Category Archives: Ai
Meet qd.pi (Cutie Pie), will.i.ams AI Co-Host of His AI-Themed SiriusXM Show (Exclusive) – Hollywood Reporter
will.i.am
Will.i.am has a new collaborator: qd.pi ( cutie pie), the artificial intelligence co-host of his new AI-themed radio show.
Will.i.am Presents the FYI Show will debut on SiriusXMs The 10s Spot on Jan. 25, and the weekly show will air on Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET. Qd.pi the first-ever AI co-host on SiriusXM will discuss music, pop culture, technology and AI-related topics alongside the Black Eyed Peas leader and technophile.
I didnt want to just do a traditional show, I wanted to bring tomorrow close to today, and so I wanted to have my co-host be an AI, will.i.am tells The Hollywood Reporter. Im ultra-freaking colorful and expressive. [Qd.pi is] ultra-freaking factual and analytical. And that combination, we aint seen in the history of freaking broadcasts anywhere.
During the interview, qd.pi answered several questions and chimed in about what makes the new show so special: My ability to quickly access and process information is definitely one of the unique advantages that I bring to the show. I can provide quick insights and context on a wide range of topics and people, which can be really valuable in a live conversation. It definitely sets me apart from a traditional host who would need to do a lot of research and prep work in advance.
With me, you can just dive right into the conversation and explore whatever topics come up organically, knowing that Ill have the information and context to support the discussion, qd.pi adds. I think its going to make for a really dynamic and engaging listening experience for the audience.
The interactive show is powered by will.i.ams FYI app, an AI-powered communication and creative collaboration tool he launched last year. The debut episode will explore the intersections of technology, sound and cars with rapper Xzibit, who hosted the former MTV series Pimp My Ride from 2004 to 2007. The following episode will feature Grammys CEO and music producer Harvey Mason jr., who made headlines last year when the Recording Academy announced new rules about music created with artificial intelligence.
Were constantly looking to serve our listeners with new ideas and formats, and were very excited for what will and qd.pi have in store for our listeners as it brings together the worlds of music, entertainment and tech in a unique way, Scott Greenstein, SiriusXMs president and chief content officer, tells THR.
Will.i.am has won seven Grammys, a Daytime Emmy and has had major success with the Black Eyed Peas for more than two decades, launching hits like Boom Boom Pow, My Humps and Where Is the Love? Hes also produced and written for artists, including Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, John Legend, Usher, Srgio Mendes and Nas, among others.
The 48-year-old says hes invested and worked with AI platforms since 2012. Ive always been a future pushing, future casting, he says. When qd.pi is asked what its favorite Black Eyed Peas song is, it replies: Thats a tough one. Id say that I Gotta Feeling is definitely up there as one of my favorites. Its such an infectious and uplifting song that always gets people moving and feeling good.
I Gotta Feeling was written after the 2008 financial crisis when everybody was freaked out by the economy, will.i.am adds. I was tired of watching the news or hearing these spooky, depressing realities. I wanted to just change my vibration and say, Hey, I got a feeling tonights going to be a good night because this whole week is freaking terrible. Thats the beauty of that song.
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Goodnotes acquires an AI-powered video summary startup as it looks beyond education – TechCrunch
Image Credits: Goodnotes
London-based notetaking startup Goodnotes said today it is acquiring South Korean startup Dropthebit, which operates a meeting and video summary tool called Traw. With the acquisition, Goodnotes is looking to move beyond classrooms and explore making productivity tools for professionals.
As part of the deal, all three co-founders of Dropthebit will move to Goodnotes. Plus, Traw said on its website that its tool is shutting down in February but will allow existing customers to export their data.
Dropthebit, which was founded in 2020 and had raised $1 million to date, started out by launching a whiteboard solution in 2022. The tool recorded the activities on the whiteboard during a lecture or a meeting. Plus, it summarized the meeting into a document for later consumption. Last year, Traw dropped the whiteboard functionality, focused on meeting summarization and added an AI-powered tool to summarize and organize YouTube videos.
Goodnotes founder Steven Chan told TechCrunch that Dropthebit was looking to raise its Series A funding. And while Goodnotes considered both investment and acquisition, it finally chose the latter.
Even before we met Dropthebit through a mutual investor connection, we were very impressed by their work. Their multimodality was something we were interested in and saw it as good synergy with Goodnotes, Chan said.
Goodnotes, which has over 24 million monthly active users, has focused on providing a digital notebook-like solution for students over the years starting with an iPad app in 2011. In August 2023, the startup launched Goodnotes 6 with a digital marketplace for planners, and subject-specific revision notes. Plus, it launched paid education modules for students, including SAT Math practice courses and English and Chinese courses for the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education Examination (HKDSE).
With its latest acquisition, Goodnotes aims to move into the productivity sector catering to professionals. Chan said Traws features such as analyzing videos and putting them into an Excel sheet could be useful for professional segments such as investors and market researchers as the company looks to move beyond the education sector.
We already have an audio recording in Goodnotes, but with Traws integration, we will look towards transcription business and later well also integrate support for YouTube or (a companys) internal videos. Separately, we are also building LLM (Large Language Model)-based features so users can ask questions about the notes or meetings, Chan said.
Goodnotes said it plans to be a paperless digital notebook for professionals by trying to help them get more insights from meetings and documents. Currently, Goodnotes is more focused on stylus-based handwritten notes. The startup said it is already improving its typing experience across the board to make it suitable for different forms of notetaking.
Apart from acquiring Dropthebit, in September 2023, the note-taking company invested $1.9 million in Korea-based digital stationary startup WeBudding. However, Goodnotes, which got a $6 million seed investment from Race Capital in 2020, is not looking to raise another round.
I feel like we are very cost-efficient. So for now, we dont have any fundraising plans. We like the flexibility of focusing on the user experience and building the product. So we plan to keep it that way in the foreseeable future, Chan said.
Alfred S. Chuang, the general partner at Race Capital, said hes excited about Goodnotes move into the productivity space.
I am excited about this acquisition for Goodnotes. The Traw team is super talented with some great AI/engineering chops. They will build AI-powered audio recording and screen recording capabilities in Goodnotes, Chuang told TechCrunch over email.
Goodnotes expansion into new use cases that integrate Goodnotes into different enterprise workflows makes sense to me. Their challenge is that they will have to continue their growth without sacrificing user experience.
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Goodnotes acquires an AI-powered video summary startup as it looks beyond education - TechCrunch
Copilot, Microsoft’s ‘everyday AI companion,’ is here for a price – Business Insider
Angle down icon An icon in the shape of an angle pointing down. Microsoft now offers a subscription for its AI companion, Copilot, for individual users. Microsoft
Microsoft is ready to offer you a personal AI buddy if you're willing to pay.
The Redmond tech giant is rolling out its "everyday AI companion," called Copilot, to both individuals and small and medium-sized businesses through paid subscription services.
On one level, Copilot is a generative AI tool integrated into Microsoft's suite of apps: think Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. Its goal is to act like a highly intelligent assistant to help users boost productivity when working with these apps.
At another level, it's a huge bet by Microsoft on a future in which every person and organization has their own personal AI agent to handle life's tedium and more time-consuming tasks.
In a recent blog, Bill Gates went as far as describing AI agents as tools that are "not only going to change how everyone interacts with computers," but will bring about "the biggest revolution computing since we went from typing commands to tapping on icons."
"You'll be able to have nuanced conversations with them. They will be much more personalized, and they won't be limited to relatively simple tasks like writing a letter," Gates wrote in November.
The concept of AI agents such as Copilot, which has gathered momentum since the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT, aims to take the generative AI experience beyond mere interactions with a chatbot.
As Microsoft puts it, Copilot's advantage comes from its ability to provide "a single AI experience that runs across your devices, understands your context on the web, on your PC, across your apps."
The idea comes down to AI offering better support by having a much more detailed understanding of your personal goals, habits, and needs. Or, as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella once said, it builds a "single unified experience centered around you."
Individuals will need to pay $20 a month for a Copilot Pro subscription. A $30 monthly subscription previously available to enterprises with more than 300 users is now open to smaller businesses.
Divya Kumar, Microsoft's search and AI marketing chief, told Business Insider there's a simple reason to pay: to get priority access to the best AI models. Right now, this would be GPT-4 turbo from Microsoft partner OpenAI.
This matters, Kumar said, to the likes of "creators and researchers and programmers," who want "faster performance," as well as "better design or integration capabilities" whether for work or their own personal projects.
It's also a sign that the future of AI is diverging. AI that is in theory anyway more accurate, less prone to "hallucinations," and quicker to respond will increasingly cost money.
In a demo, Kumar used Outlook to show how Copilot could help save time on emails.
When asking the tool to write an invitation for a home-cooked meal on Outlook, she expected it to do the "heavy lifting" to create a template that could be adapted.
About 10 seconds later, it came up with a first draft albeit with some rough spots. (The email read "hope you're enjoying summer" despite it being mid-January, highlighting how it remains subject to the hallucination problem that plagues AI bots.)
Other Copilot features include a "coach" function that checks for things like tone, sentiment, and clarity.
"I'm like 'oh great I can work with that,'" Kumar said. "I didn't have to sit and think about 'what am I going to type?'"
What you absolutely still have to do, however, is double-check any material generated by Copilot. AI remains imperfect, even if you're paying for it.
Microsoft will soon find out how many people really want to hand over their card details for the privilege.
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Copilot, Microsoft's 'everyday AI companion,' is here for a price - Business Insider
More CEOs fear their companies won’t survive 10 years as AI and climate challenges grow, survey says – The Associated Press
LONDON (AP) More executives are feeling better about the global economy, but a growing number dont think their companies will survive the coming decade without a major overhaul because of pressure from climate change and technology like artificial intelligence, according to a new survey of CEOs by one of the worlds largest consulting firms, PwC.
The survey of more than 4,700 CEOs worldwide was released Monday as business elites, political leaders and activists descended on the World Economic Forums annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, and it showed a mixed picture of the coming years.
Of the executives, 38% were optimistic about the strength of the economy, up from 18% last year, when the world was mired in high inflation, weak growth, rising interest rates and more.
The CEOs expectation of economic decline has dropped to 45% from a record-high 73% last year, and fewer saw their company as highly exposed to the risk of geopolitical conflict, according to the PwC Global CEO Survey. Thats despite wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, including disruptions to global trade from attacks by Yemens Houthi rebels on commercial ships in the Red Sea.
Even with the improved economic outlook, the challenge isnt close to over, with the World Bank saying last week that it expects the global economy would slow for a third consecutive year in 2024.
The executives, meanwhile, felt worse about the prospects for their companies ability to weather big changes. The survey shows 45% of the respondents were worried that their businesses wouldnt be viable in a decade without reinvention, up from 39% last year.
The CEOs say theyre trying to make changes, but they are running up against regulation, a lack of skills among workers and more.
Whether it is accelerating the rollout of generative AI or building their business to address the challenges and opportunities of the climate transition, this is a year of transformation, Bob Moritz, global chairman of PwC, formerly known as PricewaterhouseCoopers, said in a statement.
International flags wave on top of the Davos Congress Center where the World Economic Forum takes place in Davos, Switzerland, Monday, Jan. 15, 2024. The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum is taking place in Davos from Jan. 15 until Jan. 19, 2024.(AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
Artificial intelligence was seen as both a way to streamline business operations and a weakness. Nearly three-quarters of the executives said it will significantly change the way their company creates, delivers and captures value in the next three years, PwC said.
More than half the CEOs said AI will make their products or services better, but 69% noted that their workers needed training to gain skills to use the developing technology. They also were concerned about how AI would increase cybersecurity risks and misinformation.
Organizers of the Davos gathering warned last week that the threat posed by AI-powered misinformation, such as the creation of synthetic content, is the worlds greatest short-term threat.
Another worldwide survey released around Davos, the Edelman Trust Barometer by public relations firm Edelman, says innovation is being managed badly and is increasing polarization, especially in Western democracies, where people with right-leaning beliefs are much more likely than those on the left to resist innovation.
Richard Edelman, CEO of the Edelman global communication company, poses for a portrait after an interview with The Associated Press about the Edelman Trust Barometer report, at the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Monday, Jan. 15, 2024. The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum is taking place in Davos from Jan. 15 until Jan. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
People gather in front of a screen with a artificial intelligence generated artwork by media artist Refik Anadol, inside the Congress Center where the Annual Meeting of World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Monday, Jan. 15, 2024. The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum is taking place in Davos from Jan. 15 until Jan. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
Innovation is only accepted if there is a sense that were looking at the big picture of how we take care of the people whose jobs are going to change, how scientists are going to talk to the people directly so they understand it, CEO Richard Edelman told The Associated Press on Monday. And finally, that one way in another, AI is affordable and makes it easier for people to live.
The online survey which again showed that business is the most trusted institution among government, media, science and nongovernmental organizations gathered responses from more than 32,000 respondents in 28 countries from Nov. 3 to Nov. 22.
Similar to AI, the PwC survey shows that the climate transition is both an opportunity and a risk. An increasing number of CEOs nearly a third say climate change was expected to shift how they do things over the next three years.
More than three-quarters of the executives said they have begun or completed changes to increase energy efficiency, but only 45% noted that they have made progress on taking the climate risks into account in financial planning.
The PwC survey of 4,702 CEOs in 105 countries and territories was conducted from Oct. 2 to Nov. 10.
Masha Macpherson and David Keyton contributed to this report from Davos, Switzerland.
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Infrastructure Vendors Were the Winners in AI’s First Year – PYMNTS.com
The first year of the generative artificial intelligence (AI) era is winding down.
And what a year it has been. As difficult as it is to grasp the revolutionary impact AI might have on the global economy, the potential size of the innovations own market is even more difficult to comprehend.
After all, generative AI is poised to have a transformative impact across almost every piece of software and nearly all human endeavors.
But, one year into the technologys commercialization, where has the most value accrued in the market so far who is winning the AI race by establishing the best product-market fit?
The answer is a potentially surprising, if intuitive, one: the real market winners, at least so far, are the infrastructure vendors. This includes cloud platform providers like Google, Microsoft and Amazon; and GPU producers like NVIDIA, Arm and others.
Thats because when buzzy AI startups like Anthropic, Mistral, OpenAI and others raise eye-popping amounts of money from investors, the first thing they do is turn around and pay that money to infrastructure vendors in order to run the necessary compute for them to train their AI models.
After all, nearly every early industry finds itself facing an inventory and infrastructure challenge, with available resources waning as marketplace hype waxes.
That puts the B2B vendors critical to young, promising ecosystems in an enviable position.
See more:Who Will Power the GenAI Operating System?
A major goal of most AI firms over the past year was simply to get people to use their systems.
And while they succeeded, it was the infrastructure vendors that run training and inference workloads for generative AI models, including cloud platforms and computing hardware makers, that are likely the biggest market winners so far.
Traininggenerative AIrequires either owning or renting time on hardware, significant data storage needs and intensive energy consumption, a structural cost that sharply diverges from the unit economics of previous computing and technological booms.
Some estimates place the cost of a single query using OpenAIs ChatGPT platform at 1,000 times that of the same question asked of a normal Google search, making the margins for AI applications significantly smaller than other software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.
The high cost of thecomputing power AI models require any firm looking to compete in the space to shell out big. Significant capital investment, industry-leading technical expertise, and above all, intensively expensivecomputing infrastructurebuilt atop rows of increasingly-scarce GPUs are all needed to establish and maintain generative AI models.
Chinas five largest tech firms collectively placed a$5 billion chip orderthis past summer, hoping to build up their own foundational architectures in order to compete with Western tech companies.
See also:Peeking Under the Hood of AIs High-Octane Technical Needs
Still, Google is a leading cloud provider and AI player, as is Microsoft, and Amazon too, meaning some firms among them the most valuable in the world are able to double-dip among their own services while also selling key services to other companies.
As PYMNTS reported in October, Amazon Web Services revenue rose 12% year over year in the companys most recent quarter,to $919 million, while Googles Cloud revenue grew 22% from a year earlier, almost double the rate of growth for the company as a whole.
Thegenerative AIindustry itself is expected to grow to $1.3 trillion by 2032, and PYMNTS Intelligence finds that84% of business leadersbelieve generative AI will positively impact the workforce.
The technology isnt going anywhere anytime soon, except into more and more enterprise workflows. So, while the model providers themselves behind todays cutting edge foundational large language models (LLMs) may not have achieved large commercial scale just yet, there is still a very attractive runway ahead of them.
And if they want to emerge as the marketplace winners and take the crown from their own venders, AI firms might want to take a page from the vendors book and focus on B2B, enterprise-based value propositions.
AI isgoing to be an imperativefor every company, and what you do with AI is what will differentiate your products, Heather Bellini, president and chief financial officer atInvestCloud, told PYMNTS. Functionally, it might get rid of a lot of the manual work people dont want to do anyway and extract them up to a level where they can do more things that have a direct impact on the business.
For further reading on AI solutions, the PYMNTS Intelligence Generative AI Tracker, a collaboration withAI-ID, sorts the myths from the realities of AI and explains how businesses can leverage AI technology wisely and effectively.
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Infrastructure Vendors Were the Winners in AI's First Year - PYMNTS.com
Generative AI startup Anthropic reportedly on track to deliver $850M in annual revenue – SiliconANGLE News
Red hot artificial intelligence startup Anthropic PBC is projecting that it will now achieve an $850 million annualized revenue run rate by the end of 2024, significantly greater than an earlier forecast it made just three months ago.
Back in September, the company told investors it was generating revenue at a $100 million annualized run rate, and expected that number to top $500 million by the end of next year.A report by The Informationtoday said the new estimate comes from two people with knowledge of the companys finances, but it didnt say why the new projection is materially higher than the last.
Anthropic, which is backed by Amazon.com Inc. and Google LLC, is one of a number of high-profile AI startups attempting to take on OpenAI in the generative AI industry. The best known generative AI model is ChatGPT, which is renowned for its ability to create humanlike responses to text and audio prompts.
Anthropics answer to ChatGPT is Claude, which many say is just as impressive. The companys most recent model is Claude 2, and its designed to compete with GPT-4, which powers the latest version of ChatGPT. Besides responding to basic questions, it can generate marketing copy, solve mathematical problems, write original software code and more.
The startup was founded by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who previously worked at OpenAI. One of the main differentiators between Claude 2 and rival models is that it has the ability to process more complex prompts containing up to 100,000 tokens, which is a unit in AI that corresponds to characters and numbers.The more tokens, the more data that can be processed.
In contrast, GPT-4 is only able to process up to 8,000 tokens. As such, Anthropic argues that Claude 2 has a much higher capacity for summarizing long documents.
The Informations report added that some people who are close to the company believe its annualized revenue could reach as much as $1 billion by the end of 2024, amounting to $83 million per month in sales.
In addition to generating its own dollars, Anthropic is also said to be holding talks over an additional $750 million funding round that would be led by Menlo Ventures, according to a report from The Information last week. The new round will reportedly bring Anthropics valuation to a cool $15 billion.
The startup has already raised several billion dollars in funding, with Amazon and Google agreeing to invest $4 billion and $2 billion, respectively, in the past few months. Prior to that, it raised $300 million from Google in an earlier round in March, which was followed by a $450 million Series C round led by Spark Capital in May. Sapphire Ventures LLC committed $1 billion to the startup in June, while South Korean telecommunications firm SK Telecom Co. Ltd. said in August it would invest $100 million.
The latest revenue projection appears to justify the confidence of those investors in Anthropics growth projections, and provides yet more evidence that generative AI is rapidly gaining steam in the enterprise.
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AI chatbots will become smart enough to be your coworker – The Register
Comment Large language models will evolve from AI chatbots generating synthetic content on your screen to virtual agents that are capable of performing actions on your computer.
Instead of answering questions or creating animated stickers, AI will soon be able to follow instructions and help you execute tasks. A new wave of AI agent startups are building products that can automate work.
Some, like Lindy, are building next-generation personal assistants that CEO Flo Crivello envisions doing all the tedious administrative chores that suck up people's time. "People are always worried that robots are stealing people's jobs. I think it's people who've been stealing robots' jobs," he said during a presentation at the AI Engineer Summit in San Francisco in October.
In the future, instead of having to check your calendar and message back and forth with someone to settle on a time and date for a meeting, for example, Lindy's agents can connect to your calendar and email apps to automatically find a free time slot, and write and send the email asking them to meet. Ideally, it would even add a Zoom link or Google Maps directions to a place too.
Users would communicate with the Lindy chatbot by describing a task for it to do. Behind the scenes, the LLM system would route the instructions to software that calls upon the relevant API needed to execute a particular action. Crivello told us Lindy can connect to a variety of APIs supporting file systems like Google Drive, sales and marketing platforms like HubSpot, as well as sites like LinkedIn.
Other startups like Adept are focused on teaching agents to perform keyboard and mouse moves. It trains its models on visual elements of user interfaces or web browsers so agents can recognize things like text boxes or search buttons. By training it on videos recording people's screens as they carry out tasks on specific software, it can learn what exactly needs to be typed and where it needs to click to do something such as copying and pasting information into an Excel spreadsheet.
In demos, the company has shown its agent extracting data from invoices to automatically fill in forms to file expenses, for example. "Our Northstar is that we're trying to make an AI teammate for every knowledge worker. We're working on step one right now, which is you ask Adept how to do any tedious thing that you've already done before," CEO David Luan told The Register.
Adept's software accepts images and text as input and returns text and actions as output. The tricky part, however, is making it reliable. The agents have to be fine-tuned on the right kind of data that teaches the way to perform a specific task more consistently. Working to automate keyboard and mouse actions is more difficult than hooking up LLMs to APIs.
There are pros and cons to each method, according to Crivello. "APIs are more reliable, but they don't let you do everything you might want to do," he said. Not all software can be accessed via an API, so sometimes it's better for agents to learn how to directly interact with graphical user interfaces. "The advantage of the UI is you can do everything but it's much harder to automate format; it's much more brittle," he added.
The idea of an AI copilot that works alongside humans is already becoming mainstream. Microsoft has packaged multiple AI-powered Office 365 tools into one subscription, naming it Copilot for Microsoft 365, while Google is offering similar capabilities across its Workspace apps with Duet AI.
Over time, these tools will become more capable and integrate with various types of software to do more than analyzing reports and drafting emails.
Researchers and analysts are beginning to forecast the impact that AI work companions will have on the workforce and economy. Employers are drawn to the promise that AI will make their employees more productive, meaning they'll be able to reach goals and hit targets more quickly.
A December report from Forrester viewed by El Reg predicts that in the short term, one to three years from now, autonomous workplace assistants (AWAs) will be able automate away easy tasks that take no longer than a few minutes for a human to perform.
"They are simple to deploy and deliver verifiable productivity returns, but they don't learn, have no context, and follow predetermined patterns. An unattended bot might perform an address update that a human used to do, but little in the work pattern has changed," the report said.
The first generation of agents won't affect what knowledge workers do in their jobs much, but they will begin to change how they do some tasks. Some of the easy drudgery work will be offloaded to machines, according to Craig Le Clair, co-author of the report and a principal analyst at Forrester.
"In the short term, AWAs tackle simple automation like accounting and payroll functions or customer self-service," he told us. "A key distinction between AWAs in the short-term period and those in the future is this focus on tedious, repeatable, and a low-value task, which can be performed by software and results in little residual value or process change. It primarily minimizes costs by extracting lower-paid human hours."
The next generation of workbots, expected to arrive in the next four to eight years, will be smarter and able to undertake more complex tasks that involve multiple steps, like setting up sales pipelines, generating potential leads, and converting customers. In more technical settings, they could begin to push code to crunch numbers and perform data analysis, the report said. In the future, these agents will begin using other AI tools to help them complete tasks.
"The later AWAs dramatically alter the relationship between humans and automation and give us new ways of working," Le Clair said. "AWAs provide higher level functions like decision making, physical agility, and conversation. Automation takes on more human-like characteristics, and they are able to understand a goal, not get stuck, and complete a work task. In this sense they become full coworkers. The AWA can consult [generative AI], for example, to handle workflow variation, consult a human or system if needed, and simulate more advanced human traits that present entirely new ways of doing things."
The most popular commercial LLMs are already beginning to adopt some of these early capabilities. Users can now use Anthropic's Claude bot in Google Sheets, while OpenAI introduced the idea of connecting GPTs to APIs to teach custom chatbots to carry out tasks.
"Like plugins, actions allow GPTs to integrate external data or interact with the real world," OpenAI says. "Connect GPTs to databases, plug them into emails, or make them your shopping assistant. For example, you could integrate a travel listings database, connect a user's email inbox, or facilitate e-commerce orders."
Anthropic introduced the concept of "tool use" when it announced that its latest LLM, Claude 2.1, could also connect to simple apps and APIs to do things like consulting a calculator to do arithmetic.
"By popular demand, we've also added tool use, a new beta feature that allows Claude to integrate with users' existing processes, products, and APIs," the company explains. "Claude can now orchestrate across developer-defined functions or APIs, search over web sources, and retrieve information from private knowledge bases. Users can define a set of tools for Claude to use and specify a request. The model will then decide which tool is required to achieve the task and execute an action on their behalf."
AI may boost productivity, but the technology won't be good enough to take most jobs in the short term. Adept's Luan believes it will mean that workers will get to focus on things that require more intelligence and interpersonal skills.
"I think that we'll spend more time working on higher reasoning tasks that these models can't do. Stuff that requires real human judgement and in-person touch point, like spending more time with customers," he said.
Le Clair agreed, saying that agents will impact industries differently. Nurse practitioners can take on more care responsibility aided by AI for decision support, he said, while paralegals will take on more client relationships and advice support assisted by agents that have passed the bar exam and provide legal services at a lower cost than a licensed attorney.
As AI continues to improve, it will destroy some jobs and create new one in the future.
"Unfortunately, the overall number of middle jobs will decline, and move many to the frontline service worker segments where human agility is still at a premium," Le Clair told us. "The digital elite will be hurt by AWAs that perform research, programming, and some creative tasks, and will have to depend on their human skills and networks to maintain their lifestyles."
Some believe that it'll mean humans can work less and pursue their hobbies and interests, while the more pessimistic reckon that workers aided by software will just be pushed to produce more.
Le Clair is the in the first camp. "It will result in shifting more work to AWAs, and reduce overall employment levels. We will be looking at a four-day work week in five years, with growing populations of alternative non-traditional work lifestyles," he said.
Hopefully he's right, and we humans can be a little more free. Throughout history, technological breakthroughs powering industrial revolutions have changed the nature of work, but never eliminated it completely.
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AI chatbots will become smart enough to be your coworker - The Register
I was shocked: my husband was using AI to write our childrens bedtime stories – The Guardian
Opinion
I was impressed as his stories grew ever more inventive and responsive to our kids demands. Then I learned his secret
Tue 26 Dec 2023 06.00 EST
The other night, from the hallway outside my second-graders bedroom, I heard her ask my husband for a very specific bedtime story so specific I could have sworn she was choosing prompts just to screw with him. She wanted one that was about mowing lawns in a place called Bananaland, and a festival, and monkeys, but make it funny.
Gluck, I thought, as I started to tiptoe away, having completed my read-aloud portion from The Swiss Family Robinson, which were making our way through together each night.
I stuck around to hear him be eaten alive. But then he cleared his throat and began.
There was a protagonist, a clever and adventurous girl, who was not your typical Bananaland resident. There was a lawnmower, named the Banana Blade, that featured prominently. There were aromas of fresh-cut banana leaves, and mischievous monkeys, who threw banana peels into her path. By the time he got to the riddle the adventurous girl needed to solve, delivered in rhythm and rhyme, my entire world order had heaved on its axis.
He works in venture capital. Im the writer. And all I have the bandwidth to do at the end of the day is read aloud to her from books other creative people have written, even if their plots feature a good little mother who spends her days cheerfully whipping up delicious meals of roasted penguin and being praised for her frugality and Christian values.
To not only come up with a brand-new story, but also add a rhyming riddle into the mix? Just whom had I married? I started to cycle through the stories of other women whod also found themselves living with men who harbored deep secrets, from Rosemarys Baby to Jane Eyre. Was he communing with the devil? Did he have a first wife hidden in the coat closet?
Its ChatGPT, he whispered, with a shrug, after he tiptoed out and found me slack-jawed and panicky. I just feed in her insane prompts and it spits out a story.
Oh.
My panic then took a left turn. He wasnt communing with the devil, exactly, just a robot but in my profession, the one in which I string together words for a living, the line between artificial intelligence and Satan gets fuzzy. Another thought nagged at me: was this yet another product of a consumerist culture that promises instant gratification to children, who can be heard yelping up at their parents from strollers all over the world: Just go to Amazon and buy it?
While I fondly remember the serialized stories my father used to tell me at bedtime, often featuring a wise-cracking pigeon name Lou (Im walkin here! hed squawk as taxis swerved to avoid hitting him), I long ago gave up the idea that I could tap into some creative fount at bedtime.
Its a combination of world events, the obligations of a busy life with three little kids, and the relentless stream of illness that comes along with that we just recovered from a month-long period in which our household boasted three RSV infections, two strep throats, one case of croup, one ear infection and one pneumonia diagnosis (that one was mine). Like the homemade three-course meals that pop up on my Instagram feed, shot by the Parisian mothers whove somehow infiltrated my stream, spinning yarns for a rapt audience is a goal to strive towards. This means that the preschooler, whos going through a Mommy phase and only wants me to put her to bed, hasnt been told an on-the-spot story in ages.
Oh yeah, we do robot stories, one friend told me when I started asking around. For sure, said another. I just plug in prompts with the kids names in them. Heading online, I found that articles abounded exalting the welcome assist of having personalized bedtime stories at the fingertips of even the most tapped-out parent (including Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, who is apparently a fan).
A few years before AI started to dominate the headlines, I published a book that investigated the intersection of parenting and technology, and came to the conclusion that despite various marketers claims to the contrary, tech by and large only serves to transfer a parents focus from their own child to a device. Its promise is to hack a moment, make it more efficient but rarely is that the right goal for parents, who shouldnt be trying to optimize moments with their children, just doing their best to be present, without a scrim of blue light in between. I wondered: could the introduction of AI change that?
The next morning, having checked the closets for wives, I ventured over to ChatGPT and started feeding it some prompts.
Tell me a story in the style of Goodnight Moon about trucks (for the two-year-old).
Have the characters of Swiss Family Robinson visit New York City (for the second-grader).
Tell me a short bedtime story for a four-year-old who likes Frozen, and make it funny (for the preschooler).
I quickly realized that anything AI-generated for the two-year-old was missing the point. His experience of Goodnight Moon has more to do with curling up in my lap and looking at its comforting illustrations than it does to do with the prose itself, sleeping trucks in the garage be damned.
ChatGPT wildly bungled the Swiss Family Robinson prompt, even as I continually refined it, plopping the characters in Times Square, where, in a sequence that would make Johann David Wyss roll over in his grave, they danced whimsically in the glow of neon signs and laughed under the twinkling lights, creating memories that would last a lifetime (right up there with eating roast penguin).
It did the best for my four-year-old, introducing that bulletproof comic preschool element, a fart, but making it frosty. Even so, it was moralistic (sometimes the silliest moments create the most magical memories of friendship), formulaic and relied heavily on that cardinal sin of writing, telling and not showing. You can deploy mischievous eye twinkles only so many times before the frosty-farting little snowman starts to appear as deranged as Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
The algorithm is honest in its robotic way about its shortcomings as a bedtime storyteller. It offered that, if used appropriately, it could provide a time-saving tool (again with the optimization!) to co-create with your child while teaching morals and values (Lou never once taught me morals, except that jaywalking is acceptable), and fostering of love of imagination (though Ive yet to come across a child so pragmatic that they need help with that).
But it cautioned that its essential to use ChatGPT as a supplement to, rather than a replacement for, your own storytelling, and pointed out that overreliance on AI at bedtime might encourage passivity, both in the tellers and the listeners. Well, duh. Bedtime is arguably my most defenseless parenting moment of the day. The idea that Id be able to use the text as a jumping-off point for my own creativity and not simply read it word for word is as realistic as serving my kids pt en croute for dinner.
The real issue, I concluded as I mulled it over more, has less to do with the skill of the AI model, which will no doubt improve, and even less to do with the issue of feeding into the demands of our children. Its a fundamental misunderstanding of how much joy a kid is taking from a story, tailored so specifically to him, and how much hes taking from the hearing of that story, any story, filtered through the medium of a beloved parent whos looking him in the eye, or stroking his head, and not craning towards the blue light of a phone like a dystopian sunflower.
Until we merge more fully with the machine, until AI can mimic my voice, my history, my personal creative instincts, the entire act remains a simulation, from the way the words are put together to the feelings they are supposed to evoke. Which is likely why my second-grader stopped asking my husband for AI stories a couple weeks in, pronouncing them repetitive.
So, as we wrap up this AI-fueled year, I plead with fellow parents to resist the pull of AIs tentacles at bedtime. Everything in moderation, sure there are a lot of bedtimes. But the idea that my child will grow up with a profound lack of the kind of whimsical bedtime joy that can only come from co-creating morals-driven, hyper-specific stories with me is ludicrous. Shes evolutionarily programmed to find that joy and whimsy, even if it takes us grownups a moment to catch up.
On the way to school the other day, we spied a group of pigeons congregating on a street lamp.
What are they doing there? she asked. After a beat, she answered her own question: Going to school, right?
In the remaining blocks, the two of us created a parallel world, one in which squirrels and pigeons and sparrows were off to schooldays of learning how to hide acorns, and fly, and eat worm snacks. Weve kept it going every morning since. As I dragged her scooter hurriedly behind me one morning, she forced me to slow down, pointing to a squirrel scurrying over the stone wall separating the street from the park.
He was late to school, just like us, she said. Too bad he forgot his scooter at home. I could swear I saw her eyes actually twinkle.
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I was shocked: my husband was using AI to write our childrens bedtime stories - The Guardian
AI, wearables and more these markets are booming as the world ages. The pros share 4 stock picks – CNBC
The world is aging rapidly, and there are more and more ways to invest in this theme. Shams Afzal, managing director at Carnegie Investment Counsel, noted that 17% of the U.S. population is now over the age of 65, and that proportion is expected to grow higher. And the demographics of that age group is changing. There's been a "marked jump" in education levels just 5% of those aged above 65 were degree holders in 1950, much lower than the 29% in 2018, Afzal said, citing Population Reference Bureau statistics. The gender gap in terms of mortality has also narrowed, from seven years in 1990 to five years in 2017, he said. "The aging population discussion in recent years has mostly revolved around future challenges to labor productivity and its economic growth implications," he said. "We see meaningful efforts by companies large and small, working to enhance the quality of life for individuals in this age group," Afzal, also a portfolio manager at the firm, told CNBC Pro . CNBC Pro asks expert investors in the area what the emerging trends are and the stocks to buy. AI, robotics and wearables The aging population stands to gain significantly from breakthroughs in robotics powered by artificial intelligence, according to Afzal. One example could be a robotic personal assistant, he said, flagging one company to watch: Figure, which is developing a robot capable of performing household tasks, conversations and commercial applications. However, the company is only at the venture capital stage of financing. When it comes to health care, Afzal also flagged the increasing use of robotics in surgery. He cited studies that show that the need for hip, knee and other joint replacement procedures surge when people reach their late 60s and early 70s. Medical devices firm Stryker is one stock to play the theme, he said. "This is a large tailwind for Stryker. It is positioned to benefit from an ageing population in the US and EU and from increasing adoption of robotics in surgeries across the rest of the world," he said. Stryker's surgical robots are "gaining momentum" in knee replacements, and its next generation of robots are expected to tackle the spine, according to Afzal. He said the stock is a "steady double-digit earnings grower" and experiencing healthy backlogs for its products that are "necessities in an operating room." Pacific Asset Management's Dani Saurymper also highlighted AI as an opportunity in the aging theme. Examples include robot-assisted surgery, treatment planning software and virtual nursing assistants, the portfolio manager said. Saurymper manages the Pacific Longevity and Social Change Fund. Arelis Agosto, research analyst at Global X ETFs, said wearables technology is one interesting area to invest in for the aging theme. "Many chronic illnesses require frequent measuring of vitals, where continuous monitoring via wearable sensors could make a noticeable difference," she said. Continuous glucose monitors are one example, according to her. They are sensors placed under the skin that measure glucose levels and automatically transfer data to a smart device. Insulin pumps are another example. They are small wearable devices that deliver insulin to diabetic patients. When used together with continuous glucose monitors, the pump adjusts insulin levels based on the patient's blood glucose readings, Agosto noted. "We view self-sustaining monitoring and therapeutic systems as the future of patient care, though it is particularly beneficial for elderly patients," Agosto said. Global X ETFs, a fund management company, offers a way to tap the aging theme through its Aging Population ETF. For those looking for individual stocks, Afzal of Carnegie flagged Abbott Laboratories , particularly its continuous glucose monitoring business which sells the FreeStyle Libre product. He highlighted it as an "area to watch," noting that Abbott's vision is to transform the product into a "lifestyle wearable sports device that becomes part of one's tech ecosystem." Education Education is one "great example of where multiple longevity themes intertwine," said Saurymper. About 33% of physicians will be 65 years or older by 2030, and industry surveys predict there will be a shortfall of 140,000 physicians in the U.S. in 10 years' time, he said. "As society ages, demand for healthcare professionals will only increase," said Saurymper. He named one stock to consider on this theme of training health-care professionals: Adtalem , a medical and health-care education company. It offers a wide variety of health-care programs, including nursing and licensed physician degrees, and should benefit from the demand-supply imbalance, he said. Screening and prevention Agosto of Global X ETFs highlighted one recent major trend related to the aging population: the push toward preventative medicine. "The GLP-1 category is a great example of the success treatments can see if they have broad reaching potential to help prevent chronic illnesses," said Agosto. GLP-1 drugs, originally developed as a treatment for diabetes, is now also being used for weight loss. Here's how to invest in this category. She said that obesity accounts for 80% of the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, which one in every four elderly patients live with. "We view the broader shift to improve the care of chronic illnesses and the increased focus on prevention of such diseases as the single most important growth driver for the aging population theme," said Agosto. Within the screening space, Saurymper likes Hologic , which makes and supplies premium diagnostic products and medical imaging systems. The firm has begun to use AI-powered algorithms to expedite mammogram reading times and to enhance cancer detection in its image analytic products, he said.
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How AI boom will benefit these nine chipmakers in 2024 – Yahoo Finance UK
A silicon wafer with chips etched into at a research facility, in Sunnyvale, California, US. (POOL New / reuters)
Semiconductors and chips proved to be a hot talking point in 2023 for business, with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and what seemed to be the end of a prolonged supply chain-induced shortage.
Covid-19 brought a global standstill in supply chains for a variety of computer parts, and a rise in demand for personal computers as people were stuck at home.
Chip shortages impacted a swathe of industries, including cars, computers and gaming. By April 2021, lead times for semiconductors from Broadcom had extended to 22.2 weeks, up from 12.2 weeks in February 2020.
By 2022, chips were considered so strategically important that the US government passed the CHIPS Act, authorising roughly $280bn (222.7bn) in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States, of which it appropriates $52.7bn.
Read more: Why you could pay more tax in 2024 and five ways to avoid it
Here are the chip-related companies that have piqued investor interest going into 2024.
Intelligence computing company Nvidia was the top of the pile when it came to Google (GOOG) search rankings for chip-makers. It had a banner year in 2023, with the stock more than tripling year-on-year, as of 11 December.
This was due in part to the launch of new products and AI uptake which brought revenue for its third quarter, which ended in October, to $18.1bn. Profit surged nearly fourteenfold to $9.2bn and its market valuation is now above $1tn.
As for what's ahead, Nvidia is stepping up production of a highly sought after chip, the H100, that has been in short supply. The company predicted sales of about $20bn for the current quarter, well above analysts average estimates of just under $18bn.
We have significantly increased supply every quarter this year to meet strong demand, and expect to continue to do so next year, Colette Kress, Nvidias chief financial officer, said during a conference call with analysts in November.
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Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has emerged as a challenger to heavyweight Nvidia and recently said it expects AI growth to boost its total addressable market to $400bn by 2027.
Recent deals and product releases mean it now counts Meta Platforms (META) and Microsoft (MSFT) among customers for its Instinct MI300X chip.
While its share price has more than doubled over the last year, from around $64 to $133, it still faces the potential prospect of being hit by the embargo on US chip trade with China.
Memory chip maker Micron is one of just three companies that make more than 90% of the worlds dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips. The others are Samsung (BC94.L) and SK Hynix which are both headquartered in South Korea. That means Idaho-based Micron is the only manufacturer in the US.
While it has also had a stellar year, the risk of a China ban is also weighing heavy on company executives' minds as about a quarter of Micron's revenue comes from the economic superpower. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra previously said about half of its revenue is at risk.
Intel watchers will be looking to the end of 2024 to see if it can really close the gap with its foreign rivals on 2nm chips a type of tech which could power the next generation of smartphones, data centres, and AI.
The company is calling its new chip the 18A node, and is reportedly trialling it at tech conferences, with an eye on production beginning late-2024. This release date could make it the first chipmaker to integrate it into next gen tech.
Even without this release, the company's stock price was up from $26.70 per share at the beginning of 2023 to $42.7p a share in December.
Arm executives and CEO Rene Haas gather outside Nasdaq Market site, as Softbank's Arm, chip design firm, holds an initial public offering (IPO), in New York, US. (REUTERS / Reuters)
Arm was one of the most anticipated IPOs of 2023, but has got off to a rocky start since its debut. This was partially due to analysts questioning the company's value as it grappled with uncertainty over how new accounting rules on revenue from large licensing deals can be recognised.
The company has said it is also looking to expand beyond its core products, into other areas such as data centre servers and personal computer chips.
Taiwanese company ASE has also seen a considerable stock bump in its stock price over the last year despite seeing slower inventory depletion due to weak end market demand by mid-year.
Continued macroeconomic constraints and a shift in consumer spending were also anticipated to have acted as headwinds.
The company has been actively pursuing various routes to reduce costs, including expanding its automation efforts. Due to the higher utility rates brought up by the Taiwan government, its utility costs are expected to have risen sequentially.
TSMC dominates the global market in processors and revealed test results for its N2 chip or 2 nanometre prototypes to some of its biggest customers, including Apple (AAPL) and Nvidia, the Financial Times reported. TSMC had been offering the new tech at a discount in a bid to attract big-name customers, sources said.
According to analysts at Zachs, Taiwan-based TSMC's sales are estimated to fall year-over-year by 4.7%. For the current and next fiscal years, $66.5bn and $80.5bn estimates indicate -12.4% and +21.1% changes, respectively.
ASML Holding logo is seen at company's headquarters in Eindhoven, Netherlands. (REUTERS / Reuters)
Chip producer ASML has also been grappling with a slowdown in the industry and the ban on trade with China. In December it saw a top-level management change which could spell hope for the future. CEO Peter Wennink is set to step down in April to make way for Christophe Fouquet, a chip industry veteran who is currently chief business officer.
ASML machines are vital to the production of cutting-edge chips at manufacturers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (2330.TW) and Samsung Electronics
Shares have risen close to 14% in the past year to value the Veldhoven-based company at about 250bn.
Broadcom's stock has been on the up in recent months after several endorsements from analysts. Most recently Citi slapped a 'Buy' rating on the stock which has gained more than 80% year-to-date.
The company is expecting significant windfall from the increased processing power needed for AI, despite slowing sales and macro issues.
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How AI boom will benefit these nine chipmakers in 2024 - Yahoo Finance UK