Weekly AI Briefing #26

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The biggest story from the last fortnight in AI isn’t Artificial Intelligence of course, but Apple Intelligence. Like every new market Apple enters, it isn’t early, but it comes to it with its own way of doing things and quite possibly the most wholistic and likely to succeed approach yet.

Here are 5 must-reads to get you up to speed:

Everything announced at WWDC 2024, from iOS 18 to Apple Intelligence. Mashable

Apple Intelligence: A Guide to Apple’s AI-In-Everything Strategy. WSJ

Apple is promising personalised AI in a private cloud. Here’s how that will work. MIT

Apple is proposing a different answer to AI - that LLMs are commodity infrastructure, not platforms or products. Benedict Evans

How Apple Intelligence impacts the other Big 4 Tech Firms. In short, all of a sudden everyone else is playing catchup. WSJ

^{Scroll down for last week’s poll result}

Quick AI Sync

Employees from some of the world’s leading AI companies published an proposal demanding that their employers grant them “a right to warn about advanced artificial intelligence.” VOX

A little surprising, OpenAI adds former a NSA chief to its board. Not so surprisingly, Edward Snowden doesn’t like it. CIO

Amazon will commit up to $230 million to startups building generative AI-powered applications. Much of the “funding” - including the entire portion set aside for the accelerator program - comes in the form of compute credits for AWS infrastructure, so it isn’t really cash and customers are locked into AWS of course. Amazon

Remember OpenAI’s recent, barely talked about issue with Scarlett Johansson? Well, researchers at Arizona State University found that Scarlett Johansson’s voice does indeed sound like “Sky,” but that the voices of Anne Hathaway and Keri Russell resembled Sky’s more than did Johansson’s. The Verge

Nvidia surpassed other companies to become the world's largest firm, resembling the dot com boom. How close are we to peak AI? WSJ

Apple announced that it will train all Apple Developer Academy students and mentors on the fundamentals of AI. TechCrunch

McDonald’s will axe the AI voice ordering system it’s been testing at over 100 drive-thru locations since 2021. The decision could be related to some AI-powered incompetence: TikTok is flooded with videos of McD’s drive-thru AI messing up in ways that a human would never. As we say often, AI doesn’t replace human work, it augments it, and humans should always be in the loop. Restaurant Business

OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, recently disclosed to shareholders that the company is mulling over a governance shift, possibly evolving into a for-profit benefit corporation. The Information

Opinion

Former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner just released a new essay series detailing his view on AGI, saying AGI is coming by 2027. At over 160 pages, how many will actually read this rather than just ask AI to summarise it? Leopold Aschenbrenner

OpenAI CTO Says Generative AI’s Economic Impact Only Starting. Bloomberg

Why the Wrong Questions Are Being Asked About AI. AI Business

Elon Musk says he agrees with ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton’s estimation of a “10-20% probability of something terrible happening with AI”, but said the most likely outcome is an abundance of services available to anyone. X

Industry Insights

Generative AI (Gen AI) adoption has surged, with 65% of organisations now using it regularly, up from 33% last year. This adoption is leading to both cost reductions and revenue increases. McKinsey

A collection of 57 up to date artificial intelligence statistics helpful for your internal business cases. Exploding Topics

If you feel conflicted about AI, you’re not alone. Researchers can’t seem to agree on if, and how, workers are using AI: Some reports claim that professionals are excited about and experimenting with AI, while others say most have not tried using AI tools on the job or do not trust them. CNBC

AI Adoption

Researchers from Google DeepMind asked 20 professional comedians to use popular AI language models to write jokes and comedy performances. The study is a great example of how AI can actually be helpful for creatives, showing how AI can take on some of the boring, mundane, formulaic aspects of the creative process, but can’t replace the magic and originality that humans bring. MIT

Good news for call centre operators who are worn down by hostile customers with unreasonable demands - SoftBank’s new AI makes angry customers sound calm on phone. Asahi

The US Air Force and Space Force launched a generative AI tool, encouraging airmen and guardians to experiment with using the technology for tasks like summarising reports, IT assistance and coding. Fairly basic AI stuff, but this is government. C4ISRNET

Southeast Asia super app, Grab, will leverage OpenAI’s capabilities to improve its maps, build better customer-support chatbots and make services more accessible to users. WSJ

How corporate lawyers are using game-changing AI. AFR

Population health technology company Color Health announced a collaboration with OpenAI to identify missing diagnostics and create tailored workup plans. Vator

Marie Suzanne Sarre, Data Scientist at the Lufthansa Group, shares how the company is leveraging AI both internally and for customer-facing applications, highlighting their methods for scaling and selecting the best large language models (LLMs). AI Business

Learning

Need to get up to speed on AI? The AFR has some good advice and resources for professionals to quickly learn AI. AFR

Atlassian latest State of Teams report extolls the benefits of AI adoption and contends that fears that AI will replace jobs en masse are “overblown”. Atlassian

An article by Google engineers on how they themselves apply AI to their software development. Google

It’s been one year since Marc Andreessen wrote his Techno-Optimist Manifesto detailing how AI will save the world. Do his words still hold up? It’s worth a read one year on. a16z

A look under the hood of LinkedIn’s many new AI tools. TechBrew

New AI Tools & Features

Poised by Deepgram helps coach business professionals for better communication and presentation skills. Poised

Mapify helps to quickly transform overwhelming content into simple, clear mind maps. Mapify

Asana says its AI model can use stored information about the historical relationships and past projects of teams to assign work to the people with the best-matched skill sets. The Verge

^{Last Week’s Poll Result:
Only 11% say that you use an external consultancy to help you with your AI strategy}