20 minutes long
TechCrunch: Social network Butterflies AI adds a feature that turns you into an AI character
VentureBeat: Google’s Gemini AI gets major upgrade with ‘Gems’ assistants and Imagen 3
TechCrunch: Midjourney says it’s ‘getting into hardware’
Wired: Generative AI Transformed English Homework. Math Is Next
New York Times: Google Says It Fixed Image Generator That Failed to Depict White People
WSJ: Arizona Deal Latest Sign of Booming Demand for Sites to Power AI
The Guardian: Make AI tools to reduce teacher workloads, tech companies urged
Fortune: Google now uses AI to moderate staff meetings and employees say it asks softball questions
The Verge: Anthropic has published the default system prompts for its AI chatbot, Claude
The Information: OpenAI Races to Launch ‘Strawberry’ Reasoning AI to Boost Chatbot Business
WSJ: Inside Universities’ Love-Hate Relationship With ChatGPT
CNBC: Nvidia partner says it can cut data center energy use by 50% as AI boom strains power grid
Washington Post: After a decade of free Alexa, Amazon now wants you to pay
Bloomberg: OpenAI Taps Former Meta Executive to Head Strategic Initiatives
MIT Technology Review: What will AI mean for economic inequality?
VentureBeat: Nvidia launches NIM Agent Blueprints, allowing developers to quickly build enterprise AI apps
VentureBeat: This new open-source AI, CogVideoX, could change how we create videos forever
VentureBeat: DeepMind and UC Berkeley shows how to make the most of LLM inference-time compute
VentureBeat: Inflection AI bets on porting Pi chatbot data amid enterprise shift
VentureBeat: Accenture and AWS offer a way for companies to start their responsible AI journey
VentureBeat: Aleph Alpha unveils EU-compliant AI: A new era for transparent machine learning
MIT Technology Review: AI and the future of sex
Fortune: Exodus at OpenAI: Nearly half of AGI safety staffers have left, says former researcher
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