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GenAI Daily News Briefing: Ratings
| Date | Rating | Title | Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| 02/20/2024 | Important | The Shift from Models to Compound AI Systems | The evolution towards more complex, integrated AI systems is a key trend in the field, underscoring the importance of understanding and leveraging multiple models for improved AI applications. |
| 02/20/2024 | Important | Air Canada must pay refund promised by AI chatbot, tribunal rules | Highlights the legal and ethical implications of AI promises, serving as a cautionary tale for businesses on the importance of aligning AI actions with company policies and obligations. AI leaders will be held accountable for fails like this. |
| 02/20/2024 | Important | Groq AI model goes viral | Introduces advancements in AI processing speed and efficiency aided by new hardware that could compete with GPUs at some point, potentially impacting a wide range of AI applications and industries. While not essential at the moment, it's an important development to keep an eye on for future implications. |
| 02/20/2024 | Optional | Glass Consult is our NEW clinical reference chatbot | Offers advancements in clinical decision support for healthcare professionals. Its specialized nature makes it of limited relevance to a broader audience. |
| 02/20/2024 | Optional | NBA Shows Off "NB-AI" Generative AI Tool to Personalize Basketball Game Viewing | Showcases potential advancements in sports media personalization. Some of us were impressed by the capabilities - John was not :) |
| 02/20/2024 | Optional | How Westpac is using Generative AI to speed up software development | Demonstrates the power of GenAI in coding assistance but that use case is quickly becoming tables stakes, so not an essential development (though if your developers are not yet using such tools, get on it.) |
| 02/21/2024 | Essential | You should be playing with GPTs at work | If you aren't yet building personal GPTs to use at work you're missing out on more productivity and thus more coffee breaks :) This article shares 20 GPTs real people have built for themselves. Some of our faves included using a GPT to create technical documentation, fully cloning yourself, and a product copy tool that let's engineers and others who might not be natural writers create good copy. |
| 02/21/2024 | Important | Quantum-Enhanced Generative AI Generates Viable Cancer Drug Candidates | While the researchers admit they did not test whether their computation could be done as fast or well using classical computing, the potential for hybrid computing using AI and quantum is one for AI leaders to keep track of as it could become a viable option soon. |
| 02/21/2024 | Optional | Adobe Acrobat adds generative AI to ‘easily chat with documents’ | Our reaction: it's about time Adobe offered this obvious PDF-assistance capability (which shows how far we've come with GenAI - two years ago we would have been blown away by this use case). Adobe offers this for free now, but plans to charge in the future - will people be willing to pay? We're skeptical given other tools people are paying for can do this. |
| 02/21/2024 | Optional | Bioptimus raises $35 million seed round to develop AI foundational model focused on biology | The substantial seed funding and the focus on a foundational AI model specifically for biology reflect the shift towards specialized AI models in life sciences. TBD how effective the model will be but important for those in life sciences to track. |
| 02/21/2024 | Optional | Scale AI to set the Pentagon's path for testing and evaluating large language models | This is only about testing and creating standards for LLMs for the military, so not relevant to most. But we're surprised the DoD would only look to one vendor (and why ScaleAI?) for help with this - perhaps there are others working on it that haven't been announced. |
| 02/22/2024 | Important | Microsoft and Intel strike a custom chip deal that could be worth billions | Marks a significant partnership in the chip industry, potentially reshaping market dynamics and highlighting strategic collaboration between two tech giants. |
| 02/22/2024 | Important | Nvidia's Q4 revenues hit $22.1B, up 265% from a year ago | Reflects the tremendous demand for AI compute that's showing no signs of slowing down. The question is: When will we see the massive chips investments yield equally massive revenue gains? The pressure is on you to deliver, AI leaders. |
| 02/22/2024 | Important | AI Beyond LLMs: Benchmarking the Complex Reasoning Performance of GPT-4 and EC AI | Focuses on the evolution of AI technology beyond LLMs alone, emphasizing the importance of complex reasoning capabilities in AI's development and combining models to achieve superior results in complicated tasks like planning. |
| 02/22/2024 | Important | ChatGPT bug leads to unpredictable outputs | The incident highlights the need for reliability in AI applications, important for developers and businesses relying on AI models like GPT-4. Reminder that these models are still unstable. |
| 02/22/2024 | Optional | Adtech pioneers launch AI startup to empower publishers and brands at crucial moment | Optional because this offering is not yet available, but could significantly transform the web ad space. Plans to enable companies to embed agents in third-party web content that consumers can interact with. Could become the new "ad." |
| 02/22/2024 | Optional | Google launches two new open LLMs | Yet another announcement of a somewhat open source model (weights released, but training data not and usage limited). However, of note - Hugging Face leaderboard shows this model outperforming other 7B ones like Llama. |
| 02/22/2024 | Optional | China's Moonshot AI zooms to $2.5B valuation, raising $1B for an LLM focused on long context | The significant investment underscores China's commitment to AI development, yet its immediate impact is seen as more relevant to those deeply invested in AI advancements, particularly within China. |
| 02/22/2024 | Optional | RESEARCH: LongRoPE: Extending LLM Context Window Beyond 2 Million Tokens | Represents an interesting development in AI research to significantly expand context windows, but it's only research at this point. |
| 02/23/2024 | Essential | Google pauses AI tool Gemini's ability to generate images of people after historical inaccuracies | Underscores the necessity of rigorous testing and the potential repercussions of deploying AI tools without it. Disappointing to see Google again making a mistake. |
| 02/23/2024 | Essential | Pfizer is building a new generative AI platform for pharma marketing | Pfizer's deployment of an AI platform for marketing purposes illustrates the growing acceptance and integration of AI technologies in sectors where accuracy and compliance are paramount. Includes system to flag sensitive content for extra review. Also interesting to see Publicis, a company threatened by GenAI content creation tools, now building these tools for clients as part of their business model - kudos to them! |
| 02/23/2024 | Optional | Stable Diffusion 3 | The introduction of Stable Diffusion 3 represents ongoing innovation in AI-generated imagery. However, we rated as optional due to its limited release status. |
| 02/23/2024 | Optional | ChatGrid: A new generative AI tool for power grid visualization | Great to see development for another use case in a sensitive industry, but unsure how likely it is that grid operators will grab this off of GitHub and put it to use given such sensitivity. |
| 02/23/2024 | Optional | The Justice Department gets a chief AI officer | The government is following through on the plans laid out in the AI Executive Order, but this isn't a critical read. However, if you're an AI leader looking for a change, note that the government is hiring many CAIOs right now. |
| 02/26/2024 | Important | Salesforce Unveils Tableau Pulse for Faster Decision Making with GenAI | This upgrade integrates generative AI into decision-making tools, enhancing efficiency and accessibility for Salesforce's extensive user base. Integrations into tools like this is how most people will interact with GenAI in the coming months and years. |
| 02/27/2024 | Essential | Your Organization Isn't Designed to Work with GenAI | Crucial for AI leaders to understand organizational adaptation for effective GenAI integration. You need to focus on enabling a collaborative dialogue between humans and AI as opposed to simply taking a capability out of human hands and putting it into machines. |
| 02/28/2024 | Important | GitHub Copilot Enterprise Hits General Availability | GitHub Copilot Enterprise includes some useful new capabilities like internal search and ability to incorporate an organization's own code and knowledge base. |
| 03/11/2024 | Essential | Introducing Devin, the first AI software engineer | While much of this functionality has been available for some time, this tool makes code generation and debugging fully autonomous, marking a step forward. Software engineers will still be needed and, in fact, their skill level must be very high to be able to guide this tool when it messes up. Companies are going to be able to do a lot more software development and upgrading going forward, removing current bottlenecks. |
| 03/11/2024 | Optional | Amazon, Google Quietly Tamp Down Generative AI Expectations | We usually like The Information's reporting, but this piece is off the mark. Yes, revenue for cloud providers won't be as significant as expected, but we know companies are using GenAI in areas like customer service (Walmart, Wells Fargo, AT&T to name just a few) where this article claims they aren't. |
| 03/11/2024 | Optional | Building Meta's GenAI Infrastructure | We already knew Meta's plans for building up compute capacity to 600,000 Nvidia H100s. Perhaps they published this info to reiterate their dedication to openness and attract scarce talent. |
| 03/11/2024 | Optional | Midjourney is testing a highly requested âconsistent charactersâ feature | Midjourney's development of a feature for consistent character generation was discussed as an important advancement for those in creative industries such as marketing and entertainment. The ability to create entire videos or marketing campaigns with recurring, synthetic characters is growing near. However, it's not available yet. |
| 03/11/2024 | Optional | Generative AI video startup Tavus raises $18M to bring face and voice cloning to any app | This is confirmation of a funding round from last year for a tool with many competitors, though notable that this one will be able to live in your own CRM/environment. |
| 03/11/2024 | Optional | Perplexity brings Yelp data to its chatbot | Part of an ongoing trend of integrating various real-time data sources into AI systems and evolution of search. |
| 03/11/2024 | Important | Insilico Medicine unveils first AI-generated and AI-discovered drug in new paper | Massive speed-up and cost efficiencies achieved here in terms of finding a drug candidate and getting it into trials. Important to note, but since this is an announcement around a paper detailing the work as opposed to the work itself which was announced last year, we marked it as important rather than essential. |
| 03/12/2024 | Essential | Wxclusive: U.S. Must Move Decisively to Avert Extinction-Level Threat From AI, Government-Commissioned Report Says | This article delves into a government-commissioned report that stresses the urgent need for decisive action to mitigate potential catastrophic threats posed by AI advancements. It outlines a series of measures aimed at safeguarding against these risks that we think are unlikely to gain adoption, but worth reading this summary and maybe the full report over the weekend. |
| 03/14/2024 | Essential | FIGURES Humanoid Robot Integrates OpenAI's Advanced AI for Enhanced Interaction | The integration of advanced AI capabilities from OpenAI into FIGURES' humanoid robot represents a leap forward in making robotic technology more interactive, intuitive, and capable of understanding complex human instructions. Healthcare, customer service, warehouse work, and personal assistance need more workers - robots welcome!. |
| 03/14/2024 | Optional | A Generalist AI Agent for 3D Virtual Environments | The development of a generalist AI agent capable of functioning within 3D virtual environments represents an exciting advancement with potential applications in robot training and generalization. However, its current status as a research innovation with future-oriented applications renders it optional for immediate industry impact. |
| 03/15/2024 | Essential | Bayer pilots unique generative AI tool for agriculture | Bayer's pilot of a unique generative AI tool for agriculture addresses a crucial need for tailored agronomic advice, leveraging vast amounts of its own data to provide actionable insights for farmers. While still a prototype, the emphasis on creating knowledge utilities based on LLMs that are sector-specific is an important trend to watch - or jump in on... |
| 03/15/2024 | Optional | Anthropic just released the smallest and fastest Claude 3 model | By offering a model that is both smaller and faster, Anthropic addresses key barriers to AI adoption, such as computational requirements and cost. But we already knew this one was coming. |
| 03/15/2024 | Optional | Databricks invests in Mistral and brings its AI models to data intelligence platform | Mistral is getting around these days. Good for them and good to note if you're using or considering Databricks, but not an essential read. |
| 03/15/2024 | Optional | Knowledge Conflicts for LLMs: A Survey | Explores and categorizes the challenges posed by knowledge conflicts within large language models and provides insights into AI model training and optimization. However, it's pretty technical - maybe weekend reading if you're into the details. |
| 03/15/2024 | Optional | Apple quietly purchased an AI startup this year | Apple continues to make the news even though it still has no GenAI offering. Nothing to see here until they do. |
| 03/15/2024 | Optional | Implementing generative AI with speed and safety | Serves as a reminder of best practices in AI deployment rather than offering new insights or solutions, making it optional for those already versed in the field. Decent charts worth skimming. |
| 03/18/2024 | Essential | John Holland Embraces Generative AI to Enhance the Productivity of Its Workforce | John Holland's application of generative AI, including a custom version of ChatGPT developed in partnership with Microsoft, is an essential case study. It illustrates effective AI integration within a traditionally non-tech industry (construction), offering concrete productivity gains. Shows practical application, measurable outcomes, and the potential for replicating such success in other sectors. |
| 03/19/2024 | Essential | Nvidia launches NIM to make it smoother to deploy AI models into production | These three articles stem from announcements at Nvidia's event this week. They collectively represent a significant leap forward in AI hardware and integration capabilities, highlighted by NVIDIA's announcement of the Blackwell B200 GPU as the "world's most powerful chip" for AI. Additionally, NVIDIA's enlistment of top names in humanoid robotics for its new AI platform, GR00T, indicates a substantial move towards enhancing robotic capabilities with advanced AI. These developments are crucial for anyone involved in AI, robotics, or their applications across industries. |
| 03/01/2024 | Important | Introducing Microsoft Copilot for Finance | This introduction by Microsoft marks a significant move towards integrating AI deeply into finance departments for productivity and efficiency. It will be interesting to see how adoption unfolds - some finance pros might be skeptical while others will fully embrace. |
| 03/01/2024 | Optional | Figure rides the humanoid robot hype wave to $2.6B valuation | Big backers, giant raise, and a partnership with OpenAI. One to watch, but the robots aren't yet ready for action. |
| 03/01/2024 | Optional | On the Societal Impact of Open Foundation Models | Interesting risk framework that suggests more focus on the marginal risk of open source LLMs over risks already in play from current technologies. Some helpful points in here for AI leaders, but not an essential read. |
| 03/01/2024 | Optional | Stack Overflow and Google Cloud Announce Strategic Partnership to Bring Generative AI to Millions of Developers | Nice to see Google make a strategic move like this, but no need to read this product announcement article. |
| 03/01/2024 | Optional | With Brain.ai, generative AI is the OS | The initiative to integrate generative AI more deeply into operating systems and potential applications on smartphones and beyond is something to keep track of. However, we're skeptical about the immediate practical applications and adoption of this one. |
| 03/20/2024 | Important | TacticAI: an AI assistant for football tactics | The introduction of TacticAI by Google DeepMind and Liverpool FC applies a combo of types of AI within sports analytics. It predicts the outcomes of football tactics, such as corner kicks, underscoring the growing impact of AI on sports strategy. And, importantly, it demonstrates the technology's ability to simulate scenarios and recommend strategies based on predictive analysis, demonstrating the broader applicability of AI in analyzing complex, dynamic systems across different sectors. |
| 03/21/2024 | Important | Siemens to deepen collaboration with NVIDIA related to generative AI for immersive real-time visualization | This partnership highlights significant advancements in manufacturing and design processes through the integration of NVIDIA's Omniverse and Siemens' digital twin technology. It exemplifies the industrial sector's ongoing evolution towards more AI-integrated operations, marking it as an important development in the field of AI and manufacturing. |
| 03/22/2024 | Essential | 16 Changes to the Way Enterprises Are Building and Buying Generative AI | This article highlights significant trends, such as the rapid deployment of AI models and the integration of AI into core IT budgets, which are essential for AI leaders to understand. The detailed survey and visualizations offered in the article make it a vital resource for supporting AI leaders' budget requests. |
| 03/22/2024 | Essential | Introducing the 01 Developer Preview | The 01 device from Open Interpreter represents a super cool approach to integrating intelligence across various environments, offering open-source hardware and software that can significantly accelerate innovation in voice-activated control and automation. Its potential for widespread application and impact, encouragement for open innovation and the fact that AI leaders may have to deal with employees bringing this into the enterprise make this essential. (Our John Sviokla ordered one so review forthcoming!) |
| 03/22/2024 | Important | Introducing SceneScript, a novel approach for 3D scene reconstruction | Meta's development of SceneScript marks a significant advancement in 3D scene reconstruction, leveraging AI to understand and interact with virtual environments more efficiently. The open-source nature of the project and its application in enhancing AR glasses and especially robotics makes it a crucial development for the future of virtual interaction and machine perception. |
| 03/22/2024 | Important | Microsoft's first AI PCs are the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 for businesses | Microsoft's strategic move to integrate AI capabilities directly into personal hardware (via neural processing units) through the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 shows the company's move to vertically integrate down to the user. More strategic brilliance from Nadella. |
| 03/22/2024 | Optional | Improve performance and reduce cost with fractional H100 GPUs | Although fractional H100 GPUs (charged by the minute) offered by Baseten present a cost-effective solution for businesses needing high computational power temporarily, the broader impact on the market and its adoption remains uncertain. |
| 03/22/2024 | Optional | NHS AI test spots tiny cancers missed by doctors | The NHS's AI model for spotting tiny cancers that were previously missed by doctors illustrates the potential for AI to enhance diagnostic accuracy in healthcare and raise the bar on the standard of care. However, this isn't a new use case so we consider this an optional read. |
| 03/22/2024 | Optional | Improving LLM performance with agentic behavior | AI heavyweight Andrew Ng explains how to create agentic behavior to improve LLM outcomes. Important to know but his instructions are a bit high level so marking this as optional. |
| 03/25/2024 | Important | Accenture's Generative AI Revenue Surpasses All VC-Backed Startups Combined | While our experience working at major consulting firms leads us to believe some of the reported $1B in GenAI work reported is reclassification of current work/resources, this article offers AI leaders a good adoption proof point when asking for budget and resources for GenAI. |
| 03/25/2024 | Important | RAFT: Adapting Language Model to Domain Specific RAG | This piece introduces an approach combining retrieval augmentation (RAG) with fine-tuning techniques to enhance the applicability and efficiency of language models in specific domains. It is particularly relevant for technical teams looking to leverage the latest advancements in AI to improve model performance and applicability. For AI leaders, understanding and potentially adopting RAFT could lead to significant improvements in AI-driven projects. |
| 03/25/2024 | Important | Tennessee becomes the first US state to protect musicians from the threat of AI | New "Elvis Act" safeguards the intellectual property rights of musicians (including use of their voice) in the face of advancing AI technologies. Monitoring progress on various state and federal acts around IP issues as well as seeing how they later hold up in court is critical. |
| 03/25/2024 | Optional | Stability AI CEO resigns to pursue decentralized AI | This latest departure of a key executive comes after several other resignations of critical employees in recent weeks as Stability struggles to generate revenue to support its AI decentralization ambitions. One to watch for those leaning on Stability offerings. |
| 03/25/2024 | Optional | KPMG Using Generative AI To Enhance Capabilities Of Digital Gateway For Tax | A GenAI upgrade to KPMG's existing offering that is hopefully a lot better than what we saw from some other tax assistance platforms like TurboTax. If you're a user, let us know what you think of this one! |
| 03/25/2024 | Optional | Financial Times tests an AI chatbot trained on decades of its own articles | The Financial Times' pilot with 500 FT Pro users is a nice example of an AI chatbot for enhancing user engagement, but is becoming common low-hanging fruit, making this optional news. |
| 03/26/2024 | Important | The Unbundling of ChatGPT | While we know GenAI solutions are increasingly becoming verticalized, the article is worth a read and features a nice chart of some of the role-specific GenAI tools out there. Also features a graph that shows ChatGPT hasn't acquired new users in a while to help prove the point. |
| 03/27/2024 | Important | Is Your Company's Data Ready for Generative AI? | This article by the prolific Tom Davenport delves into the readiness of companies' data for leveraging generative AI technologies. Through survey data, it paints a picture of the current state, where (unsurprisingly) most Chief Data Officers find themselves unprepared for the demands of generative AI. Some helpful figures for benchmarking and Tom always bring a thoughtful approach so worth a quick read. |
| 03/27/2024 | Important | Databricks Launches DBRX, Challenging Big Tech in the Open Source AI Race | Databricks seems to constantly make the news these days with strategic moves and growth. They're now venturing into the competitive arena of open-source large language models with DBRX and claim it has GPT-4 level performance with more efficiency. They're becoming a major player. |
| 03/27/2024 | Important | Amazon Doubles Down on Anthropic, Completing its Planned $4B Investment | Amazon finished out their initial investment - chump change for them so while this is a nice vote of confidence, don't read too much into it. Remember what happened with Inflection. |
| 03/27/2024 | Important | Hume AI Raises $50M After Building the Most Realistic Generative AI Chat Experience Yet | While the development of a chatbot with empathy and emotional intelligence is promising for the future of AI chatbots in sectors like healthcare this is a funding announcement. However, you can follow the link to play with the model so we're putting this as important as it's worth giving it a go. |
| 03/27/2024 | Optional | Pentagon Tested Generative AI to Draft Supply Plans in Latest GIDE 9 Wargame | This experiment underscores the broader implications of AI in enhancing decision-making processes and operational efficiencies in complex, dynamic environments but not an essential read or groundbreaking use case. |
| 03/27/2024 | Optional | New Report Highlights Critical Gap Between Employees and Executives Around Generative AI Leadership Readiness | This report from Udemy just repeats a call to action for educational initiatives rather than presenting new developments in AI technology or applications (and of course, markets their ability to provide that education). |
| 03/27/2024 | Optional | New MLPerf Inference Benchmark Results Highlight the Rapid Growth of Generative AI Models | While these benchmarks are critical for developers and researchers focusing on optimizing AI model performance, the technical nature and specific focus of the benchmarks might limit their immediate relevance to a broader audience. A nothing burger. |
| 03/29/2024 | Important | Microsoft launches new Azure AI tools to cut out LLM safety and reliability risks | We usually don't rate announcements of products that are not yet available as important. But given the prevalence of Microsoft in the enterprise and the issues this will reportedly address - hallucinations, prompt injection attacks and more - we want AI leaders to know this is coming. |
| 03/29/2024 | Optional | Artificial intelligence boosts super-resolution microscopy | Interesting to see a new spin on diffusion for image generation, what they call a Conditional Variational Diffusion Model (CVDM), but this isn't immediately relevant to the AI leader. |
| 03/04/2024 | Important | Qualcomm Empowers Developers with AI Hub, Advancing Generative AI Revolution | Qualcomm's announcement about offering a model hub for developers to access models optimized for Qualcomm hardware highlights the significance of on-device AI computing. The initiative is important due to Qualcomm's substantial market influence, though our John Sviokla made an impassioned plea to mark this Essential! |
| 03/04/2024 | Important | Here Come the AI Worms | Researchers created a worm exploiting security issues with LLMs, emphasizing the importance of awareness around AI security vulnerabilities. While the immediate threat may be theoretical, the potential for future exploitation makes it important for stakeholders to be informed and prepared. |
| 03/04/2024 | Important | Copilot for OneDrive will fetch your files and summarize them | No need to read this announcement, but important to be aware of Copilot 's OneDrive capabilities (eg, enabling file fetching and summarization) with so many enterprises using Microsoft. |
| 03/04/2024 | Optional | Pioneering the Future: Leading Health Systems Test AI-Powered Healthcare Provider | The article discusses the collaboration of over 40 healthcare providers on generative AI applications for healthcare professionals in areas like care management, post-discharge follow-up, wellness, and health risk assessments. The initiative is part of a broader trend of AI integration into healthcare, making it optional as the concept is not new. |
| 03/04/2024 | Optional | H2O AI releases Danube, a super-tiny LLM for mobile applications | H2O AI's release of a compact LLM designed for mobile applications represents another step towards bringing AI capabilities to edge devices. However, given the crowded space of LLMs targeting mobile and edge computing, this announcement is considered optional. |
| 03/04/2024 | Optional | AI chip startup Groq forms new business unit, acquires Definitive Intelligence | While potentially significant for Groq's business trajectory and market positioning, the lack of immediate impact and benefits places this news in the optional category. |
| 03/05/2024 | Essential | Anthropic launches Claude 3 | Challenges OpenAI's ChatGPT in terms of code generation, reasoning and math. This launch signifies a pivotal development in AI capabilities and market competition, though it seems we'll still be using different models to achieve best-in-class results for different tasks. |
| 03/06/2024 | Essential | A Safe Harbor for AI Evaluation and Red Teaming | Open letter issued by notable researchers at MIT, Stanford, CMU and others calling for LLM providers to remove restrictions preventing the research community from red teaming LLMs in good faith. As we continue to see providers release LLMs with flaws (see Google's recent gaff as an example), this would be a positive development. |
| 03/07/2024 | Essential | US Army Experimenting with generative AI Chatbots in War Games: Report | The deployment of generative AI technologies in military war games showcases an expansion in the application of AI beyond conventional sectors. Essential to know from a citizen perspective and gives AI leaders ammunition (pun intended) for making the case that their organization should get going on GenAI. |
| 03/07/2024 | Important | AI Prompt Engineering Is Dead Long Live AI Prompt Engineering | Nice piece debating how long PE will be needed. Our take: For quite some time. The transition from manual to algorithmic prompt engineering is important for AI leaders to acknowledge as it impacts the development, efficiency, and effectiveness of AI applications. |
| 03/07/2024 | Important | Microsoft AI Engineer Warns FTC about Copilot Designer Safety Concerns | Whistleblower case that highlights ongoing concerns about how well models are being tested for harmful outputs before being put into the hands of millions - including children. |
| 03/07/2024 | Important | Google Engineer Indicted Over Allegedly Stealing AI Trade Secrets for China | Brings to light issues around cybersecurity, intellectual property, and international relations in the context of AI technology. Cautionary tale for AI leaders - AI security protocols and access controls are critical!! |
| 03/07/2024 | Optional | How Amperity Is Building Generative AI Tools Using OpenAI's GPT Models | While the application of GPT models by Amperity to create generative AI tools is great, its impact is more incremental within the crowded space of AI-driven marketing solutions. |
| 03/07/2024 | Optional | ArtPrompt: ASCII Art-based Jailbreak Attacks against Aligned LLMs | We had a spirited debate on this one, but the majority felt this particular case represents a highly specialized security challenge. It's marked as optional, given its narrow scope and the assumption that such specific vulnerabilities will be addressed as part of ongoing security enhancements in AI systems. |
| 03/07/2024 | Optional | Amazon Buys Nuclear Data Centre Campus for $650 Million | While indicative of the growing demand for sustainable and large-scale energy solutions to support AI computations, not an essential read. Note Microsoft has been talking about doing this for a while, too, so we're likely to see more of this. |
| 03/08/2024 | Essential | Saudi Aramco Unveils Industry's First Generative AI Model | A 250B parameter model customized on 90 years' worth of company data tailored to needs of the industry -- impressive! This move could significantly influence the competitive dynamics and operational efficiencies within the energy sector, making it essential news. |
| 04/25/2024 | Important | Simple probes can catch sleeper agents | Anthropic continues to follow through on their commitment to responsible AI. Here they've studied and shared their findings on easy ways to detect secretly corrupted AI systems. AI leaders need to stay abreast of the nature of emerging threats to LLMs and how to combat them. |
| 04/25/2024 | Important | Researchers develop malicious AI 'worm' targeting generative AI systems | Same reason as above - security is critical. The worm can extract data and take over email systems to send out malicious emails. Intel collaborated with academia on this one - the worm was developed in a lab setting, so no risk in the wild yet, but it could certainly become one. |
| 04/25/2024 | Important | CMA seeks views on AI partnerships and other arrangements | The review by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (akin to the US's FTC and anti-trust arm of the DOJ) is a precursor to a formal inquiry and part of a broader regulatory interest in AI partnerships, echoing similar investigations in the US and EU. |
| 04/25/2024 | Optional | Apple releases OpenELM: small, open source AI models designed to run on-device | This is the second batch of models Apple has quietly released (they published a multimodel one last fall). Open sourcing is somewhat new for Apple so we're noting this as an indicator of their LLM strategy but not worth reading the article. We're looking forward to the May 7 event they just announced. |
| 04/25/2024 | Optional | Snowflake targets enterprise AI with launch of Arctic LLM | We're excited about the company's repositioning under the new CEO to aggressively compete in the generative AI space. They claim this model is on par with Llama 3 but released no supporting documentation. We decided to save a potential 'Important' rating for the more comprehensive Cortex offering. |
| 04/25/2024 | Optional | The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses have multimodal AI now | Nice to see new computing form factors continue to evolve but this isn't a worthy read for the AI leader. |
| 04/01/2024 | Important | Congress bans staff use of Microsoft's AI Copilot | Showcases the government’s rightfully cautious stance towards integrating GenAI tools within its operations, emphasizing security and privacy concerns. |
| 04/01/2024 | Optional | NYC’s AI Chatbot Tells Businesses to Break the Law | Another cautionary tale about putting GenAI tools out in the wild without proper tuning and guardrails. |
| 04/01/2024 | Optional | OpenAI built a voice cloning tool, but you can’t use it… yet | Another announcement from OpenAI about a capability that no one can use yet. Plus other providers like ElevenLabs already offer this. |
| 04/01/2024 | Optional | How Stability AI’s Founder Tanked His Billion-Dollar Startup | This long, well-researched story is rich in details about the operational and managerial missteps leading to Stability AI's challenges. |
| 04/01/2024 | Optional | OpenAI and Microsoft Plan $100 Billion AI ‘Stargate’ | It will be interesting to see if AI's power couple pull off this planned build of a mega-AI data center, but it's only in the planning stages at this point. |
| 04/01/2024 | Optional | Generative AI to quantify uncertainty in weather forecasting | Another example of Google's AI research prowess - and we welcome better weather forecasts - but not essential news for the AI leader. |
| 04/02/2024 | Important | Yum Brands Doubles Tech Spending, Expands Use of Generative AI | Yum Brands has a pretty comprehensive strategy for applying GenAI across its operations and is putting $21M (double last year's spend) into digital innovation this year. Core areas of its business are being targeted. This is another good article to have in your back pocket when trying to get budget for GenAI or facing skepticism over its value. But Yum appears to have no GenAI apps in production yet, preventing us from elevating this to an essential read. |
| 04/02/2024 | Important | For Data-Guzzling AI Companies, the Internet Is Too Small | We had a lively discussion around this one (starts around minute 26:00 in our morning briefing). It highlights the challenge of finding new data sources to improve the biggest of models any further given they've hoovered the entire internet, including many (but not all) video transcripts. As you've heard many times before, AI leaders, your company's data is extremely valuable. Are you using it to its full potential? You need to be. |
| 04/02/2024 | Optional | Generative AI: The next S-curve for the semiconductor industry? | Despite presenting forward-looking insights into the potential B2B and B2C GenAI growth areas that will drive semi demand, speculative assumptions in the analysis and a slog of a read led to its optional rating. Some interesting points if you can hang in there with it, but it doesn't provide a solid enough foundation for immediate action or decision-making. |
| 04/02/2024 | Optional | Apple researchers develop AI that can 'see' and understand screen context | Yet again, Apple in the news around GenAI, but not for announcing any GenAI products. This research is geared toward improving context to help them (eventually) create a good experience when using GenAI on your iPhone. Interesting, but not a critical read. |
| 04/02/2024 | Optional | The Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of the Deeper Layers | Authors report improving upon well-established pruning techniques. May be good fodder for engineers looking for new tricks, but not an essential read for the AI executive. |
| 04/02/2024 | Optional | It's for Real: Generative AI Takes Hold in Insurance Distribution | We know Insurance is an industry 'in the crucible' based on our WINS framework and hoped this article would provide some fresh insights. But there's not much new info here, and we didn't necessarily agree with the analysis provided in the charts, so giving this one an optional rating. |
| 04/03/2024 | Important | WHO Unveils a Digital Health Promoter Harnessing Generative AI for Public Health | This development was considered important due to WHO's significant role in global health and the potential impact of introducing an AI-driven assistant like this one (named SARAH) to serve the historically underserved. This is a major, cautious organization jumping into the GenAI mix. And our tests show the tool is quite good, despite a little latency and repetitiveness. |
| 04/03/2024 | Important | Many-shot Jailbreaking | Anthropic found this issue and kindly alerted other LLM providers to it. They've mitigated it in their models (though not to 100%) but we don't know if other providers have. Also, if you're building your own model, you need to be aware of this and take steps to combat it as well. |
| 04/03/2024 | Important | Gen-AI Search Engine Perplexity Has a Plan to Sell Ads | Search is changing - this is essential for a CMO but only important from an awareness perspective for the AI leader. You to be informed as to all the ways GenAI is changing the game in long-standing industry norms. Recall this startup also focused in this area. |
| 04/03/2024 | Optional | Hailo lands $120 million to keep battling Nvidia as most AI chip startups struggle | Although Hailo's successful fundraising marks its significance in the AI chip industry and the move toward compute at the edge, the group consensus leaned towards this news being optional. They seem to be gaining traction but Nvidia and other major players still rule the roost. |
| 04/03/2024 | Optional | Luminance's Generative AI-for-law raises $40M Series B | Despite acknowledging Luminance's achievement and healthy competition for Harvey, we see this as primarily a sector-specific development. It was noted that while the funding signifies growth in legal tech AI, it represents a trend rather than a breakthrough, making it of optional interest to those not directly involved in legal AI. |
| 04/04/2024 | Essential | AI adoption accelerates as enterprise PoCs show productivity gains | This article underscores the tangible benefits and productivity gains realized through GenAI adoption. Highlighting examples from 3 major companies - Webster Bank, Eli Lilly and Eaton - it highlights a lot of the best practices we've been espousing. Long but essential read with good proof points for the AI executive. |
| 04/04/2024 | Important | Startup Datavolo raises over $21M to transform how generative AI models access unstructured data | Datavolo's announcement is not necessarily significant for the capital raise, but it is for spotlighting the critical challenge of structuring your data pipeline - you'll need these types of tools because the classic ones won't cut it for routing unstructured data to GenAI. |
| 04/04/2024 | Optional | Microsoft 365's Copilot gets a GPT-4 Turbo upgrade and improved image generation | The upgrade to Microsoft 365's Copilot with GPT-4 Turbo and enhanced image generation capabilities signifies a notable advancement for users already embedded in the M365 ecosystem. While it introduces more powerful models for reasoning and supports larger text prompts, along with improved daily limits for image creation, it's seen as an incremental upgrade, but good for M365 users to be aware of. |
| 04/04/2024 | Optional | I have a group chat with three AI friends, thanks to Nomi AI they're getting too smart | Explores the evolving capabilities of AI in creating more convincing and emotionally intelligent virtual companions. Highlighting personal experiences with Nomi AI's chatbots, the discussion reflects on the broader implications for social interaction and mental health. Intriguing for its societal implications, but its immediate relevance to enterprise AI strategy and day-to-day operations is limited. |
| 04/04/2024 | Optional | Enhancing The Forrester Experience With Generative AI | A chatbot that provides on-demand info for high-tier users. What took you so long? Nothing burger. |
| 04/04/2024 | Optional | Nature Communications Publishes Zapata AI Research on Generative AI for Optimization | While the findings demonstrate the potential for quantum modeling to outperform traditional methods in complex optimization problems like portfolio management, its current status as emerging research renders it an optional consideration for a broader audience. We do think we'll see more quantum+AI progress so a good weekend read if you want to geek out a bit. |
| 04/04/2024 | Optional | DALL-E now lets you edit images in ChatGPT | Finally, in-painting comes to ChatGPT. It has been available in other popular image generation apps like Midjourney for a while. Our David DeLallo is a Midjourney power user, but says this will make him start exploring the use of ChatGPT more to create his weekly AI comic. |
| 04/05/2024 | Important | JetMoE: Reaching LLaMA2 Performance with 0.1M Dollars | A demonstration of achieving high-level AI performance with significantly reduced costs, though they compare this model's performance to Llama 2 as opposed to the most powerful models. Still, it offers hope to enterprises that it may not cost millions to build a custom model that gives you a competitive advantage. |
| 04/05/2024 | Important | S&P Global launches groundbreaking AI benchmark for the financial industry | We've been espousing the importance of industry-specific benchmarks for real-world AI performance. S&P Global's initiative serves as a pioneering example in the financial sector where precision, reliability and fostering trust are paramount. |
| 04/05/2024 | Important | Wiz uncovers security flaws at Hugging Face | Israeli cloud security firm, Wiz, was able to access private data and models from Hugging Face users by uploading a malicious LLM. Hugging Face has patched the flaw, but this is an important reminder of the continuous need for vigilance in vetting providers. This hack was possible because Hugging Face stores all instances of models and data uploads from users in the same cloud - they, of course, aren't alone in this. |
| 04/05/2024 | Important | Introducing Command R+: A Scalable LLM Built for Business | Cohere seems to be emphasizing its competitive pricing, though Command R+ is several times more expensive than Command-R (launched a few weeks ago). Of note that there's another option out there of an LLM with associated tooling. |
| 04/05/2024 | Optional | OpenAI expands its custom model training program | Good to know about some incremental improvements to OpenAI's tuning API and the scaling up of their hands-on work with customers, but not an essential read. Scattered among the technical notes, they share that Indeed and SK Telekom are using OpenAI models in applications. |
| 04/05/2024 | Optional | Google using AI to come up with search answers in UK trial | Google's expansion of its AI-driven search answers into the UK is another step in Google's testing of its Search Generative Experience, which is available to beta testers (we're among them) in the US. No need to read - we've just shared the news in a nutshell for you. |
| 04/05/2024 | Optional | SiMa.ai secures $70M funding to introduce a multimodal GenAI chip | Our Luda Kopeikina, a venture capitalist, notes that the valuation of this firm hasn't increased in this funding round so the future for this company might not be as bright as this announcement indicates. They're SoC offering is for the edge, which could make them an interesting takeover target for Nvidia, who isn't yet playing on the edge much. |
| 04/08/2024 | Important | Hercules AI unveils assembly line approach for building enterprise-grade gen AI apps | This platform looks promising for helping industries with a lot of info trapped in spreadsheets to extract it and enable LLMs to do what they do best - improve worker productivity. It also features an LLM that gets impressive coding results that surpass GPT-4 by simply fine-tuning a 7B model. |
| 04/08/2024 | Optional | How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for A.I. | A nice piece of reporting that gets into the details of the lengths OpenAI, Google and others are going to in order to get more data to train their models. And, as we know, the legality of some of their methods are questionable. A reminder to the AI leader about how valuable your data is. Good read if you have the time, but optional. |
| 04/08/2024 | Optional | How Google lost ground in the AI race | Similar to the previous piece, this is well-written and captures the details on the causes of Google's well-covered AI fumbles, but is an optional read. The company's GenAI course to date makes for a good Harvard Business case study - a giant organization with duplicative projects happening in silos that faces the innovator's dilemma around their search business. |
| 04/08/2024 | Optional | Large language models are able to downplay their cognitive abilities to fit the persona they simulate | This is not a surprising feature. We know that giving GenAI chatbots a persona (eg, 'act like the most effective marketer in the world') works well. If you're not employing this technique in your prompting strategies, you should be. |
| 04/08/2024 | Optional | SWE-agent turns LMs (e.g. GPT-4) into software engineering agents that can fix bugs and issues in real GitHub repositories | An application that looks to compete with Devin, but demonstrates slightly less effective performance and has a clunkier UX. Expect to see many more Devin competitors emerge. |
| 04/08/2024 | Optional | Meta will require labels on more AI-generated content | Of course Meta needs to do this to look like they're trying their best in the eyes of regulators and the public, but we know tools aimed at identifying AI-generated content are not very effective so don't expect a lot of help here. |
| 04/09/2024 | Important | Jamie Dimon says AI may be as impactful on humanity as printing press, electricity and computers | The headline isn't why we tagged this as important (and our John Sviokla argued it is essential). It's the information provided in Dimon's annual investor letter that we want the AI leader to absorb. JP Morgan is a tech leader among banks: 2,000 AI/ML workers, 400 apps in production, 32 data centers, and private and public clouds (though still migrating there). And Dimon says he sees AI impacting every role. |
| 04/09/2024 | Important | Coles turns GenAI onto 40,000 customer comments a week | Another article that nearly made it to essential because it's a great use case. Coles is a giant supermarket chain in Australia. They're using GenAI to process the 40K customer comments they collect each month and acting on the insights at a store level. Well done! |
| 04/09/2024 | Optional | TSMC receives $6.6B to build chip factories under U.S. CHIPS and Science Act | While essential for everyone as US citizens, optional read for the AI leader. Good to see the Chips Act working, and TSMC is more on track to stand up the 3 foundries they're building in Arizona than Intel - the first one is set to come online in 1H2025. |
| 04/09/2024 | Optional | Google rolls out Gemini in Android Studio for coding assistance | A nothing burger. It would be news if Google DIDN'T offer a coding tool. |
| 04/09/2024 | Optional | Stability AI brings 12B parameters to Stable LM 2 model update | Great that the company is still pumping out new models despite the turmoil over there, but are AI leaders going to use models from an organization that is hanging on by a thread? Imagine trying to justify that to your CEO... |
| 04/09/2024 | Optional | Biocompare Announces Beta Launch of LifeSciAI, a New Generative AI Tool | This supplier of products for the experimenting scientist is offering a chatbot that has knowledge of 8 million lab supplies and tons of experiments, but it's a common use case and a niche user base so we rated it optional. |
| 04/10/2024 | Essential | Google Cloud Next 2024: Everything announced so far | It may be a cloud event but AI is taking center stage. A new video generation tool in Workspace, a revamped image generation tool in the developer kit, and an agent builder were among the announced products. Nothing edgy - mostly their versions of tools already available from others. But Workspace has a huge user base and Google is 3rd in cloud, so worth knowing about. |
| 04/10/2024 | Important | Intel Unleashes Enterprise AI with Gaudi 3, AI Open Systems Strategy and New Customer Wins | Intel is still a few years behind Nvidia, but competition is needed in this space to meet demand and bring prices down so good to see Intel keeping at it. |
| 04/10/2024 | Optional | AMD launches second-generation Versal chips to make AI faster at the edge | This is an upgrade to an existing chip - feels like a 'me too' announcement on the day of Intel's. Important to know if you're a customer but not worth reading the article otherwise. |
| 04/10/2024 | Optional | Ferret-UI: Grounded Mobile UI Understanding with Multimodal LLMs | This is the paper that follows on the research announcement from a week or so ago. As we said then, of course Apple is putting effort into GenAI computing at the edge since it's where the company plays hardest. |
| 04/10/2024 | Optional | Dairyland powers up for a generative AI edge | We had high expectations for this article, hoping to see some interesting use cases from a local utility. But in the end, seems they're pretty much just using Copilot for coding and generating communications. They are using traditional AI in more impactful ways, though, so maybe more to come on the GenAI front soon. |
| 04/10/2024 | Optional | New Federal Bill Could Require Disclosure of Songs Used in AI Training | Rep. Adam Schiff introduced a bill that calls on LLM providers to reveal what music was used in their training data (nothing around other content types - industry lobbying, anyone?) but we've got some time to see if this becomes a law so nothing to see here yet. |
| 04/11/2024 | Important | Poe introduces a price-per-message revenue model for AI bot creators | Quora seems to have beaten OpenAI to the punch in providing a way for creators to monetize the bots they create using a revenue model similar to app stores. This is for bots developed on any platform as long as they integrate with Quora's Poe AI. Increasingly tough to understand why Quora's CEO still sits on OpenAI's board... |
| 04/11/2024 | Optional | Beyond Transformers: Symbolica launches with $33M to change the AI industry with symbolic models | Early days for this company that plans to combine symbolic AI, which has been worked on for decades, with deep learning to produce models and applications that are interpretable. John Sviokla and Tim Andrews engaged in a spirited (albeit geeky) discussion about when and whether LLMs could become interpretable which is worth watching in the recording or today's briefing, but Symbolica doesn't plan to release anything until 2025 so this is one to watch, but optional for now. |
| 04/11/2024 | Optional | Mistral AI drops new 'mixture of experts' model with a torrent link | We may elevate this to important once we start to learn how the models perform, but Mistral's minimalist method of announcing releases makes it tough for us to assess this development for the moment. We do know this is a talented bunch so we expect good things! |
| 04/11/2024 | Optional | Ask your assets anything: State Street's generative AI lets investors chat with their data | This piece of news almost made it to important. Custody is a boring but critical area of global finance. And State Street is one of a handful of banks that collectively serve as the 'keeper' of about 90% of assets. The company is building a chatbot for custody customers to interact with as well as a bot for a broader group of customers to more easily interact with their research. We would have rated this as Important if the bots were already available but they aren't just yet. |
| 04/11/2024 | Optional | Intercom's new Fin AI Copilot gives customer service agents their personal AI assistant | We know customer service is a prime use case, and this is a platform for building your own GenAI-powered application. But organizations are doing just fine building these already so not sure this will get a ton of traction. |
| 04/12/2024 | Essential | OpenEQA: From word models to world models | Meta released a benchmark to help model developers assess how their models do with establishing a representation of the world, which is essential for progressing the abilities of AI and robots. LLMs aren't very good at this--the latest version of GPT-4 does best based on Meta's analysis (full results provided in the article). The benchmark itself isn't necessarily essential but spurring research in this area is. |
| 04/12/2024 | Important | Microsoft is working on sound recognition AI technologies capable of detecting natural disasters | While this is only the announcement of Microsoft's filing of a patent in this area, 'AI as ears' will open up a host of new use cases. Here, Microsoft is patenting a technology that better senses sounds amid background noise. Important to start thinking about how you might be able to use this capability. |
| 04/12/2024 | Important | NTT Research unveils AI model, sustainable path for AI, and better distributed data centers | Three major announcements of note here: (1) they're releasing a model they claim does better than GPT-4 on analyzing inputs that contain graphics and text , (2) they propose a paradigm for distributed data centers that can improve their energy efficiency, and (3) they announce a partnership with Harvard to advance knowledge about the brain which would benefit AI development and human understanding. Research, but all critical areas. |
| 04/12/2024 | Optional | European car manufacturer will pilot Sanctuary AI's humanoid robot | BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar and others have committed to testing this robot. Great to see robotics moving forward, but let's see how these pilots pan out before we elevate this to important or essential. |
| 04/12/2024 | Optional | RULER: What's the Real Context Size of Your Long-Context Language Models? | Another benchmark. This one confirms what many of us experience - LLMs don't perform as well in their purported context windows as their developers claim. GPT-4 does best. Could be a more useful benchmark than some existing ones. Put it on your radar but might not be worth the long read. |
| 04/12/2024 | Optional | Snowflake Copilot, a Mistral Large-powered AI assistant, launches in public preview | Snowflake now enables natural-language prompts that translate into technical SQL queries. Nice feature, but no need to read the article. |
| 04/12/2024 | Optional | The Weather Channel's parent company has a new AI tool to make hyperlocal weather videos | Helpful for meteorologists, but the use case doesn't feature any novelties so parking this one in the optional spot. |
| 04/15/2024 | Important | The Worst Part of a Wall Street Career May Be Coming to an End | Banks leaders say that AI could soon enable them to cut down on junior analyst hires by a whopping two-thirds. Implications are huge for organizations. |
| 04/15/2024 | Important | Introducing Rerank 3: A New Foundation Model for Efficient Enterprise Search & Retrieval | The introduction of Rerank 3 by Cohere signals important advancements in cost efficiency and performance in enterprise search solutions. |
| 04/15/2024 | Important | The rise of the chief AI officer | There's a significant focus on the necessity of having dedicated AI leadership to navigate the complex legal, ethical, and operational challenges. |
| 04/15/2024 | Important | Generative AI is coming for healthcare, and not everyone’s thrilled | Put aside the fear-mongering headline. The article provides a good list of use cases that healthcare providers are exploring. |
| 04/15/2024 | Optional | Apple plans Mac line overhaul with AI-focused M4 chips, Bloomberg News reports | Yet again, Apple making news for something forthcoming but not yet available. Even when this chip drops, it's just an upgrade. |
| 04/15/2024 | Optional | Former Google DeepMind researchers launch AI-powered music creation app Udio | We knew this was coming and now it's here. Used in marketing and entertainment, but not an essential read. |
| 04/15/2024 | Optional | British DARPA’ to build AI gatekeepers for ‘quantitative safety guarantees | Certifications like the one this group is working on are welcomed, but this is still in the works. |
| 04/16/2024 | Essential | 2024 AI Index Report | This annual report from Stanford University is a comprehensive and valuable resource on AI's current state. |
| 04/16/2024 | Important | Reka Core, Flash, and Edge: A Series of Powerful Multimodal Language Models | Competitive offering from a small but well-funded group in Singapore with former Google Brain and DeepMind founders is notable. |
| 04/16/2024 | Important | A.I. Has a Measurement Problem | We need reliable and standard ways to evaluate and compare model performance. |
| 04/16/2024 | Important | Cohere Compass Private Beta: A New Multi-Aspect Embedding Model | Offers a new approach to embedding models that could improve enterprise data systems management. |
| 04/16/2024 | Optional | Adobe Premiere Pro is getting generative AI video tools — and hopefully OpenAI’s Sora | The capability isn't yet available, and the integration of Sora isn't even certain. |
| 04/16/2024 | Optional | OpenAI's Altman pitches ChatGPT Enterprise to large firms, including some Microsoft customers | Unsurprising continued coopetition at play with no compelling reason to engage OpenAI directly. |
| 04/16/2024 | Optional | ArenaX Labs launches ARC AI game infrastructure and SAI research platform | Cool development in gaming but not of note to the AI leader. |
| 04/17/2024 | Important | Microsoft Makes High-Stakes Play in Tech Cold War With Emirati A.I. Deal | Microsoft's investment into G42 has been orchestrated by the US government as a way to get companies in the Middle East more aligned to the US as opposed to China. While this is important from a geopolitical perspective, it's also yet another proof point for the AI leader that GenAI is truly powerful - our government is moving swiftly and decisively to position the US as a global AI powerhouse. |
| 04/17/2024 | Important | Zendesk users get generative AI infusion for customer service | While it's not surprising that a customer service software provider would integrate GenAI into it offering, the company includes some other nice features that provide ideas for any organization. The tool helps predict staffing levels and prioritizes an agent's work in addition to providing the agent with the best answers to customer issues. |
| 04/17/2024 | Important | Pegasystems offers every worker access to a personalized, generative AI-powered coach | This is another article we're flagging as a source of GenAI use case ideas. This low-code software provider is using GenAI internally in interesting ways - it integrates GenAI into an individual's workflow in a personalized way so that it gives advice to a sales or back-office worker in the course of their work. |
| 04/17/2024 | Important | C6 Bank accelerates innovation using generative AI with AWS | The use cases this major Brazilian bank backed by JP Morgan is implementing are low-hanging fruit (coding and customer service), but that's why we're flagging. These use cases are becoming table stakes so if you're not already at least testing them, you're falling behind. |
| 04/17/2024 | Important | Nvidia expands Ampere-based GPUs for AI design and productivity apps | Nvidia is everywhere - including at the edge. This will enable laptops to run AI faster. |
| 04/18/2024 | Essential | Thomson Reuters unveils CoCounsel, leveraging generative AI for legal professionals | Big name with a lot of data entering an increasingly crowded space, but one where Harvey has maintained its dominance to date. A formidable competitor has arrived. The economics for law firms and everyone who leans on them are changing fast. For AI leaders, this is a reminder that if your company is in an industry in the crucible according to our WINS framework, you have little time to lose. |
| 04/18/2024 | Important | Logitech wants you to press its new AI button | Let's be clear - this isn't important for the release of the $49.99 mouse itself. What's important is the fact that we're moving toward a world where we'll all have a physical 'easy button' that activates an assistant to help us do many everyday tasks (remember that Microsoft is installing one on keyboards as well). |
| 04/18/2024 | Important | BigPanda launches generative AI tool designed specifically for ITOps | While this functionality doesn't look extremely sophisticated, any help here is welcomed, and the AI leaders who also head up IT should take note that this functionality will be coming to the platform of your choice soon. |
| 04/18/2024 | Important | Cheaper, Better, Faster, Stronger | In this article, Mistral provides information on the 8X22B open source model it released last week. The highlights are that it covers 5 languages, offers native function-calling capability, and claims to have better performance-to-cost ratio than its nearest competitors, Llama 2 and Cohere's Command models. |
| 04/18/2024 | Important | 12 companies that rolled out internal AI tools for employees | The article shares an overview of GenAI-powered general knowledge and HR assistance tools used by both big (PwC, Walmart) and smaller firms (Pipefy). Easy read and a good scan of the types of tools that are becoming commonplace in many organizations. Worth a few minutes of your time. |
| 04/19/2024 | Essential | Meta launches Llama 3 | This isn't an "another model, another day" type of announcement. Besides already shooting to the top of the open-source model leaderboard on performance, Llama 3 is now heavily integrated into all of Meta's social channels, enabling search, image generation, animations and more right in its apps. The image generation capability is particularly impressive - so fast that the images generate as you type in your "order." Llama 3 still doesn't hold a candle to the top closed source models but the next version of it due out in the summer sounds like it might... |
| 04/19/2024 | Important | Honeywell exec reveals plan to deliver $100 million in value with generative AI: “Just getting started” | While this isn't a significant amount of value generation for a $90B+ company, Honeywell shares info about its organizational GenAI strategy here that offers some tips / validation for the AI leaders' approach. |
| 04/19/2024 | Important | Generative AI in manufacturing — out of the old, emerges the new | Industrial giant Bosch details how they're creating synthetic data to enable GenAI-powered quality assurance. The company noted that it has so few defects in its products, that it doesn't have enough error-ridden product images to train the system - a little self-promo never hurts. This is a great use case. |
| 04/19/2024 | Important | Meet Lingo-2, a groundbreaking AI model that navigates roads and narrates its journey | London-based autonomous driving tech provider Wayve released this second version of its multi-modal model that can share what it's doing as it maneuvers (so far, only in simulation environments). Multimodal is the future so this is of note, but the development of this model is not yet essential given where we are with autonomous vehicles. |
| 04/19/2024 | Optional | ChatGPT is coming to Nothing’s earbuds | The name of the company (which creates mobile phones - anyone actually have one?) says it all about this nonessential development. |
| 04/22/2024 | Important | Intel Builds World’s Largest Neuromorphic System to Enable More Sustainable AI | While this system has a ways to go before reaching the enterprise, it's important to know that more efficient computing for generative AI is on the way. Intel claims this system uses a whopping 100X less energy than conventional CPU and GPU architectures. Sandia National Laboratories will be the testing ground for this - we look forward to seeing how it goes! |
| 04/22/2024 | Important | Langdock raises $3M with General Catalyst to help companies avoid vendor lock-in with LLMs | This particular company's tool may or may not end up being notable, but the space they're playing in is. The middle layer that they're providing between LLMs and the user enables access to whichever LLM is best-suited for a particular task and is sanctioned for use by an enterprise. |
| 04/22/2024 | Optional | Microsoft shows off VASA-1, an AI framework that makes human headshots talk, sing | Just one image can be turned into a video with synced audio and pretty realistic animation - quite amazing. But you can see how this could be used for nefarious purposes so Microsoft is taking the responsible route and not making this available. They offered no timetable for when they might which is why we marked this optional. |
| 04/22/2024 | Optional | How United Airlines uses AI to make flying the friendly skies a bit easier | Pretty underwhelming generative AI use cases discussed like creating an announcement for a pilot. Skip this one. |
| 04/22/2024 | Optional | Two-thirds of top 20 pharmas have banned ChatGPT—and many in life sci call AI ‘overrated,’ survey finds | This click-bate got our John Sviokla fired up on an early Monday morning. While some pharmas might be banning ChatGPT specifically, the article also notes that pharmas are using generative AI in critical areas like drug discovery (there's already a GenAI-created drug in Phase II trials, btw). If anything, this article shows companies what not to do - it says half of employees are using GenAI chatbots anyways. There are too many easy ways to enable your employees to use GenAI chatbots safely to ban it and give up the efficiency gains. |
| 04/23/2024 | Important | Generative A.I. Arrives in the Gene Editing World of CRISPR | While there's no immediate action item for an AI leader from this news, it's just a stunning advancement that humans in general should know about. |
| 04/23/2024 | Important | Efficient finetuning of Llama 3 with FSDP QDoRA | This is a super-technical article that you should only read in its entirety if you seriously like to geek out. |
| 04/23/2024 | Optional | Introducing the Data Intelligence Platform for Energy | Databricks' vertically integrated offering is notable for those in energy and other asset-heavy industries. |
| 04/23/2024 | Optional | Swiss Re Launches Swiss Re Life Guide Scout, a Generative AI-Powered Underwriting Assistant | A nice use case, but not groundbreaking. |
| 04/23/2024 | Optional | Sam Altman Invests in Energy Startup Focused on AI Data Centers | Sam is diversifying his energy plays, adding this to his portfolio. |
| 04/23/2024 | Optional | Apple acquires French startup behind AI and computer vision technology | This acquisition happened in December but is coming to light now. |
| 04/24/2024 | Essential | Introducing more enterprise-grade features for API customers | OpenAI announced new enterprise features to better serve large-scale business needs, including enhanced security, administrative controls, and, perhaps most notably, favorable pricing strategies. |
| 04/24/2024 | Essential | New additions to Amazon Bedrock make it easier and faster than ever to build generative AI applications securely | Amazon’s improvements to Bedrock substantially enhance the ease of integrating and managing AI models. |
| 04/24/2024 | Important | BCG says AI consulting will supply 20% of revenues this year | BCG’s projection highlights the growing influence and integration of GenAI. |
| 04/24/2024 | Important | Perplexity is raising $250M+ at a $2.5B-$3B valuation for its AI search platform, sources say | The march toward reimagining search with GenAI continues. Perplexity has big-name backers. |
| 04/24/2024 | Optional | The Instruction Hierarchy: Training LLMs to Prioritize Privileged Instructions | Discusses a training approach that makes LLMs prioritize instructions which could help protect against threats. |
| 04/24/2024 | Optional | Microsoft launches Phi-3, its smallest AI model yet | Microsoft's launch of this 3.8B model represents more advancement in creating efficient, compact AI models. |
| 04/24/2024 | Optional | The Coca-Cola Company and Microsoft announce five-year strategic partnership to accelerate cloud and generative AI initiatives | This partnership between Coca-Cola and Microsoft to build out new GenAI use cases together. |
| 04/26/2024 | Essential | At Moderna, OpenAI’s GPTs Are Changing Almost Everything | Highlights the company's broad application of GenAI from legal processes to drug discovery. More than 750 GPTs created by employees to date with plans to engage OpenAI for more formal applications. However, this is a company struggling with only 1 product in the market and there's a little too much smoke here as opposed to fire to call this essential. |
| 04/26/2024 | Important | Stainless is helping OpenAI, Anthropic and others build SDKs for their APIs | Focuses on Stainless's role in enhancing the accessibility of LLMs through SDKs, which aid in the broader deployment of AI technologies by bridging a crucial gap for developers. Very small company ($1 million in annual revenue and 10 employees), but we're flagging to let the AI leader know that their teams do need SDKs for APIs. |
| 04/26/2024 | Important | AI designs new drugs based on protein structures | The model discussed here was developed through an industry/academia collaboration between Bosch and ETH Zurich. It's tuned to (1) produce only those compounds that can actually be created and (2) limit side effects. It's being open-sourced. A good story all around to take note of. |
| 04/26/2024 | Optional | New Cohere Toolkit Accelerates Generative AI Application Development | Cohere has made some important announcements recently related to new models and RAG tools, but, while this is a helpful set of tools - includes interfaces, connectors and other goodies - we didn't think this one rose to that level of significance. |
| 04/26/2024 | Optional | Research identifies pitfalls and opportunities for generative AI in patient messaging systems | Nice to see an actual study on the use of LLMs v. LLMs+humans v. humans alone but the insights it yielded aren't surprising. The conclusion was essentially that LLMs are helpful, but humans need to edit LLMs' work. Duh... |
| 04/26/2024 | Optional | Watch it and weep (or smile): Synthesia’s AI video avatars now feature emotions | If you watch the videos of an avatar before and after this feature was added, you'll see there's only a subtle improvement in emotional facial expressions. |
| 04/26/2024 | Optional | SenseTime Shares Surge on New Language Model It Says Rivals GPT-4 Turbo | There's no evidence provided to back their claim so this stays in the optional camp for now. |
| 04/29/2024 | Important | JP Morgan AI Research Introduces FlowMind | JPMorgan demonstrates its leadership in AI in the financial sector with this paper that explains how they're using LLMs to automate workflows that are unpredictable. They also use a training method to limit hallucinations that's different from RAG. FlowMind writes code to automate a workflow as the user performs a string of tasks and then presents what it created at a high level for user feedback. Looks to still require that user to have some technical knowledge, though. Sounds a lot like what we described in our recent HBR article - love this. |
| 04/29/2024 | Important | Oracle doubles down on generative AI with new features to accelerate enterprise deal cycles | They're offering 50+ GenAI capabilities in Oracle CX Cloud. One example is automatic generation of next-best-actions for customer service agents, as opposed to the agent having to type in the customer problem to get recommendations. The article also shares that Cohere is under the hood of these capabilities - we've seen a lot of new offer announcements from Cohere over the last few weeks and here we see them in action. |
| 04/29/2024 | Optional | Estée Lauder and Microsoft partner to help beauty brands use generative AI | We've recently seen similar announcements of industry/big tech partnerships, for example Moderna/OpenAI and Coca-Cola/Microsoft. They're primarily just grabs for attention. We'll call it important when they have in-production use cases. |
| 04/29/2024 | Optional | Chatbot answers are all made up. This new tool helps you figure out which ones to trust. | MIT has created a tool that summons multiple LLMs to opine over one LLM's answer and assign it a probability of correctness. But nothing will ever get a perfect score so not sure how this is helpful. For now, you're always going to have to check LLM responses for accuracy. |
| 04/29/2024 | Optional | It’s not only AI that hallucinates | Nice to see a defense of LLMs for their occasional inaccuracies - the author points out that humans don't have impeccable recall either. But it's a meandering editorial with no real value - skip it. |
| 04/29/2024 | Optional | Make Your LLM Fully Utilize the Context | While the research on enhancing LLMs' context utilization is of academic interest, we're not convinced of immediate practical applications or significant breakthroughs. |
| 04/30/2024 | Essential | NIST launches a new platform to assess generative AI | A government entity is taking the lead on developing and enforcing GenAI standards - the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced a new program, NIST GenAI, that will release benchmarks, help create “content authenticity” detection (i.e. deepfake-checking) systems and encourage the development of software to spot the source of fake or misleading AI-generated information. |
| 04/30/2024 | Important | GitHub Copilot can now help start a project with AI, not just complete it | GitHub Copilot will now have capabilities to start/design a software project. For developers, this is an important component that will make their work more efficient. |
| 04/30/2024 | Important | Healthcare industry sees increased investment in generative AI, LLMs | This article reports 300% growth in budgets allocated for generative AI projects in the healthcare and life sciences sectors according to one-fifth of the study participants. There is also useful statistics on GenAI applications development and deployment in these sectors. |
| 04/30/2024 | Optional | Mysterious new model called gpt2-chatbot | This is speculative news that is bound to create buzz but not worth a lot of attention. It's similar to the news in 2019 announcing that scientists developed an AI model that is so powerful that it is dangerous to release. |
| 04/30/2024 | Optional | ChatGPT’s AI ‘memory’ can remember the preferences of paying customers | The Memory functionality was announced in Feb 2024. Now this memory capability is available. More features are needed for it to become useful for industrial applications. |
| 04/30/2024 | Optional | OpenAI licenses Financial Times’ content for ChatGPT | OpenAI has been on a partnership mission lately. And, even though we believe that the partnership with Financial Times is powerful for both parties, it is one of many. |
| 05/01/2024 | Essential | Siemens Xcelerator: Scaling Roll-out of Generative AI with Siemens Industrial Copilot | A vertically integrated industrial GenAI tool from a market leader. It provides functionality to work with the underlying hardware, one of the most difficult components to design and manage. Also has private co-pilot sandboxes that will not be used for model training. A potential game changer for industrial applications. |
| 05/01/2024 | Important | AI Startups Have Plenty of Cash. They Often Don’t Yet Have a Business. | Thoughtful, skeptical article on AI revenue versus funding. A short article worth reading to reflect on the current status of the AI market. |
| 05/01/2024 | Important | Amazon expands enterprise AI play with wider availability of its Q chatbot | Amazon announced its Q chatbot in November 2023. However, new capabilities were added to Q ahead of general availability. Amazon Q Developer can now provide coding assistance, app testing, security scanning, troubleshooting, and call up AI agents that autonomously perform tasks like software updates or documenting code. Amazon Q Apps, another new feature, aims to make building generative AI-based apps easier, even for employees without coding experience. Amazon says users just have to describe the type of app they want in a prompt, and Q will generate the app they’re looking for. |
| 05/01/2024 | Important | Yelp is launching a new AI assistant to help you connect with businesses | Yelp's AI assistant is an advanced web search capability that provides customized content in response to a query, with links to businesses that can fulfill the request. If you are a business that gets volume from Yelp, this is essential news. |
| 05/01/2024 | Optional | Ads for Explicit ‘AI Girlfriends’ Are Swarming Facebook and Instagram | Interesting dynamics around the virtual versus real sex worker ads on Meta. |
| 05/01/2024 | Optional | DressCode: Autoregressively Sewing and Generating Garments from Text Guidance | Cool new GenAI tool to help create new fashions. |
| 05/02/2024 | Essential | Atlassian launches Rovo, its new AI teammate | Atlassian, one of the leaders in the data management space with its 300K customers, introduces Rovo that is focused on addressing an important challenge of internal data management tools proliferation within an enterprise. Not only Rovo offers to integrate the tools, it provides AI agents to act on the collected data, a critical performance advancement for knowledge workers. |
| 05/02/2024 | Essential | Could generative AI work without online data theft? Nvidia's ChatRTX aims to prove it can | A confirmation of a trend to provide secure access to user's local data at any time. Nvidia first introduced ChatRTX as “Chat with RTX” in February as a demo/experimental app. The app essentially creates a local chatbot server on your Windows PC that you can access from a browser to get a powerful search tool on your own data without compromising your data security. With this release NVIDIA added voice for query and extended the list of LLMs available for query. |
| 05/02/2024 | Important | Anthropic’s Claude Teams and iOS App: The secure, scalable solution for enterprise AI adoption | Anthropic, one of the AI market leaders, has been focused on data security and integrity in its products, As a result, it has achieved significant traction in highly regulated industries such as healthcare and finance. Anthropic now extends its capabilities with teams' functionality and a mobile app making its products more accessible for broader enterprise adoption. |
| 05/02/2024 | Important | RAG and RAU: A Survey on Retrieval-Augmented Language Model in Natural Language Processing | Excellent survey paper on how Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Understanding (RAU) work with LLMs and NLP. Worth taking time to read. |
| 05/02/2024 | Optional | Samsung’s operating profit soars 930% as AI tailwinds drive demand for memory chips | Not a surprising development but well deserved. |
| 05/02/2024 | Optional | OpenAI’s Sora in ophthalmology: revolutionary generative AI in eye health | Short article suggesting ways on how Sora could be used for eye health education. |
| 05/03/2024 | Essential | The AI-Generated Population Is Here, and They’re Ready to Work | Having the ability to create digital twins is a huge trend that will change the way we live. For example, having digital twins for customers and employees will be essential to learning and marketing. |
| 05/03/2024 | Important | With Tribble, RFP writers get their own shot of generative AI | Tribble is not alone in providing AI help for RFP responses. However, its founders are ex-Salesforce executives and have lived through the pain points. Sales in general, RFP responses and AI enabled Sales Engineers using "tactical AI" are certainly areas seeing much innovation from AI. |
| 05/03/2024 | Optional | Stardog’s Karaoke offers on-premises, zero hallucination LLM solution for enterprises | Smart use of knowledge graphs plus generative AI. |
| 05/03/2024 | Optional | CoreWeave raises $1.1B to expand its GPU cloud infrastructure network | This is a funding announcement. Interesting to see that investors are willing to put a lot of money into AI infrastructure at high valuations. If you are in need of additional GPU cycles, CoreWeave can provide them. |
| 05/03/2024 | Optional | Better & Faster Large Language Models via Multi-token Prediction | Interesting model training technique to perform multi token prediction. The method is showing good results in outperforming older methods. Something to watch if you are training your own LLMs. |
| 05/03/2024 | Optional | An Ivy League school just announced its first AI master's degree | Tremendous to see that there will be additional graduates to fill in-demand AI jobs. |
| 05/06/2024 | Important | Four start-ups lead China’s race to match OpenAI’s ChatGPT | Useful article to be aware of - Chinese efforts in LLMs and four specific start-ups (Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and 01.ai) aspiring to beat ChatGPT. |
| 05/06/2024 | Optional | SHISEIDO HK fuses creativity with AI in new branding campaign | New combination of talent, AI and art in advertising. The resulting ads, however, are not yet very impressive. A trend to watch. |
| 05/06/2024 | Optional | An Economic Solution to Copyright Challenges of Generative AI | A research article presenting a clever but rather complicated method to share royalties to artists contributing to an LLM. An interesting potential solution to copyright challenges. However, it does not apply to text and, as a result, cannot be implemented broadly. |
| 05/06/2024 | Optional | Brightcove integrates AWS’ generative AI assistant | AWS customer announcement about a cloud streaming provider, Brightcove, implementing Amazon Q Business solution. |
| 05/06/2024 | Optional | Walmart to use Generative AI to Help Reduce Food Waste in Stores | Announcement from Walmart about an internally developed solution to provide guidance to employees on dealing with expiring food items to reduce food waste. Rating as optional since this application is not operational yet (about to be piloted in Canada). It is, however, an important use case to monitor. |
| 05/06/2024 | Optional | Google Says Its Med-Gemini AI Healthcare Models Beat GPT-4 | It is not surprising that LLMs fine-tuned for specific applications perform better than general purpose LLMs. Note that Med-Gemini is using contextual information - a trend to make generic LLMs much more effective. |
| 05/07/2024 | Essential | Hugging Face launches LeRobot open source robotics code library | Open source toolkits and data sources should help speed up the already accelerating area of robotics. Generative AI is helping to do planning in unmodeled places. For defense, healthcare, any company with a distribution center, and more - the robots are coming. |
| 05/07/2024 | Important | UPS delivers customer wins with generative AI | Another company using GenAI for customer service with plans to do much more in finance, HR and sales. If your business has a significant customer service element and you're not yet at least testing GenAI to improve response time and efficiency, you're falling behind. |
| 05/07/2024 | Important | Stack Overflow signs deal with OpenAI to supply data to its models | While there's nothing actionable here for the AI leader, it's important to stay aware of how information delivery/consumption is evolving with chatbots becoming pervasive. Stack Overflow has been THE go-to for developers for quite sometime, and the article notes traffic has been down since the use of GenAI coding assistants has become widespread. Content providers are adopting different strategies - some are making deals with LLM providers (eg, Axios, FT) and others are suing to keep their content out of models (eg, NYT). Who's got the right strategy and where will this all land? |
| 05/07/2024 | Important | Meet MAI-1: Microsoft readies new model to compete with OpenIA, Google | We have seen Microsoft release small models and here we're learning that they're also working on one that could compete with GPT-4 and Gemini - though not even Microsoft is certain it will reach that level of performance just yet. It will have about half as many parameters so it will be quite interesting to see if it does. Microsoft is clearly reducing its reliance on OpenAI, which is wise. Regulators may force the issue. |
| 05/07/2024 | Optional | Randy Travis gets his voice back in a new Warner AI music experiment | Two sides of the coin here regarding voice replication. Randy Travis gets to make a song he otherwise wouldn't have been able to produce since he lost his voice to a stroke. But then we see unwanted deepfakes of rapper voices. We already know the danger of deepfakes in scams, so these are not essential reads. |
| 05/07/2024 | Optional | In the Battle of Drake vs. Kendrick Lamar, A.I. Is Playing Spoiler | Two sides of the coin here regarding voice replication. Randy Travis gets to make a song he otherwise wouldn't have been able to produce since he lost his voice to a stroke. But then we see unwanted deepfakes of rapper voices. We already know the danger of deepfakes in scams, so these are not essential reads. |
| 05/07/2024 | Optional | Alphabet-owned Intrinsic incorporates Nvidia tech into robotics platform | Important news and advancements may come from this partnership down the line, but this announcement doesn't carry any. |
| 05/08/2024 | Important | How VISA is using generative AI to battle account fraud attacks | Here we have a company using its own data for a critical use case and advantage - something every company should be considering. That makes this news important, though the article spends too much time educating the reader on types of attacks. Skim those parts but take away the main message. |
| 05/08/2024 | Important | AI Copilots Are Changing How Coding Is Taught | Great to see some areas of academia already adjusting the way they teach coding based on the emergence of coding assistants. No need to spend so much time on syntax, but they're moving more advanced skills like problem decomposition up in course syllabi and spending time on teaching testing and debugging - critical skills to assess coding assistant outputs. |
| 05/08/2024 | Optional | Microsoft Creates Top Secret Generative AI Service for US Spies | Microsoft's ties with the government sure run deep, even as the government is coming down on them for security issues. Wouldn't it be interesting to have access to this model built just for the CIA and other intelligence agencies using their classified data? As you can imagine, it's strictly on-prem signaling the government has some nice compute power. |
| 05/08/2024 | Optional | Apple Is Developing AI Chips for Data Centers, Seeking Edge in Arms Race | The article notes this isn't even confirmed yet, and even if true, not surprising or notable. |
| 05/08/2024 | Optional | Nike developing AI model as part of design step change | Nike is working on its own LLM customized with its data - as we mentioned earlier, that's something everyone should explore. The personalized shoes they made for some of their athletes are pretty cool-looking, but Nike shared no tangible benefits so parking this one in the optional lot. |
| 05/08/2024 | Optional | OpenAI says it’s building a tool to let content creators opt out of AI training | The tool isn't ready and this, of course, comes after they've already built their LLMs using everyone's data without permission. |
| 05/08/2024 | Optional | OpenAI strikes licensing deal with the magazine giant behind People | Another deal, another day. If by some chance, the courts make OpenAI trash the models they already built because they used content without permission, they're building up their training data stable. Also, if OpenAI is building a search engine as is rumored, these deals will be helpful. |
| 05/09/2024 | Essential | Google DeepMind debuts huge AlphaFold update and free proteomics-as-a-service web app | The most significant improvement in this newest version of AlphaFold is that researchers can now model how a synthesized protein might interact with other proteins or even with RNA and DNA strands. That speeds up an important step in drug discovery since protein interaction is what makes things happen. We only wish they were open sourcing the full model - they're only providing researchers with free access to a limited version. |
| 05/09/2024 | Essential | Microsoft is ‘turning everyone into a prompt engineer’ with new Copilot AI features | Copilot will soon have an autocomplete feature to help people create more effective prompts. We're flagging this as an essential development because users still struggle to create prompts that unlock the power of GenAI. This should help adoption - and it's also another step toward automating prompt engineering. For the AI leaders dealing with skeptics, this should bolster their case for adoption. |
| 05/09/2024 | Important | ServiceNow and Microsoft expand strategic alliance, combining generative AI capabilities to enhance choice and flexibility | Two GenAI systems (Copilot and ServiceNow's Assist) interacting and handing off tasks to each other sounds like the early stages of agentic systems to us so we're marking this one important. |
| 05/09/2024 | Optional | Introducing the Model Spec | This article from OpenAI shares the principles they follow to guide GenAI's behavior. It offers guidance and opens interesting questions to any organization training models. Determining how we make these systems reflect societal norms and values is not easy and is hotly debated. For example, should a system convince a flat-earther that our planet is round? According to this model spec, the answer is 'no.' |
| 05/09/2024 | Optional | 1 in 6 Contact Centers Have Deployed GenAI Capabilities, Finds Deloitte | A lot of data cherry picking here to make the case that every organization should use GenAI in customer service. While we believe that is the right move, this survey doesn't really do a great job at proving the point. We are surprised, however, that only 1 in 6 service centers are using GenAI at this point. |
| 05/09/2024 | Optional | Holiday decor retailer Balsam Brands analyzes data with generative AI | This is a republished press release from SoundCommerce, one of the providers Balsam is tapping along with Snowflake. And it's not even clear how they'll use GenAI. Skip it. |
| 05/10/2024 | Essential | Brands are unleashing generative AI design tools for customers | Our analysts got very excited about this article that shares how Reebok, Adore Me and others are letting consumers generate their own designs with GenAI and then providing them with digital versions to use in games and other online forums as well as physical versions in some cases. Personalization at scale is finally arriving. |
| 05/10/2024 | Important | Leaked Deck Reveals How OpenAI Is Pitching Publisher Partnerships | This deck seems to confirm that OpenAI is making a play in search. It offers publishers who strike a licensing deal with OpenAI a few options for linking to their content in ChatGPT responses. From the article: "In an anchor treatment, branded, clickable buttons appear below ChatGPT’s response to a user query. And the in-line product inserts a pullquote into the text of ChatGPT’s response, whose font is larger and includes a clickable, branded link." Game on, Google. |
| 05/10/2024 | Important | SoundHound AI and Perplexity Partner to Bring Online LLMs to Next Gen Voice Assistants Across Cars and IoT Devices | SoundHound is an established AI-powered voice recognition provider so this is a nice move for Perplexity whose GenAI-driven Q&A service has been gaining traction. SoundHound is using it to offer real-time info to its customers' products. GenAI is gradually seeping into many areas. |
| 05/10/2024 | Important | Meet AdVon, the AI-Powered Content Monster Infecting the Media Industry | Well-researched article on the way some notable publishers (eg Sports Illustrated, Us, LA Times) have used services like AdVon to create zero-value clickbait content from fake writers that drives traffic to publishers' sites. As you can imagine, GenAI is supercharging such services. Reader beware... |
| 05/10/2024 | Optional | California to tap generative AI tools to increase services access, reduce traffic jams | Nice to see innovation from the government sector. They're fielding proposals from OpenAI and others at the cost of only $1 (we thought this was a typo at first!). But not of significant note to the AI leader. |
| 05/10/2024 | Optional | Introducing Command R Fine-Tuning: Industry-Leading Performance at a Fraction of the Cost | Cohere continues its recent positioning as a low-cost LLM alternative by showing how its smaller model (R+ is its bigger one) can offer performance similar to larger models for some tasks like summarization when fine-tuned. AI leaders are likely already aware that fine-tuning smaller models can do this so marking as optional. |
| 05/13/2024 | Essential | AI at Work Is Here. Now Comes the Hard Part | This research from Microsoft is of course self-serving but there are lots of interesting stats on GenAI usage in business, how it might affect roles and more. Plenty of hard data to support you as you look to implement AI in your organization. Our analyst Adam Rappaport created a CustomGPT to help you explore the report. |
| 05/13/2024 | Important | How AI Has Already Begun to Change These Workers’ Jobs | Nice piece from the WSJ showing how people in various industries (e.g., real estate, healthcare, entertainment) are using GenAI in their work. We didn't elevate to essential because these are individual uses rather than at-scale implementations across an org, but still worth a read. |
| 05/13/2024 | Important | Prompting assistance with Claude | As we know, prompting is tricky, and people often are ineffective at it, which makes them forego using GenAI. This is a move in the direction of taking prompting out of the equation, though it doesn't quite go that far. Still helpful and another way Claude is showing itself worthy of being in the SoA LLM tier. |
| 05/13/2024 | Important | Agent Hospital: A Simulacrum of Hospital with Evolvable Medical Agents | The researchers use simulation to train a model as opposed to fine-tuning or other common methods and achieve good results. Could be a method to train when there's limited data available. Worth a read. |
| 05/13/2024 | Optional | RadOnc-GPT: Leveraging Meta Llama for a pioneering radiation oncology model | We almost went to important on this Llama-2 based model but ultimately landed on optional because it was vague on how/whether the model is actually in use. |
| 05/13/2024 | Optional | Triomics taps LLMs to accelerate cancer care, raises $15M | While Y Combinator is in on this funding round, it still amounts to a funding announcement. The company notes it's working with a handful of companies but none are named and a handful is, well, just a handful. Let's see how this pans out further down the line, though, since cancer care is a hugely important area. |
| 05/14/2024 | Essential | Hello GPT-4o | OpenAI's post about their latest updates is an absolute must read (and 'view' of their videos) for the AI leader. |
| 05/14/2024 | Important | OpenAI’s custom GPT Store is now open to all for free. | The GPTs are now available to anyone to use, though still only Plus subscribers can create a GPT. |
| 05/14/2024 | Important | Alibaba says its Tongyi Qianwen AI models are used by over 90,000 corporate clients in China. | Anyone staying up to date on the latest AI research knows that China is very much alive and well as a leader in the space. |
| 05/14/2024 | Important | The consequences of generative AI for online knowledge communities. | Interesting study that looks at the implications in the decline in usage of Stack Overflow. |
| 05/14/2024 | Optional | Nvidia launches quantum computer centers with CUDA-Q platform. | The intersection of AI and quantum computing is certainly a space to keep an eye on, but this particular news is not of note to the busy AI leader. |
| 05/14/2024 | Optional | Exploration-focused training lets robotics AI immediately handle new tasks. | A group of Northwestern University researchers may be onto a method that would help robots learn more efficiently. |
| 05/15/2024 | Essential | Google reveals plans for upgrading AI in the real world through Gemini Live at Google I/O 2024 | Did Google Live look a lot like what we saw from OpenAI's 4o earlier this week? Yes. Is it available yet? No. While frustrating that Google did a lot of previewing of new offerings and functionality that have no clear time line for availability other than 'this year,' it's still important for the AI leader to understand what each of the ponies in what's increasingly a two-horse race offers. |
| 05/15/2024 | Essential | Google I/O 2024: Everything announced so far | This article goes through the full laundry list of GenAI-powered offerings coming from Google, making it tough to absorb, but the AI leader needs to go through it. Our analysts all had different favorites among the upcoming features (watch the first 10 minutes of today's briefing to see what they were). But one thing we agreed on - a future where our workspace is fully AI-powered, personalized, and completely controlled through voice interaction is now a real and exciting possibility. Our youngest grandkids may laugh at us when we show them a keyboard. One thing we didn't mention on our morning briefing but should have: the expected price wars are now in full swing. Both OpenAI and Google have dropped pricing this week to attract users. |
| 05/15/2024 | Important | How Generative AI Is Remaking UI/UX Design | This piece from Andreesen shares the ways that generative AI is making the app development workflow easier as designs get translated into code. Most AI leaders do double duty as CIO or CTO so it's important to be aware of the tools now available for this. As they often do in these types of pieces, Andreesen provides a great chart showing the tools available for each stage of the process. |
| 05/15/2024 | Optional | Fintech firm Klarna says 90% of its employees are using generative AI daily | Not sure we believe this figure, but even if it's real, the article isn't worth reading. Stick to the headline. |
| 05/15/2024 | Optional | Women Leaders in Tech Outpace Men Counterparts in Generative AI Adoption | We had a visceral reaction to this (including from our Luda Kopeikina.) First of all, the overall difference between female and male users was 68% vs 66%. Second, there are so many more amazing accomplishments by women in tech and places where they outshine men to focus on. C'mon, BCG. Your content is typically better than this. |
| 05/16/2024 | Important | Microsoft's carbon emissions have increase 30% since 2023 due to data center expansion | While the emissions increase is attributed to building data centers as opposed to their use, it's likely some strategic carbon accounting and clean energy credit purchases offsetting the running of their data centers which have surely cranked up this year due to GenAI's energy demands. The industry needs to solve for this before regulators step in further than they already have which could slow GenAI development and adoption. And AI leaders will need to track their own emissions through cloud use for CSRD and potentially soon for US regulators. |
| 05/16/2024 | Optional | Deloitte Digital Introduces CreativEdge: A Generative AI-powered, Omnichannel, Content Creation Tool That Can Revolutionize Marketing | Great that they've designed this solution but dozens of startups offer similar ones that you can get without paying for consulting services. |
| 05/16/2024 | Optional | TD Bank launches generative AI platforms for contact centres, engineering teams | This is an announcement about pilots rather than production use cases and they're in what's become table stakes areas - coding and customer service. |
| 05/16/2024 | Optional | Verizon using generative AI to do customer service better | Another call center implementation. At least this one is in production. Still kept it as optional since all you need to know is the headline. |
| 05/16/2024 | Optional | Weka raises $140M as the AI boom bolsters data platforms | Worth taking a look at the data pipeline offering from this established player with 11 of the Fortune 50 as clients but the article is no more than a funding announcement. |
| 05/16/2024 | Optional | Anthropic hires Instagram co-founder as head of product | After a bevy of announcements from Google and OpenAI this week, we get this from Anthropic. Good to see that they'll be focused on productizing some offerings going forward. We increasingly hear of companies and individual users exploring Anthropic's offerings given the SoA performance of its LLMs. |
| 05/16/2024 | Optional | Moving past gen AI’s honeymoon phase | A comprehensive piece on the challenges CIOs and other AI leaders face in implementing GenAI at scale with a nice architecture diagram but not enough detail on how to address them to warrant an important rating. |
| 05/17/2024 | Important | OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever is officially leaving | Signals a period of leadership upheaval at OpenAI - watch this development closely especially if you are building applications based on ChatGPT products. Also, we believe that it is a signal of OpenAI strongly focusing on commercial side versus its original mission of creating Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) model that benefits all of humanity. |
| 05/17/2024 | Important | Industrial Renaissance: Software Transforming the Physical World | A somewhat marketing article from Bain Capital highlighting how AI is impacting software stacks integrated with hardware for industrial applications. This is an important read for supply chain, warehousing, robotics and other companies in the industrial space. |
| 05/17/2024 | Optional | Nasdaq Enhances Global Market Surveillance with GenAI | Nasdaq has earned respect for applying advanced analytics and machine learning in ensuring investors' trust in capital markets. It is continuing on this path with deployment of new AI surveillance capabilities based on Amazon Bedrock, an AWS service for building secure generative AI applications. |
| 05/17/2024 | Optional | AI Talks Leave ‘Little Tech’ Out | An opinion from WSJ worthy of note. It argues that imposing strict government AI regulations will favor the current AI leaders such as large companies Microsoft and Google, creating barriers for smaller start-ups. |
| 05/17/2024 | Optional | Hugging Face is sharing $10 million worth of compute to help beat the big AI companies | We applaud Hugging Face for the gesture. However, how far will it go to help the open source community and is it really a marketing piece? |
| 05/17/2024 | Optional | Aurora Supercomputer Ranks Fastest for AI | Another milestone reached by Intel - it has broken the exascale barrier at 1.012 exaflops and is the fastest AI system in the world dedicated to AI for open science, achieving 10.6 AI exaflops. Early success stories using the system from Argonne National Laboratory include mapping the human brain’s 80 billion neurons, high-energy particle physics enhanced by deep learning, and drug design and discovery accelerated by machine learning, among others. |
| 05/20/2024 | Essential | Slack users horrified to discover messages used for AI training | Slack's policies seems to leave the door open for them to use customer data to train their models though they claim they don't. And you have to opt out via your Slack administrator rather than opt in. The confusion has caused some users to get angry and point out the discrepancies. Essential for AI leaders (and any organizational leader) to understand if their private data is being used for training by their service providers so we marked this essential (and here we provide a better article about the issue than the one we reviewed on our briefing this morning). |
| 05/20/2024 | Important | Gen AI and cloud optimization help Asian SuperApp Grab turn a profit | This Singaporean company (which is akin to Uber in the US) has cut 18% of its staff citing GenAI as at least part of the impetus. And, it says, thanks to this and the performance of GenAI, they've turned a profit for the first time. The company says content creation went from taking 99 hours to 90 minutes. Important for AI leaders to see that GenAI truly drives such efficiency. And important for everyone to understand the need to upskill to avoid being one of the employees falling victim to cuts. |
| 05/20/2024 | Important | Replit cuts staff by 30 amid aggressive AI push in software development | This is important for the same reason as the previous article - 16% of staff cut here due to GenAI. |
| 05/20/2024 | Optional | Law firms start generative AI rollout, with safeguards | Of note for anyone in the legal space but optional for others. One good nugget from this one, though - a major law firm in Australia offered a significant $20K 'prize' for employees to submit use cases for GenAI which helped them find killer use cases. An approach any AI leader could consider. |
| 05/20/2024 | Optional | RLHF Workflow: From Reward Modeling to Online RLHF | We marked this as optional for now because we want to see if this training method has legs. It's one to watch - rather than using human annotators, it uses AI to provide feedback on LLM responses and achieves some pretty good results. Could offer a way for companies that might not have the human resources for human-led RLHF. |
| 05/20/2024 | Optional | Microsoft risks billions in fines as EU investigates its generative AI disclosures | Microsoft missed an EU deadline for providing information on AI safety and was given an extension and a warning that if they don't deliver, they could be fined. Not an essential read. |
| 05/20/2024 | Optional | OpenAI researcher resigns, claiming safety has taken ‘a backseat to shiny products’ | We only marked this as optional because we already flagged the departure of safety lead Ilya Sutskever as important on Friday. This is another departure from the same team. Here's another good article talking about all the tumult at OpenAI around this if you're interested. |
| 05/21/2024 | Essential | Microsoft wants to make Windows an AI operating system, launches Copilot+ PCs | We knew something like this would be coming and here it is. 40 generative AI models power this new OS and deliver some great capabilities. The AI can view what you're doing on-screen and you can interact with it verbally in natural language in real-time as you work. And you get capabilities that are performed locally so your data is safe. No doubt this is an essential development. |
| 05/21/2024 | Essential | Google’s broken link to the web | Great commentary about the slow death of search as we know it and the implications for creators, publishers and any brand that relies on traditional search advertising (which is pretty much every brand). Anyone in business needs to track the trends here and should be preparing for changes now. |
| 05/21/2024 | Important | Scarlett Johansson told OpenAI not to use her voice — and she’s not happy they might have anyway | We believe OpenAI's contention that this is not Scarlett's voice. However, whether they intended the voice to sound like her or not, Altman made enough overtures to 'Her' to imply that they may have. The implications for companies using AI-generated voice are clear - this is tricky territory with real implications. AI leaders must be prepared to navigate the use of voice in their apps carefully. |
| 05/21/2024 | Important | Dell Technologies building AI Factory with Nvidia, growing AI efforts with Hugging Face, Meta and Microsoft | If you're planning to infuse, for example, customer service with GenAI capabilities, you need to think about your infrastructure and Dell has a smart implementation here. Worth noting. |
| 05/21/2024 | Optional | INDUS: Effective and Efficient Language Models for Scientific Applications | As our John Sviokla noted, this is 'good for the geeks' in that models can get smart on science, but this is optional for most AI leaders. |
| 05/21/2024 | Optional | ChatGPT’s mobile app revenue saw its biggest spike yet following GPT-4o launch | An interesting and smart move by OpenAI to offer access to its new 4o model for free on desktop but require a subscription to the mobile app. They generated $4.2M in revenue from this in less than a week. But that's all you need to know here. |
| 05/21/2024 | Optional | AI is already changing management — companies must decide how | We love Ethan Mollick and consider him a true GenAI thought leader but his thoughts in this editorial are more theoretical than actionable. There's a lot better content from him that's worth spending time on. |
| 05/22/2024 | Essential | Introducing Tako, a new way to reference real knowledge And our first integration, Perplexity | Tako, an advanced knowledge search and visualization engine, is partnering with Perplexity's answer engine, creating a revolutionary capability that will make many applications across the enterprise visual and user friendly. Amazing combination of real data with visualization. |
| 05/22/2024 | Important | IBM Unveils Next Chapter of watsonx with Open Source, Product & Ecosystem Innovations to Drive Enterprise AI at Scale | IBM announces its commitment to Open Source by releasing a set of advanced LLMs into open source, partnering with Red Hat, integrating AI into products and consulting, and strengthening partnerships with many leading AI providers, such as Microsoft, AWS, Meta, SAP and Salesforce. Essential for IBM existing customers. |
| 05/22/2024 | Important | Five ways criminals are using AI | Generative AI provides a new, powerful tool kit that allows malicious actors to work far more efficiently and internationally than ever before. An essential read for leaders to understand the next wave of malicious attacks to get prepared for. |
| 05/22/2024 | Important | Microsoft Build 2024: everything announced | Microsoft announced a set of cool new capabilities at its Build 2024 event, expanding Copilot with autonomous agents and adding AI to Windows clipboard. The company also rolled out Phi-3-vision, a new version of the Phi-3 AI model it announced in April. It’s multimodal and can read text and look at pictures, but it’s a small language model that’s compact enough to work on a mobile device. |
| 05/22/2024 | Important | Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model | Vital new work from Anthropic in model transparency and thus, increased safety. Using 'dictionary learning' researchers successfully extracted features from the middle layer of Claude 3.0 Sonnet, providing a rough conceptual map of its internal states halfway through its computation. This is the first ever detailed look inside a modern, production-grade large language model that will provide insight on increasing models' safety. |
| 05/22/2024 | Optional | Data-labeling startup Scale AI raises $1B as valuation doubles to $13.8B | A funding announcement from Scale AI working in a vital area of providing data-labeling services to companies that want to train machine learning models. |
| 05/23/2024 | Essential | OpenAI, WSJ Owner News Corp Strike Content Deal Valued at Over $250 Million | The article highlights two mega shifts happening in the media industry. One, the power of distribution is winning over content creation demonstrated by the low number, $50MM a year, that WSJ will get from the partnership. Second, a fight for traffic and advertising revenue is on. Publishers are concerned that AI-powered search tools, such as Bing/OpenAI and Google, will serve up complete answers based on news content, eliminating a user's need to click on an article link and depriving publishers of traffic and advertising revenue. How will this fight play out? |
| 05/23/2024 | Important | Nvidia’s Sales Triple, Signaling AI Boom’s Staying Power | Nvidia reports impressive financial results, revenue and profit, due to increased demand for its AI chips, - signaling further significant AI growth. Nvidia has already made several shrewd acquisitions. With additional money this trend is likely to continue making Nvidia hard to dislodge as a leader in AI hardware. |
| 05/23/2024 | Important | Meta AI chief says large language models will not reach human intelligence | A well written article presenting an opinion from a well recognized technical leader in GenAI stating that LLMs will not reach human intelligence due to their innate technical limitations. This opinion goes counter to a pervasive belief that, since LLMs are so good at so many things, they will be as humans at some point. Certainly worth reading to understand the limitations of the current LLMs. |
| 05/23/2024 | Optional | Mastercard Doubles Speed of Fraud Detection with Generative AI | Mastercard reports faster, better fraud detection with GenAI reconfirming its previous statements in this regard. It is interesting to note that their GenAI model is able to predict the behavior of individuals and groups. |
| 05/23/2024 | Optional | Gen Z loves generative AI-powered customer service chat: Affirm CEO | Believable assertion by Affirm's CEO that GenZ prefers robot customer help, - confirming that, when done right, AI assistants can get to the 'meat of the matter' faster and provide the needed answer. |
| 05/23/2024 | Optional | Snowflake acquires TruEra to deliver LLM observability inside data cloud | With this acquisition, Snowflake, an AI cloud data provider, is bolstering its efforts to give its customers an end-to-end platform to build generative and predictive AI applications using the data hosted on their Snowflake data cloud. TruEra will add tools to test, debug and monitor machine language (ML) models and large language model (LLM) apps in production. This is the third Snowflake's acquisition in the observability space. |
| 05/24/2024 | Essential | The Foundation Model Transparency Index | A comprehensive evaluation index for foundation models enabling leaders to have more insight into models before selecting the right one for their projects. |
| 05/24/2024 | Essential | JPMorgan's private bank is launching a generative AI tool. A top exec walks us through her tech strategy and how she wants to transform bankers' jobs. | Great example of a leading large firm transforming a key business using AI. Note that the person leading the effort does not have the tech background but is highly knowledgeable in the processes of the business being transformed. |
| 05/24/2024 | Important | Google Cloud Consulting launches Generative AI Ops to assist in enterprise AI deployments | Even though it is a product announcement, we rate this article as important because it provides in-depth insight into steps, such as prompt engineering, design and optimization, that are necessary in order to take an idea for using GenAI into production and ensure high-quality, accurate outputs. |
| 05/24/2024 | Important | The Guide to AI Agents | AI agents will play a critical role in the future of AI. This brief but comprehensive article written for non-techies provides a great overview of AI agents. Certainly worth a read, especially when it is coming from two co-founders who had senior positions at Salesforce, Facebook and Google. Bret Taylor serves on the board of OpenAI. |
| 05/24/2024 | Optional | Airline to 'better manage' flights with AI use | A use case article on using AI for scheduling and other tasks to optimize airline efficiency. |
| 05/24/2024 | Optional | Truecaller partners with Microsoft to let its AI respond to calls in your own voice | A product announcement from Truecaller, the widely known caller ID service app, offering its customers a feature to respond to calls in their own voice. Watch this trend of adding every individual's voice to the robots that can change the nature of interaction. |
| 05/28/2024 | Essential | Financial Statement Analysis with Large Language Models | With chain of thought prompting, GPT-4 outperformed financial analysts in predicting the direction of future earnings and was on par (and better in delivering context) than SoA ML prediction models. This dispels the myth that LLMs are never good at numerical tasks and reasoning - clearly they're quite capable in some use cases with the right set up. A must read for any AI leader. |
| 05/28/2024 | Important | NAB plots major AI strategy to roll out in three key areas | Good article about the ways a major Australian bank is piloting LLMs beyond customer service applications, including in assessing customer complaints, helping paralegals review trust deeds (in minutes vs. human time of 45 minutes) and personalizing product offerings. |
| 05/28/2024 | Optional | Elon Musk’s xAI raises $6 billion | As our Luda Kopeikina said, 'billion is becoming the new million' in funding raises for LLM-related companies. Impressive raise, likely helped by the Musk name and the amount of data his company is sitting on through X. But we'll save important or essential ratings for when these investments bear fruit. |
| 05/28/2024 | Optional | Meta and Elon Musk’s xAI fight to partner with chatbot group Character.aiLaw firms start generative AI rollout, with safeguards | Not a huge surprise that two powerhouses are circling the wagons on the second-most used GenAI app. Meta already has a similar play to Character's offering. Our co-founders placed a friendly wager on whether both Character.ai and Perplexity will exist or be snapped up in the next year - Paul believes they will be acquired whereas John believes they won't. We shall see.... |
| 05/28/2024 | Optional | Why WPP is adding Anthropic’s Claude models to its AI platform | Not enough meat on the bones of this announcement to warrant a read. Note that this owner of many PR/marketing companies like Ogilvy is using Amazon Bedrock and tapping Claude and other models as opposed to using just Claude. |
| 05/28/2024 | Optional | Understanding the Cost of Generative AI Models in Production | We like the idea of this article, which costs out LLM implementation, but disagree with the analysis. It posits that you don't need an engineer if you're buying vs. building which is simply not true. |
| 05/29/2024 | Important | AI on Trial: Legal Models Hallucinate in 1 out of 6 Queries | Stanford HAI tested two legal GenAI apps - one from Thomson Reuters and another from LexusNexus - that claim to be hallucination free. Turns out they're not. They both use RAG, and while the technique minimizes hallucinations, it's not foolproof. To drive that message home, we marked this article as important. |
| 05/29/2024 | Important | EU’s ChatGPT taskforce offers first look at detangling the AI chatbot’s privacy compliance | While the task force didn't come to concrete conclusions as to whether ChatGPT violates portions of the GDPR, this article provides good detail on the particular tenets of the law that LLM providers need to take into account. For the busy AI leader, this is a worthy read to understand how the LLMs they're using could at some point be impacted by the law. |
| 05/29/2024 | Important | Retail and Gen AI: Now Scale Those Terrific Early Returns | Hyperbolic headline and unhelpful 'group your use cases' advice aside, there are two good charts in here that provide use cases applicable to many industries in addition to retail so worth checking those out. |
| 05/29/2024 | Optional | OpenAI Board Forms Safety and Security Committee | They had to do something after disbanding the safety committee. They've put a lot of people on the new committee but the key person on it to note is Sam Altman. Will his voice matter most? And what will that translate into? |
| 05/29/2024 | Optional | Jan Leike joins Anthropic | Speaking of that disbanded OpenAI safety team, one of its leaders has jumped over to Anthropic, which has shown that safety is a priority (though transparency is apparently not given that, as is the case with their competitors, they've never revealed what data they used to train Claude - we can guess...). |
| 05/29/2024 | Optional | How Airbus uses generative artificial intelligence to reinvent itself | Airbus has identified 600 potential GenAI use cases, but provide little information on what they are and which ones they have in production so this article isn't worth your valuable time. |
| 05/30/2024 | Essential | AI Integration and Modularization | We had a lively discussion about this article by independent analyst Ben Thompson (starts at 13:25 in the recording of today's news briefing) that ponders whether vertically integrated AI players (Google is the only AI player with a fully integrated stack from chips through apps right now) will have a competitive advantage over partially integrated (eg, Microsoft) or horizontal (eg, Amazon) players in the great AI race. You may or may not agree with all of his contentions, but the article is well worth the read. |
| 05/30/2024 | Optional | Vox Media and The Atlantic sign content deals with OpenAI | While this article is optional, it's another move related to the evolution of search - remember that those publishers striking deals will have their content linked to in ChatGPT. |
| 05/30/2024 | Optional | Mistral releases Codestral, its first generative AI model for code | Mistral had to do this to remain competitive with other LLM providers, but they've slapped a 'no commercial use' restriction on the model. Given all the other options for code generation, we marked this news as optional. |
| 05/30/2024 | Optional | OpenAI signs 100K PwC workers to ChatGPT’s enterprise tier as PwC becomes its first resale partner | This type of arrangement between a consultancy and software provider is not unusual though it's yet another move that puts Microsoft and its partner OpenAI in direct competition. A development to note but the article is not an essential read. |
| 05/30/2024 | Optional | Announcing Sonic: A Low-Latency Voice Model for Lifelike Speech | The makers of Mamba introduce a state space model for audio generation. Our Adam Rappaport found the performance decent but not quite as good as current transformer-based competitors like Eleven Labs. |
| 05/30/2024 | Optional | The Crossroads of Innovation and Privacy: Private Synthetic Data for Generative AI | This blog post by Microsoft discusses three differential private synthetic data generation techniques. An interesting evaluation and good for the AI leader to be aware of these possibilities but perhaps deeper than the busy AI leader needs to go. |
| 05/31/2024 | Important | Perplexity AI’s new feature will turn your searches into shareable pages | We don't rate new features in an existing tool as important very often, but this one warrants it - in fact we had one vote for essential. This feature is already being rolled out, and our David De Lallo gave it a test drive on our briefing this morning (minute 8:20 here). It's quite good for an initial release. And the web pages you produce can be published and are crawlable by search engines. The tool itself is another big step in the search revolution that's unfolding before us. Implications of this sea change for any company that relies on search for traffic and sales are huge. |
| 05/31/2024 | Important | Anthropic’s AI now lets you create bots to work for you | Another feature announcement that we think is worth noting. Via any API a developer can create an AI agent that performs tasks. One example offered is creating a tool for an interior designer that processes images of someone's house and other data to offer personalized room decor recommendations. AI agents that perform tasks on your behalf are here, earlier than many predicted. |
| 05/31/2024 | Optional | Tech giants form an industry group to help develop next-gen AI chip components | Microsoft, Meta, Google, AMD, Broadcom and several other big tech players are coming together to create a common standard for the components that link GPUs. Nvidia didn't join the party, likely since they have their own connectors and are the clear market leader in he data center. No Amazon either. Of note, but the article isn't an important read. |
| 05/31/2024 | Optional | Transformers Can Do Arithmetic with the Right Embeddings | This research article goes deep on how the authors used embeddings to improve LLMs' abilities to do addition and multiplication. We're seeing good progress in improving LLM performance in math. A positive development but no need to read this one unless you feel like geeking out a bit this weekend. |
| 05/31/2024 | Optional | Generative AI predicts hospital admissions from ED visits | Researchers at Mount Sinai ran a study using more than 800,000 patient EHR records to see how GPT-4 performed in predicting whether a patient coming into the ER would need to be admitted. They got decent performance out of the box (77.5% accuracy) and improved performance by giving the LLM a little bit of clinical data (83.1% accuracy). Promising but only an essential read for those in healthcare and health insurance. |
| 05/31/2024 | Optional | How Italian CIOs produce value with gen AI | This article covers how some Italian companies are using LLMs, but they're all the most common use cases - customer service, internal knowledge tool, coding assistants - and the piece offers little detail or actionable insights so you can skip this one. |
| 06/03/2024 | Important | What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs (Part I) | This article published by O'Reilly is not news per se, but it provides some tactics the authors have found to be successful when implementing LLMs in the enterprise. Best practices on RAG, building AI agents, evaluations and more can provide real practicable advice for the AI leaders' team. This is one to read when you have time and forward to your workers. |
| 06/03/2024 | Important | Singapore Publishes Generative AI Model Governance Framework | Our important rating on this one is because it provides a crisp summary of a framework AI leaders can use in their own organization as opposed to the news of Singapore publishing the framework. A good one to read to either serve as a checklist for your own framework or to help you get started on creating one if you don't have one already. |
| 06/03/2024 | Optional | Dell earnings reveal sluggish enterprise AI adoption | We selected this article because it goes into Dell leaderships' discussion about why they think GenAI pickup is slow. We see it as an excuse for an earnings miss - slowness is expected given it's still early days. We had a lively discussion about Dell's AI strategy (starts around minute 1:40) which is similar to its cloud strategy (or lack of one) - they're targeting on-prem infrastructure. We don't think it's wise to plow resources into on-prem right now given the early days and pace at which things are advancing. |
| 06/03/2024 | Optional | Secret Cyborgs and Their AI Shadows: Navigating the Copilot+ PCs Frontier | This articles poses that the forthcoming AI-infused PCs introduce new risks for shadow AI usage in the enterprise. It doesn't make an effective argument - most of what's discussed mirrors risks for any organization that issues computers to workers (which is most orgs). And if you bought AI PCs for your employees, doesn't this signal you want them to use AI (as you should)? |
| 06/03/2024 | Optional | Meet Showrunner, The ‘Netflix Of AI’ That Turns Viewers Into TV Show Creators | While this company's product is certainly innovative - they publish animated series that users can create new episodes for - we've known about it for a while and it's still not widely available. |
| 06/03/2024 | Optional | Sony Pictures Uses AI to Cut Film Costs | Yes, we know that studios are going to use AI for voiceover, post-production and more - as much as they can within the bounds of labor agreements. However, it's worth clicking this link to see Perplexity Pages in action - they're using it to create their newsletter from which we pulled this. |
| 06/03/2024 | Optional | FineWeb: decanting the web for the finest text data at scale | The authors detail a technique they used to create what they've deemed (and some evals support) a better dataset for training than those currently available. Perhaps worth forwarding to your team for a look but too in the weeds to warrant a read by the busy AI leader. |
| 05/30/2024 | Important | What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs (Part II) | Yesterday we rated the first edition of this series on LLM implementation tactics as important and we give the same rating to the second edition which covers operations. While the tactics edition was more geared toward developers, this one has points that both AI leaders and their teams will find valuable. |
| 05/30/2024 | Important | The Agent Development Life Cycle | This article co-authored by Bret Taylor is clearly making a case for using his company Sierra's SDK. However, what Sierra is solving for is of note - standing up an LLM application is quite different from what developers are used to. Sierra's tools attempt to make it more similar for them. |
| 05/30/2024 | Important | Interesting insights on NVIDIA and what we can expect from AI in future | This is a thoughtful X post by investor Nic Carter that's wide ranging in what it covers. The implications of power moving from labor to capital, the US's place in the world in the AI-driven future, energy implications and more. A worthy read. |
| 05/30/2024 | Optional | Generative AI is now scanning your Amazon packages for defects before they get shipped out | Amazon's use case is of note, but the article provides little information about it beyond the headline so no need to read it. |
| 05/30/2024 | Optional | Clarity may be emerging in AI capabilities pricing. Here's how | AI pricing can be confusing right now, but so is this article. Skip it. |
| 05/30/2024 | Optional | Introducing Project G-Assist: A Preview Of How AI Assistants Can Enhance Games & Apps | The takeaway of this one is all you need to know - AI agents that can see our screens and interact with us about what we're doing on them are coming. First in Microsoft's forthcoming AI-powered PCs and, apparently, soon from Nvidia. |
| 05/30/2024 | Important | What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs (Part II) | Yesterday we rated the first edition of this series on LLM implementation tactics as important and we give the same rating to the second edition which covers operations. While the tactics edition was more geared toward developers, this one has points that both AI leaders and their teams will find valuable. |
| 05/30/2024 | Important | The Agent Development Life Cycle | This article co-authored by Bret Taylor is clearly making a case for using his company Sierra's SDK. However, what Sierra is solving for is of note - standing up an LLM application is quite different from what developers are used to. Sierra's tools attempt to make it more similar for them. |
| 05/30/2024 | Important | Interesting insights on NVIDIA and what we can expect from AI in future | This is a thoughtful X post by investor Nic Carter that's wide ranging in what it covers. The implications of power moving from labor to capital, the US's place in the world in the AI-driven future, energy implications and more. A worthy read. |
| 05/30/2024 | Optional | Generative AI is now scanning your Amazon packages for defects before they get shipped out | Amazon's use case is of note, but the article provides little information about it beyond the headline so no need to read it. |
| 05/30/2024 | Optional | Clarity may be emerging in AI capabilities pricing. Here's how | AI pricing can be confusing right now, but so is this article. Skip it. |
| 05/30/2024 | Optional | Introducing Project G-Assist: A Preview Of How AI Assistants Can Enhance Games & Apps | The takeaway of this one is all you need to know - AI agents that can see our screens and interact with us about what we're doing on them are coming. First in Microsoft's forthcoming AI-powered PCs and, apparently, soon from Nvidia. |
| 06/04/2024 | Important | What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs (Part II) | Yesterday we rated the first edition of this series on LLM implementation tactics as important and we give the same rating to the second edition which covers operations. While the tactics edition was more geared toward developers, this one has points that both AI leaders and their teams will find valuable. |
| 06/04/2024 | Important | The Agent Development Life Cycle | This article co-authored by Bret Taylor is clearly making a case for using his company Sierra's SDK. However, what Sierra is solving for is of note - standing up an LLM application is quite different from what developers are used to. Sierra's tools attempt to make it more similar for them. |
| 06/04/2024 | Important | Interesting insights on NVIDIA and what we can expect from AI in future | This is a thoughtful X post by investor Nic Carter that's wide ranging in what it covers. The implications of power moving from labor to capital, the US's place in the world in the AI-driven future, energy implications and more. A worthy read. |
| 06/04/2024 | Optional | Generative AI is now scanning your Amazon packages for defects before they get shipped out | Amazon's use case is of note, but the article provides little information about it beyond the headline so no need to read it. |
| 06/04/2024 | Optional | Clarity may be emerging in AI capabilities pricing. Here's how | AI pricing can be confusing right now, but so is this article. Skip it. |
| 06/04/2024 | Optional | Introducing Project G-Assist: A Preview Of How AI Assistants Can Enhance Games & Apps | The takeaway of this one is all you need to know - AI agents that can see our screens and interact with us about what we're doing on them are coming. First in Microsoft's forthcoming AI-powered PCs and, apparently, soon from Nvidia. |
| 06/04/2024 | Important | Snowflake Data Cloud Summit 2024: The biggest developments announced | Data is, of course, a vital element of GenAI, and that's where Snowflake plays. Announcements included making Iceberg Tables generally available, open sourcing Polaris in the coming weeks, and enhancing the Cortex AI offering. Worth reading through these updates. |
| 03/06/2024 | Important | True Fit leverages generative AI to help online shoppers find clothes that fit | This company provides sizing data and tools to retailers like Urban Outfitters and JCPenney. It's enhancing these tools with GenAI and lays out a roadmap for more GenAI-enabled offerings to come. Nice use case story. |
| 06/04/2024 | Optional | US delays AI chip exports to Middle East by Nvidia, AMD over concern that China can access the tech via data centres | While the topic covered in these pieces is one for any executive in a company that relies on semis (which is many at this point) to monitor for digital supply chain resiliency, these articles aren't necessarily the ones to read to do so. |
| 06/04/2024 | Optional | Vinod Khosla, Marc Andreessen And The Billionaire Battle For AI's Future | This article discusses the competing perspectives among two famous tech investors on open source (supported by Andreessen v. closed source (supported by Khosla) LLMs. A somewhat entertaining read, but it doesn't introduce any new ideas into the debate. |
| 06/04/2024 | Optional | Databricks to Buy Data-Management Startup Tabular in Bid for AI Clients | Databricks continues its acquisition spree with its third purchase of the year. Tabular makes a cloud storage technology that is built on Iceberg. A notable development as this company continues to compete with Snowflake in the data space, but we don't think the article is an essential read. |
| 06/05/2024 | Important | Introducing Generative Physical AI | In this video, Nvidia shares details about its Isaac robotics platform, which leverages GenAI and reinforcement learning to help companies create autonomous robots that can perform numerous tasks by training them in a virtual environment. Worth taking 3 minutes to view. |
| 06/05/2024 | Important | Snowflake Data Cloud Summit 2024: The biggest developments announced | Data is, of course, a vital element of GenAI, and that's where Snowflake plays. Announcements included making Iceberg Tables generally available, open sourcing Polaris in the coming weeks, and enhancing the Cortex AI offering. Worth reading through these updates. |
| 06/05/2024 | Important | True Fit leverages generative AI to help online shoppers find clothes that fit | This company provides sizing data and tools to retailers like Urban Outfitters and JCPenney. It's enhancing these tools with GenAI and lays out a roadmap for more GenAI-enabled offerings to come. Nice use case story. |
| 06/05/2024 | Optional | US delays AI chip exports to Middle East by Nvidia, AMD over concern that China can access the tech via data centres | While the topic covered in these pieces is one for any executive in a company that relies on semis (which is many at this point) to monitor for digital supply chain resiliency, these articles aren't necessarily the ones to read to do so. |
| 06/05/2024 | Optional | Vinod Khosla, Marc Andreessen And The Billionaire Battle For AI's Future | This article discusses the competing perspectives among two famous tech investors on open source (supported by Andreessen v. closed source (supported by Khosla) LLMs. A somewhat entertaining read, but it doesn't introduce any new ideas into the debate. |
| 06/05/2024 | Optional | Databricks to Buy Data-Management Startup Tabular in Bid for AI Clients | Databricks continues its acquisition spree with its third purchase of the year. Tabular makes a cloud storage technology that is built on Iceberg. A notable development as this company continues to compete with Snowflake in the data space, but we don't think the article is an essential read. |
| 06/06/2024 | Important | Navigating the generative AI disruption in software | This article provides an analysis of how GenAI is impacting software providers today and projects effects going forward. It notes that GenAI is likely to increase tech spend but also increase vendor switching, with these trends already beginning. Worth at least a look through the charts. |
| 06/06/2024 | Important | Torrens University leverages generative AI to uplift its online learning experience | While this is a case study from Microsoft with an agenda, it highlights a nice use case in which a university used GenAI to audit 1,200 courses and 16,000 web pages to help it standardize the structure of the content to improve the student experience. Quick read that's worth the two minutes to get some inspiration. |
| 06/06/2024 | Optional | Wix’s new tool taps AI to generate smartphone apps | The popular no-code website development provider is moving into no-code mobile app development. While the article isn't worth reading, the move is an indicator that the no-code revolution hyped several years ago is finally becoming a reality thanks to GenAI. |
| 06/06/2024 | Optional | Asana’s new ‘AI teammate’ can tell people what to do at work | Another day, another GenAI assistant embedded into existing software. However, we noted that there's a bit of a creep factor in this one - the tool assesses worker performance on prior projects and team "relationships" to suggest the best team members for a new project. Will employees push back on such AI-as-manager functionalities? While this type of monitoring already occurs to some extent, the press around every new GenAI-powered offering is increasing awareness of it. |
| 06/06/2024 | Optional | Mistral launches new services and SDK to let customers fine-tune its models | New tools from the French company could be powerful, but we don't think this announcement is worth reading unless you're using or considering using Mistral. |
| 06/06/2024 | Optional | Generative AI Innovations Take Center Stage at SAP Sapphire in 2024 | This one won the award for the biggest nothing burger of the day. Perhaps the expansion of its AI assistant, Joule, offers some good capabilities, but this article provides zero info on what those are. We'd love to hear from users to learn more. Reach out if you have experience with it. |
| 06/07/2024 | Essential | What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs (Part III): Strategy | We enjoyed this entire series published in O'Reilly, rating part I on tactics and part II on operations as Important earlier in the week. Given the AI leader is responsible for strategy, we marked this final edition as Essential. Some recommendations aren't revelatory, but there are great nuggets in here. For example, the authors note that the best LLM-based applications tend to be the ones designed to augment humans as opposed to those that strive for full task automation. Read the whole series this weekend. |
| 06/07/2024 | Important | Doing Stuff with AI: Opinionated Midyear Edition | This one is important with a caveat. It shares some basic information about frontier models (Gemini, GPT-4o, Claude, etc.), offering insights into which are better at particular tasks. An AI leader should know this information already, but if you actually haven't spent a lot of time playing with these models, this article will get you up to speed. |
| 06/07/2024 | Important | Study finds that AI models hold opposing views on controversial topics | It's one thing to talk about the importance of evaluating a model for bias and another to see that bias play out in very different ways across various models. Researchers studied several models to examine their biases, which are sometimes from the data and sometimes from intentional guardrails implemented by model trainers. This piece shows the AI leader how bias can show up, and we think that's pretty important to understand. |
| 06/07/2024 | Optional | Extracting Concepts from GPT-4 | OpenAI's research team has made a bit of progress in the effort to understand how LLMs actually work, which remains a great mystery that's quite important to solve. They trained a 16-million feature autoencoder on GPT-4 that you can actually see in action and mess around with via this link in the article. But this is a quite technical piece, so not an essential read. |
| 06/07/2024 | Optional | LLMs achieve adult human performance on higher-order theory of mind tasks | Another deep piece of research that we don't think warrants your time. It finds that GPT-4 and Flan-PaLM reach adult-level or near-adult-level performance in theory of mind, which is the ability to infer and reason about the mental states of oneself and others that's important in social interactions. In the process, the authors developed a benchmark to gauge this capability. Only read if you feel like geeking out a bit this weekend. |
| 06/07/2024 | Optional | How Gen AI Is Helping One French Retailer Enhance Shopping Experiences | A very brief interview with the marketing and digital director of a French company akin to the US's Home Depot. The company is finding that its GenAI-powered shopping assistant is enabling customers to avoid overwhelm when assessing options to suit their needs, which results in more purchases. A nice anecdote to show that a shopping assistant done well - we've seen plenty that aren't up to snuff - truly provides value. |
| 06/10/2024 | Essential | Silicon Valley on Edge as New AI Regulation Bill Advances in California | This bill is on the move, passing through 3 out of 6 steps needed to pass (bill text here). While some AI regulation is needed, the language and content of this bill is worrisome and could seriously hamper AI development while not really achieving its goals of keeping people safe. This article is not great, but you need to be aware of this bill and begin interacting with your own's state legislators to work toward a much better version. |
| 06/10/2024 | Important | The Snowflake Attack May Be Turning Into One of the Largest Data Breaches Ever | Ticketmaster, Santander, and Advance Auto Parts are among those companies whose data has been stolen and put up for sale on the dark web for enormous sums in the millions of dollars. User names and passwords are among this data - but for those with two-factor authentication enabled, such data doesn't get hackers very far. This breach serves as another important reminder to use multi-factor ID and any methods that provide enhanced data security. |
| 06/10/2024 | Important | Claude’s Character | Brands will need to consider the "personality" and behaviors they want to instill in the GenAI agents they embed in their customer-facing applications. This article from Anthropic will get you thinking about it. |
| 06/10/2024 | Important | Say Hello to My New AI Marketer: How Gen AI-Based Software Is Advancing Marketing and Sales | A well-written piece from Andreessen about the levels of capability that GenAI-powered marketing tools are expected to progress through, from a copilot for marketers to a fully autonomous marketing team. AI leaders will be supporting their marketing teams through this journey so this is one to read. |
| 06/10/2024 | Important | AgentGym: Evolving Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments | Our John Sviokla is a fan of this team's approach to agent training, believing it could greatly affect the economics of agent development. A longer, technical piece, but one to bookmark for when you have some time. |
| 06/10/2024 | Optional | Building AI products | Our Luda Kopeikina labeled this commentary from Benedict Evans as "ruminating in the dark." He debates how to productize LLMs given that they are probabilistic and will produce inaccuracies. But he presents no solutions and adds no interesting new thinking on the topic. Skip it. |
| 06/11/2024 | Essential | Apple Intelligence: every new AI feature coming to the iPhone and Mac | While Apple is integrating with OpenAI, they let you know when it's happening, and they're using local models to do a lot of the AI work on the iPhone. They're incorporating AI capabilities largely in a potentially safer and conservative way that will still have impact. The Siri upgrades are, of course, very welcomed, and it's most notable that Apple's trusty will start being able to use apps as tools with more advanced capabilities in that realm to come (dare we say agentic!). And we're perhaps most excited to finally have a calculator on the iPad. Plus, before you think this is all about B2C, consider that more 60% of enterprise mobile devices are from Apple. |
| 06/11/2024 | Optional | Generative AI is expected to magnify the risk of deepfakes and other fraud in banking | Interesting that Deloitte attempted to quantify the projected increase in fraud we could see, but how scientific could this really be? Banks are well-aware of this potential - and the article doesn't really provide anything helpful for them to combat the problem. |
| 06/11/2024 | Optional | It Looked Like a Reliable News Site. It Was an A.I. Chop Shop. | Unfortunate to see - remember that model providers are training their systems on internet data and may or may not remove this type of terrible content before doing so. But we already know that the web is getting flooded by AI-generated content, so not an essential read. |
| 06/11/2024 | Optional | Elon Musk threatens Apple ban over OpenAI integration, cybersecurity experts raise alarms | Elon doing what he does - making noise. Nothing burger. |
| 06/11/2024 | Optional | Multiplication-Free Transformer Training via Piecewise Affine Operations | A neural network training optimization technique that could be a game changer (though currently slower than current techniques because it doesn't work well with current hardware). But yet to be seen where this goes. Keep an eye out for it but this technical paper is optional for now. |
| 06/11/2024 | Optional | Nvidia’s New Sales Booster: The Global Push for National AI Champions | The fact that governments are scrambling to scoop up chips from Nvidia comes as no surprise. Not worth reading. |
| 06/12/2024 | Essential | What Apple's AI Tells Us: Experimental Models | This is a great commentary from GenAI thought leader Ethan Mollick on the various business models we're seeing emerge from those putting the technology into their offerings. He contrasts Apple's approach, in which they're utilizing small models for discrete tasks and abstracting GenAI away versus a company like OpenAI using a giant model and putting GenAI forward. It also emphasizes the need for companies to build trust, something Apple prides itself in putting first and was the topic of our David De Lallo's popular Sunday AI comic a few weeks ago. The piece is worth a read by the AI leader. |
| 06/12/2024 | Important | Roadmap: AI Infrastructure | Bessemer Venture Partners put together a nice commentary on the evolving AI stack and include a market map of players - unfortunately you can't enlarge it to actually read it, but you get the point that the ecosystem is growing and crowded. A worthy overview for the AI leader. |
| 06/12/2024 | Important | SELF-TUNING: Instructing LLMs to Effectively Acquire New Knowledge through Self-Teaching | AI model training is, as we know, incredibly expensive so LLMs often have a knowledge cut-off date and lack recent information. This promising technique from a group of Chinese researchers offers an efficient way to enable LLMs to learn from new knowledge. It's a well-written piece of research that's worth your time to read. |
| 06/12/2024 | Optional | Paris-based AI startup Mistral AI raises $640M | Mistral's recent raise puts the company at an eye-watering $6B valuation and included many investors, including competitors Nvidia and IBM. That's all you need to know - no need to read. |
| 06/12/2024 | Optional | Why Perplexity’s Cynical Theft Represents Everything That Could Go Wrong With AI | Perplexity's newsletter recently pulled content from a Forbes article that included citations in some places, but not all, and lifts some text directly from the article. And apparently Perplexity published the newsletter on the web and it siphoned traffic away from Forbes. Editor Randall Lane was quite unhappy about this and published this scathing commentary to share that view with the world. He has a valid point - if you're going to lift the content you better put quotes around it and cite it visibly. But the news here is for marketers - do you have a strategy for the seismic shift happening in search? You better. |
| 06/12/2024 | Optional | How to use Perplexity in your PM work | Lenny Rachitsky's newsletter shares the various ways product managers are using Perplexity in their work - and an informal poll of 6,000 plus workers shows 57% of PMs use either Perplexity, Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT daily. Worth a skim to understand how these tools can help your PMs and you should forward this to them, PMs but not necessarily an essential full read for an AI leader. |
| 06/13/2024 | Important | Databricks and Shutterstock are trying to remove the copyright risk from AI image generation | It's critical for marketing departments to be able to generate images free of copyright issues. While some vendors offer indemnification, it hasn't been tested yet. Plus, we applaud Databricks and Shutterstock for paying creatives for use of their work in training data and would be interested to see what that compensation model looks like. |
| 06/13/2024 | Important | Together MoA — collective intelligence of open-source models pushing the frontier of LLM capabilities | Together.ai takes a mixture of agents approach, combining several open source LLMs to create a single model that outperforms OpenAI's 4o in one evaluation (AlpacaEval 2.0) though takes a little longer on inference. Despite the issues with relying on benchmarks, given 4o's dominance, this intrigued us. Give it a read when you have time. |
| 06/13/2024 | Optional | LiveBench is an open LLM benchmark that uses contamination-free test data and objective scoring | Another attempt to create benchmarks that are actually informative for AI leaders trying to choose among LLMs. But we still think enterprises will need to try a model to truly know if it works for their purposes. Of note as a potentially helpful tool, but we're skeptical that this fully solves the problem leaders face. |
| 06/13/2024 | Optional | Luma Labs Dream Machine | The outputs from this new video generator are gorgeous, but it still has some of the same limitations as competitor tools like Runway so we're marking this optional for now. |
| 06/13/2024 | Optional | Generative AI Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For You | The author ,Honeycomb.io co-founder and CTO Charity Majors, makes some good points about how the labor structure will evolve and software engineering apprenticeship needs a rethink given the emergence of coding assistants. This notion that some hold that AI will do everything for us in engineering or other occupations is naive. Only read this if you hold that view and need a reality check. |
| 06/13/2024 | Optional | Can LLMs invent better ways to train LLMs? | Sakana.ai has found a way to use LLMs to generate and evaluate proposals that improve alignment. Unlike the Tomorrow article that we rated important, there's no empirical evidence on performance here so we put this one as optional for now. |
| 06/13/2024 | Optional | OpenAIs-annualized-revenue-doubles-to-3-4-billion-since-late-2023 (paywall) | Though OpenAI told The Information that this figure was "inaccurate," we don't know how inaccurate this figure is. If it's even close, it shows how far ahead of competitors they are in revenue generation. The article notes that Anthropic expects $850M annually by the end of 2024 (though told investors last fall they generated $100M) and Cohere comes in at $22M a year. But are you surprised? |
| 06/14/2024 | Essential | Introducing Lamini Memory Tuning: 95% LLM Accuracy, 10x Fewer Hallucinations | This one is worth a look - the improvements in accuracy over RAG or prompting (or a combo of the two) are impressive. Lamini has come up with a 'new way to fine-tune any existing LLM by tuning millions of LoRA adapters and selecting across them in a wide Mixture of Experts at inference time.' They tout that they have some Fortune 500 customers as well. |
| 06/14/2024 | Important | BT rolls out Amazon’s generative AI developer tool to more coders | We're flagging this one, but not necessarily because BT adopted Amazon Q (though good to see as we hear more about GitHub adoption). It provides stats on the productivity improvements they're seeing (13% of work automated) and discusses which developers see the benefit - those in the middle of the pack as opposed to the most junior (who they don't even let use it because they won't be able to effectively check for errors) or the most senior. |
| 06/14/2024 | Important | Bendigo and Adelaide Bank Partners with MongoDB to Modernize Core Banking Technology Using Generative AI | We're selective with rating press releases as important, but using GenAI to limit cost and time in migrating to the cloud is a compelling use case. |
| 06/14/2024 | Optional | Apple to ‘Pay’ OpenAI for ChatGPT Through Distribution, Not Cash | OpenAI is banking on earning subscriptions by getting more exposure to consumers via this deal. Unclear whether Apple will take its typical 30% cut if ChatGPT is then purchased through its app store. Either way, not a lot of impact on the AI leader so optional read. |
| 06/14/2024 | Optional | US Air Force seeks generative AI test pilots | This is a pilot for pilots (and others) using 'self-hosted open-source LLMs in a controlled environment' (no, GenAI isn't flying fighter jets). The public sector is experimenting with GenAI a lot sooner than previous tech innovations, which is indicative of the potential here, but a pilot is a pilot and there is zero info on exactly how they're using the tool. |
| 06/14/2024 | Optional | How Mars Is Using Generative AI to Accelerate Product Development and Personalization | The company behind M&Ms and other sweets are using GenAI to generate product ideas and optimize ads. But the article is light on the details so we marked it as optional. |
| 06/17/2024 | Essential | Former NSA head joins OpenAI board and safety committee | General Paul Nakasone has been brought in as a cybersecurity expert, but we worry that this has more to do with OpenAI continuing to signal it's up for doing business with the government - and potentially helping unlock all their data (ie, YOUR data) for government surveillance. Remember that you can turn off data sharing in Settings whether you're a paying user or tapping the free version of ChatGPT. However, it still stores your chats for 30 days unless you use Temporary Chats. |
| 06/17/2024 | Essential | ‘Devastating’ potential impact of Google AI Overviews on publisher visibility revealed | The UK's Press Gazette and other publishers commissioned an SEO agency to plug 3,300 search terms that typically drive traffic to publishers into Google to see how AI Overviews are affecting their position. AI Overviews were presented nearly 25% of the time and, when they were, links to the publisher from which an article originated moved about a full page-scroll down. Google, however, notes that citations in the overviews (when they're present) drive a lot of clicks. Every brand should be conducting these experiments, and the AI leader will want to help marketers understand what's going on technologically here. |
| 06/17/2024 | Important | Nvidia’s ‘Nemotron-4 340B’ model redefines synthetic data generation, rivals GPT-4 | A high-performing model from a big player is a pretty big deal, so we're rating this as important. LLM providers are running out of data to train systems with - many are already using synthetic data. |
| 06/17/2024 | Optional | Meta says European regulators are ruining its AI bot | European regulators are standing up to Meta's data-gobbling ways. Let's see if it holds. |
| 06/17/2024 | Optional | Former Meta engineers launch Jace, an AI agent that works independently | It's still very early days for the company behind this - Zeta Labs - and the pre-seed funding of $2.9M is quite small. We'll monitor this one, but optional for now. |
| 06/17/2024 | Optional | AI in finance is like ‘moving from typewriters to word processors’ | This brief FT article about how AI will impact accountants and financial analysts is full of well-covered observations. Skip it. |
| 06/18/2024 | Important | Bag of Tricks: Benchmarking of Jailbreak Attacks on LLMs | This is a very thorough piece of research on ways jailbreaks are performed and techniques to combat them. It's long, so if you're looking for a short version, our Analyst Adam Rappaport made a GPT to share the critical points. |
| 06/18/2024 | Important | Generating audio for video | Interesting research from Google that shows how they're able to automatically add sound effects and scores to generated video, with or without prompting. The frontier of video generation is progressing rapidly with implications for the creator economy, film production and marketing. |
| 06/18/2024 | Important | Black founders are creating tailored ChatGPTs for a more personalized experience | Well-sourced article that highlights the ways that bias shows up in models and affects those against whom their biased. Also shows the opportunities for start-ups and incumbents to create models that are more inclusive or are customized for particular cultures. |
| 06/18/2024 | Important | How A.I. Is Revolutionizing Drug Development | A critical article for anyone in life sciences, but we also think there's enough detail here to show the art of the possible when you create feedback mechanisms (data in, run model, new data out, incorporate the new data into model...) and digitize what once was a physical development process. |
| 06/18/2024 | Optional | Inside Publicis Groupe’s closed-door Cannes AI push | Interesting to see how larger marketing agencies are evolving their services to incorporate more data and tech services around GenAI, but not an essential read unless you're in that space. |
| 06/18/2024 | Optional | OpenAI Expands Healthcare Push With Color Health’s Cancer Copilot | Some nice detail in this piece on how Color Health is using GenAI (eg, automating aspects of prior authorization process, medical test plans, etc) that makes for an essential read for those in healthcare, but it's optional for all others. |
| 06/19/2024 | Essential | MISQE Insight on Leveraging Computability for Competitive Advantage | This article is a piece by our own John Sviokla that discusses how GenAI is making intelligence more computable and explains what the implications of this are for management and competitive advantage. We understand the appearances of rating our own work as "essential" but the framework provided here is one that AI leaders will certainly find useful. |
| 06/19/2024 | Essential | Giant Chips Give Supercomputers a Run for Their Money | This article talks about the latest advance in compute by Cerebras, a company we've covered before. It now offers a wafer that wires processors together on-chip, bypassing "many of the computational speed losses that come from many GPUs talking to each other." The company says this helps beat the performance of Frontier, the world's largest supercomputer, and can reduce energy requirements by two thirds. Time to start tuning into this Nvidia competitor. |
| 06/19/2024 | Important | China’s DeepSeek Coder becomes first open-source coding model to beat GPT-4 Turbo | The innovation coming out of China is something AI leaders should have on their radar. A lot of the research papers we've flagged as important have come from the country's researchers, and this model shows product starting to come along as well. |
| 06/19/2024 | Important | Meta releases flurry of new AI models for audio, text and watermarking | Meta's putting the watermarking under commercial licensing but the other models it announced, including JASCO which can improve the sound of audio inputs, are open source. Good to be aware of the advancing frontier of open source. |
| 06/19/2024 | Important | Introducing Gen-3 Alpha | This short announcement of Runway's latest model upgrade is worth taking in if only to understand how fast video generation is progressing. Stunning clips here that are worth gawking at. |
| 06/19/2024 | Optional | Prosci launches new change management generative AI tool | Our only optional piece of the day is not worth reading, but it does point out how one company is "packaging" their consulting services into a GenAI model and begs the question - how are you capturing your company's proprietary knowledge to offer it in new and compelling ways as intelligence becomes more computable? |
| 06/20/2024 | Important | Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine | Our analysts had wide-ranging views and a spirited debate on this investigative piece by WIRED in which the publisher demonstrates that Perplexity crawlers go around blocks to scrape pages but the company denies doing so (watch it at 8:30 here). Our John Sviokla pointed out that the lack of transparency and questionable behavior runs counter to the company's stated values while Luda Kopeikina called the development "noise." We split the difference with an Important rating. |
| 06/20/2024 | Optional | Nvidia Conquers Latest AI TestsGPU maker tops new MLPerf benchmarks on graph neural nets and LLM fine-tuning | Is anyone surprised by this? We think it's more compelling that the tests show AMD and others catching up in performance. |
| 06/20/2024 | Optional | Safe Superintelligence Inc. | OpenAI defectors Ilya Sutskever and Daniel Levy along with investor Daniel Gross have started a new company that seeks to create "safe superintelligence," meaning AGI created while putting safety first. They'll need a lot of new funding to do so - let's see how this goes. |
| 06/20/2024 | Optional | Snap previews its real-time image model that can generate AR experiences | The model is not yet ready for prime time (and still seems far from impressive from the video demos in the article) so we're parking this as optional for now. |
| 06/20/2024 | Optional | Florence-2: Advancing a Unified Representation for a Variety of Vision Tasks | Microsoft researchers have created a vision model using a generated and autonomously annotated data set of 126M images, achieving impressive zero-shot captioning and image generation in a small model (less than 1B parameters). Impressive but we don't think you need to read the technical research. |
| 06/20/2024 | Optional | Former Snap engineer launches Butterflies, a social network where AIs and humans coexist | Interesting spin on somewhat similar offerings from Charater.ai and Meta - here you don't just interact this an AI persona, though. The personas interact with each other and humans. It will be interesting to see if it gains as much traction as Character.ai, but no need to read this piece. |
| 06/21/2024 | Essential | Claude 3.5 Sonnet | Lots of excitement in the community about this upgrade to Anthropic's middle-of-the-road model which is available to try for free. It is not only surpassing OpenAI's 4o on some benchmarks, but is also already getting rave reviews from users. The new UX on this is great, featuring an editable workspace on the right where you can update your AI-generated content. Anthropic's press release clearly shows their pivot to the enterprise and we think this new offering is going to help them gain traction there. |
| 06/21/2024 | Essential | State of the Cloud 2024 | This latest article from Bessemer Venture Partners is actually all about AI given its growing presence and outsized mindshare in cloud. Lots of great market maps and insights in this one as the VC team walks you through the 5 trends they are seeing in cloud. A must read over the weekend. |
| 06/21/2024 | Important | Optimizing AI Inference at Character AI | Character.ai gets a lot of traffic - 20K inference queries per second, which they estimate to be about 20% of the request volume in Google Search. They have reduced their inference serving costs by more than 30X - worth seeing how they are doing it as costs for LLM use are a big issue for the AI leader. |
| 06/21/2024 | Important | Latent Expertise: Everyone is in R&D | A smart piece by Ethan Mollick about tapping your experts in a subject area to work with and refine LLM applications because they can tell what good outputs are vs. generic/poor ones better than an inexperienced person - and definitely better than someone in IT. |
| 06/21/2024 | Optional | Roblox’s Road to 4D Generative AIUS Air Force seeks generative AI test pilots | Roblox is extremely popular, to the tune of 77 million active daily users. They consider the 4th dimension to be interactivity and here they talk about how they are working on it and why it is important to grok. While they are in gaming, the work they are doing on physics-based modeling is of obvious relevance to industry. But there is not anything in this piece that is useful to the AI leader yet. |
| 06/21/2024 | Optional | AI startup Adept is in deal talks with Microsoft | If this rumor is true, it will be a deal akin to the Inflection one and another strong strategic move by CEO Nadella. Regulatory scrutiny does not appear to be slowing him down, but no need to read this. |
| 06/24/2024 | Essential | AI Survey: Four Themes Emerging | While we expected another high-level survey when we saw this research from Bain, we were pleasantly surprised that the nature of the questions they asked provide helpful benchmarks for the AI leader. A few examples: Average spend on GenAI is $5M annually, $50M among the largest companies; concerns are shifting from data and IP to organizational readiness; and GenAI use in sales is growing. Of note to AI vendors: low vendor/tool quality and capabilities is increasing as a reason for GenAI implementations not meeting expectations. |
| 06/24/2024 | Important | Why Anthropic’s Artifacts may be this year’s most important AI feature: Unveiling the interface battle | While the title of this piece may be overstating things a bit, we agree that UX for GenAI tools leaves a lot of room for improvement at this point and AI leaders should take note. Our David DeLallo called this out in his Sunday AI comic yesterday. |
| 06/24/2024 | Important | Reckitt Gen AI Pilots Optimizing Operations, Product Development, and Marketing | The maker of Lysol and Clearasil provides hard numbers on improvements it's seeing from using GenAI for product development (60% reduction in concepting time), localizing advertising and post-campaign analysis (90% reduction in time). And, importantly, Reckitt is using it to help measure Scope 3 emissions, which many companies operating in the EU need to report on in 2025 due to the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). It's a nontrivial effort to do this so if GenAI can help, take advantage. |
| 06/24/2024 | Optional | Target embraces generative AI with Store Companion | Good to see Target implementing an employee knowledge assistant tool, but this is becoming a table stakes move for companies, with many Target competitors (eg, Walmart) already using one, so no need to read this. |
| 06/24/2024 | Optional | OpenAI buys Rockset to bolster its enterprise AI | This is OpenAI's second acquisition. Rockset is a small outfit with a data infrastructure offering that OpenAI looks to be acquiring to bolster RAG and access to real-time data. That's all you need to know on this. |
| 06/24/2024 | Optional | Training is not the same as chatting: ChatGPT and other LLMs don’t remember everything you say | This commentary attempts to allay fears we hear around the potential for LLMs to leak private data used to train it. Possibly provides the AI leader with some language to explain how LLMs really work to leadership, but not worth reading if you already have talking points on that. |
| 06/25/2024 | Important | Death, Taxes, and AI: How Generative AI Will Change Accounting | Professional services firms are 'in the crucible' in our WINS framework. This article does a decent job at breaking down the tasks in accounting that GenAI could be applied to and exploring impacts on billable hours. Doesn't present new ideas, but a good overview of where GenAI slots into the accountant's workflow. |
| 06/25/2024 | Optional | OpenAI buys a remote collaboration platform | Just a few days after the Rockset acquisition, OpenAI has purchased a small 5-person operation called Multi that offered a Zoom-like collaboration platform. We suspect the video capabilities (and talent) they're picking up will factor into future agentic capabilities, but no need to read the full announcement which is light on details and future plans. |
| 06/25/2024 | Optional | AI-Powered Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant Transforms Interactions Between Practitioners and Patients | The nurse assistant that fell to the wayside years ago is now back as an AI - this offering 'listens' in to a doctor appointment to take notes, to be later verified and approved by the doctor. Nice offering, but not the first of its kind so marking as optional. |
| 06/25/2024 | Optional | How generative AI could reinvent what it means to play | This article talks about the way that non-player characters (NPCs) in video games can be hooked up to LLMs to vary the conversations players can have with them every time they interact (today, there is a little variation, but among a fixed set of a few dialogues). Gaming can offer a glimpse at what virtual worlds, that may be where businesses and consumers increasingly interact, could look like so good for marketers to keep an eye on developments to craft future strategies, but this long read isn't worthwhile for the AI leaders. |
| 06/25/2024 | Optional | LongRAG: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Long-context LLMs | Big performance gains from this method that uses larger chunks, but it's based on the existence of hyperlinked text in the corpus the researchers used, which isn't something that will be prevalent in most data. This made us downgrade this to optional. |
| 06/26/2024 | Important | Collaborate with Claude on Projects | Anthropic continues to push out features that are useful to businesses as they make the shift to the enterprise audience. Chunking up knowledge into little shareable packs that colleagues can collaborate on should be pretty powerful. |
| 06/26/2024 | Important | Etched is Making the Biggest Bet in AI | This company is building a transformer into its chip, achieving an impressive 500K tokens of throughput per second on a 70B model. It's a big bet because LLMs are the only models it can process. Can't ignore this performance that Etched claims beats out Nvidia's Blackwell so we marked it as an important development. |
| 06/26/2024 | Important | ESM3: Simulating 500 million years of evolution with a language model | Newcomer EvolutionaryScale aims to make biology programmable using their frontier language model, ESM3, which can reason over the sequence, structure, and function of proteins. By simulating evolutionary processes, they seek to revolutionize the field of synthetic biology, enabling precise and logical design of biological molecules. Will we be able to design life? That scares us much more than AGI but this is supercool. |
| 06/26/2024 | Optional | Dante Genomics Generative AI GenomeChat Aims at Becoming Doctors’ and Patients’ Best Partner for Advanced Genomics Solutions | This is what it sounds like - a chatbot that delivers info about genomics. A product announcement light on details - skip it. |
| 06/26/2024 | Optional | On LLMs-Driven Synthetic Data Generation, Curation, and Evaluation: A Survey | Another piece of research from the prolific Chinese scientific community. It's a survey of other research on the topic that offers a bit of a one-stop-shop on synthetic data frameworks, but we think it's an optional one. |
| 06/26/2024 | Optional | Insights on AI Capex | This interesting little X post we came across estimates the amount of AI capex in terms of ChatGPTs and says by 2026 investment will be equivalent to 12,000 ChatGPTs. But no insights offered into how they've come up with this calculation, and how do we know if this means ROI on this will be high or low? |
| 06/27/2024 | Important | Mitigating Skeleton Key, a new type of generative AI jailbreak technique | Microsoft uncovered a relatively easy jailbreak technique using a simple prompt that explains to a chatbot that you're an expert seeking educational information on a topic so it can deliver information (like how to make a bomb) as long as it includes a warning about the sensitive nature of the content. Microsoft informed top LLM providers of the issue so it should be fixed in major offerings, but if you're using an open source or proprietary model, make sure you address this. |
| 06/27/2024 | Optional | Introducing AuraSR - An open reproduction of the GigaGAN Upscaler | Generative media platform provider fal.ai has open sourced a model that uses GANs to improve the resolution of images faster and at a lower cost than diffusion models. A positive development, but optional read. |
| 06/27/2024 | Optional | An AI version of Al Michaels will deliver Olympic recaps on Peacock | NBC is using an AI video generation tool (we don't know which) to replicate iconic sports commentator Al Michaels so they can provide personalized updates on the Olympics. Important for marketing leaders who should be thinking about how to use GenAI to personalize (and localize) content at scale, but optional for the AI leader. |
| 06/27/2024 | Optional | The owner of Toys ‘R’ Us just used OpenAI’s Sora to animate the zombie brand | Another piece showing a brand taking advantage of video generation tools. Here we know they're using Sora, which is still not generally available, to help create content. The creative team says Sora got them 80% of the way there of the video you can view in the article and a team of about 12 humans did the rest. |
| 06/27/2024 | Optional | Apple intelligence and AI maximalism | Smart commentary by Benedict Evans that examines Apple's strategy to use GenAI for features rather than as a product in and of itself, which we've talked about a few times. It also highlights how their strategy makes their costs to run generative AI much lower given it's mostly running on-device. But it also shares the view that LLMs will be commoditized. Do you agree? Let us know. |
| 06/27/2024 | Optional | Formation Bio raises $372M to boost drug development with AI | No need to read this funding announcement and you should be well-aware at this point that drug discovery is a prime use case for GenAI. |
| 06/27/2024 | Optional | CData, which helps orgs use data across apps and build AI models, snaps up $350M | Start-ups aren't the only ones benefitting from VCs clamoring to capitalize on GenAI. This 10-year-old company that provides standard APIs to connect proprietary data sources has seen an uptick in demand thanks to GenAI and is taking advantage of it to get some funding. |
| 06/28/2024 | Important | Goldman Sachs Deploys Its First Generative AI Tool Across the Firm | The tool they deployed is Copilot for code generation which isn't exactly cutting edge, but there are some lessons to take away from their overall approach to GenAI making this worth the read. |
| 06/28/2024 | Important | Gemini 1.5 Pro 2M context window, code execution capabilities, and Gemma 2 are available today | While this highlights the impressive increasing size of context windows, what's most interesting here is probably what's highlighted least - the context caching which should improve cost efficiency. |
| 06/28/2024 | Optional | Meta Large Language Model Compiler: Foundation Models of Compiler Optimization | Meta continues to push the envelope on the open source side. They're going after the efficiency of the code here, and it's an interesting piece of research. If they were announcing this was available, we'd have made it important. |
| 06/28/2024 | Optional | Finding GPT-4’s mistakes with GPT-4 | OpenAI is using GPT-4 to help the humans providing feedback during training (as part of RLHF) figure out what's wrong with GPT-4. An essential step in improving these models and a good example of using AI to enhance human efficiency, but an optional read. |
| 06/28/2024 | Optional | TIME and OpenAI Announce Strategic Content Partnership | It's interesting to track these deals, but no need to read this press release. Note that the content OpenAI and others are licensing is likely not just for training, but also for grounding the models (which will help models deliver better answers). |
| 06/28/2024 | Optional | Google partners with Thomson Reuters, Moody’s and more to give AI real-world data | Same commentary on this one regarding grounding as previous article - and same optional rating. |
| 06/28/2024 | Optional | Inside UW Health's generative AI pilot for nurse efficiency | A single use case that's pretty basic - helping nurses write responses. Good to see given the massive nurse shortage, but optional. |
| 06/28/2024 | Optional | Introducing Baseten Chains | This is an announcement about the company's framework and SDK for managing multiple models and components for "compound AI systems," a term we're hearing more and more from vendors. They're claiming halving processing times and 6X improvement in GPU utilization which is impressive, but we don't think that quite elevates this product announcement to important. |
| 07/02/2024 | Important | Morgan Stanley’s gen AI launch is about global analysis | Morgan Stanley is planning to record all conversations--more than a million annually--that advisors have with clients and then summarize them and share them with all advisors. They've tapped OpenAI as their LLM provider for this. We had a spirited debate about whether this goes beyond the level of surveillance we already experience through monitored customer service calls for quality assurance, with analysts expressing opinions on both sides. |
| 07/02/2024 | Important | ServiceNow’s generative AI solutions are taking advantage of the data on its own platform | This article presents ServiceNow's broad AI strategy which encompasses enabling customers to be more productive through task automation, helping customers get answers faster, and speeding innovation. This company sits at the heart of the organizations they serve. Some of our analysts argued that the level of data they're capturing is at the level of Morgan Stanley's while others disagreed. Read the article and see what you think. |
| 07/02/2024 | Important | Energy giant Saudi Aramco is betting on AI to thrive after the ‘peak oil’ era | Saudi Aramco is pouring a ton of money into building out an AI hub--let's see if they succeed, as they'll be hard-pressed to attract top talent. And, arguably, oil is a constrained resource and intelligence is increasingly not, thanks to AI. This is all interesting from a geopolitical perspective and essential for anyone in the oil industry, netting us out at important for AI leaders in general. |
| 07/02/2024 | Important | Scaling Synthetic Data Creation with 1,000,000,000 Personas | The TenCent researchers demonstrate that you can train models with more diverse synthetic data than otherwise possible using this method. Everything is done by LLMs here - the creation of the personas, the testing, etc. A 7B model that matched the performance of GPT-4 Turbo performed this work. Important to know that there's a method to scale synthetic data creation. |
| 07/02/2024 | Optional | How Mattel is using AI to bring your next Barbie box to life | Product development acceleration is, as we know, a prime use case for GenAI and that's how Mattel is using it, particularly for mocking up toy packaging. A good "back-pocket" article for the AI leader evangelizing GenAI, but not necessarily an essential read. |
| 07/02/2024 | Optional | Walmart uses GenAI for payroll, employee digital experience | It's important to note how much Walmart is using GenAI (we've shared other articles about their use cases, like the employee support tool now in the hands of workers on the floor), particularly as the GenAI detractors are starting to come out in full force. Here they talk about using it for payroll and processing health insurance claims, but there's little detail so reading this particular article is optional. |
| 07/03/2024 | Important | Pro Search: Upgraded for more advanced problem-solving | Our disapproval of the way Perplexity's CEO has responded to legitimate criticisms about its site crawling practices aside, we continue to be impressed with the product. This upgrade enables the tool to break compound queries into individual task, enabling the delivery of richer and most accurate responses. Remember how Google was the unknown that emerged as the winner in search? Perplexity could play the same role in this next evolution of search. But TBD how their way of building the platform holds up - expect lawsuits... |
| 07/03/2024 | Important | Meta 3D Gen | Text-to-3D is a big deal for product development and the increasingly fluid relationship of the physical and digital worlds. Can this capability provide an accelerant for your company? Food for thought. |
| 07/03/2024 | Important | ElevenLabs adds AI voice of celebs to new digital narrator — but is it safe? | Companies need to start staking out the voices they want to own for their brand. The voice element of interactions are least developed. And voices are to the coming audio wave as generic URLs (eg, cars.com which sold for millions) were to the early internet. Listen to John Sviokla's interesting points on this at minute 24:23 of our morning briefing. |
| 07/03/2024 | Optional | AI Agents That Matter | A nice overview of agents and cost considerations around them so if you want to get up to speed on the topic, this could be a worthwhile read. Otherwise, skip it. |
| 07/03/2024 | Optional | AI scaling myths | This one got our John Sviokla heated (it's his birthday today - drop him a note!). He noted that the authors' argument as to why scale isn't necessarily going to lead to increasingly capable models with emergent capabilities is not well-constructed. There are plenty of fronts on which to criticize AI (environmental concerns, IP theft and other distasteful behavior happening) and perhaps the authors' contention turns out to be correct, but they haven't convinced us with this flimsy analysis. |
| 07/03/2024 | Optional | Figma disables its AI design feature that appeared to be ripping off Apple’s Weather app | Another "oopsy" that gives GenAI skeptics more fuel, but we commend the Figma CEO for taking responsibility. He said he pushed his team to move too fast to roll out this feature, resulting in insufficient QA. He then quickly put his team to work to pinpoint the problem, which they did. 👏 |
| 07/08/2024 | Essential | Independent analysis of AI language models and API providers | Choosing an LLM provider and the right API for LLM access is a tough decision - this fantastic dashboard from Artificial Analysis helps you compare LLM vendors and APIs across multiple dimensions like quality, latency and cost (Andrew Ng agrees with us on the utility of this tool!). Your use case will dictate which factors are most important - we can help you think through that. |
| 07/08/2024 | Essential | Declare your AIndependence: block AI bots, scrapers and crawlers with a single click | This article from Cloudflare is a brilliant piece of thought leadership. They share information and data on all the AI scraping bots trying to pull data off of websites (spoiler alert: Tiktok owner Bytedance's bot is the most active by far, though also most likely to get blocked by Cloudflare) and demonstrate how their security solution identifies them (with a specific example of how it identifies Perplexity's bot, even though it disguises itself). Something important to consider: Do you want to block these bots or let them in given the chatbot-driven evolution of search? |
| 07/08/2024 | Important | GEN AI: TOO MUCH SPEND, TOO LITTLE BENEFIT? | This report from Goldman Sachs presents multiple viewpoints on the potential direction of AI adoption and impact, along with plenty of data and projections on related topics (and potential gating factors) like energy supply. Worth at least a skim of the charts. |
| 07/08/2024 | Important | Salesforce proves less is more: xLAM-1B ‘Tiny Giant’ beats bigger AI Models | This model from Salesforce was built specifically for function-calling and appears to perform quite well at it. Such bots will be needed for agentic AI. Important to be aware of, and to understand Salesforce is a player in the space. |
| 07/08/2024 | Optional | A Hacker Stole OpenAI Secrets, Raising Fears That China Could | This hack happened last year and was performed on OpenAI's internal systems. Old news. |
| 07/08/2024 | Optional | Meta drops AI bombshell: Multi-token prediction models now open for research | Meta published this research a few months ago. Back then we rated it as optional, but one to watch. While they've now published the model, it's under a research-only license which keeps it in the optional camp (though note that it will be quite difficult for Meta to track whether or not people use it commercially). |
| 07/08/2024 | Optional | Meta ordered to stop training its AI on Brazilian personal data | Pushback on Meta's data-gathering for AI training similar to what we saw from the EU. But Brazil is saying they'll fine Meta ~$8,000 in USD a day - will Meta care? |
| 07/09/2024 | Important | Poe Previews | Quora's Poe, which provides access to multiple LLMs, now has an interface it calls "Previews," which is similar to Claude Artifacts, enabling users to see what they're creating and iterate on it. More control and visibility is emerging... |
| 07/09/2024 | Optional | French AI Lab Kyutai Releases OpenAI GPT-4o Killer ‘Moshi’ | Good to see more activity out of France (where Mistral is based) but our early tests of the model show it is indeed very fast (a la 4o) but the outputs aren't great. We don't see this killing 4o any time soon, but will keep an eye on it. |
| 07/09/2024 | Optional | How Good Is ChatGPT at Coding, Really? | This study on how well ChatGPT does on various coding tasks in different languages was conducted on GPT-3.5, making the results a bit useless at this point. Skip it. |
| 07/09/2024 | Optional | AI Threatens Tech Companies’ Climate Commitments | Google published its sustainability report last week which shows that, like Microsoft, their energy consumption is increasing due to AI, putting their aggressive carbon goals in serious jeopardy. Will progress toward building and adopting smaller models reverse this trend? The incentive is there given these are costs for Google and peers. This is an important trend to watch, but this article doesn't introduce anything new on the topic. |
| 07/09/2024 | Optional | For AI Giants, Smaller Is Sometimes Better | Speaking of that small model trend, this WSJ article summarizes the movement, but, like the previous article, doesn't introduce new insights on the topic. The most interesting insight in the piece is the note that Experian is using smaller models to dole out financial advice and support customer service. But no further detail on that is provided. |
| 07/09/2024 | Optional | Applied Materials reveals chip wiring innovations for energy-efficient computing | Some of the hardware innovation we're seeing is fascinating, and it's pretty mind-blowing to consider that a chip has 60 miles of wiring on it. But the immediate relevance to the AI leader is minimal - Applied Materials is essentially the only game in town in this space so beyond knowing that innovation is still happening in wiring, there's nothing actionable off this news. |
| 07/10/2024 | Essential | Generative AI turns spotlight on contract management | We know several large companies using GenAI to draft and query contracts and seeing great results. This articles confirms the value of this application, reporting on legal tech companies snapping up startups that have built a GenAI contract management tool. |
| 07/10/2024 | Important | China-Based Inventors Filing Most GenAI Patents, WIPO Data Shows | We're flagging this as a quick and interesting quick read that confirms what we've been reporting on in our morning briefings for the past several months - there's a lot of interesting research coming out of China. Of the 54,000 GenAI patents filed since 2014, a staggering 38,000 come from China. The quality of the filings is a question mark, but still interesting to see the numbers on this. Also, image and video have seen the most patents overall. |
| 07/10/2024 | Important | MIT researchers introduce generative AI for databases | While still in research, an MIT team has built GenSQL which enables analysis of tabular data and synthetic data generation within a database. Unclear how this compares to existing tools, but the value of this application of GenAI is clear and applicable to most companies so we're flagging this as important. |
| 07/10/2024 | Optional | OpenAI and Arianna Huffington are working together on an ‘AI health coach’ | Lots happening with GenAI in the health space, but this isn't the first personal health coach powered by GenAI and certainly won't be the last. Big names involved, but they haven't built anything yet so we're parking this in the optional lot. |
| 07/10/2024 | Optional | Meta AI develops compact language model for mobile devices | The movement toward on-device GenAI continues. Not surprising to see Meta playing here, and its MobileLLM is released for research only so this is important for developers, but optional for the AI leader for now, aside from noting the trend. |
| 07/10/2024 | Optional | In It for the Long Haul: Waabi Pioneers Generative AI to Unleash Fully Driverless Autonomous Trucking | A reminder of all the spaces Nvidia is playing in, but otherwise optional until we see these trucks on the road. |
| 07/11/2024 | Important | Anthropic’s Claude adds a prompt playground to quickly improve your AI apps | Small improvements in prompts can translate into big improvements in LLM outputs. Anthropic has a new tool for developers, Evaluate, that enables them test different prompts or have Claude generate prompts and tests itself. Looks like a very useful upgrade to the company's developer console. |
| 07/11/2024 | Important | AWS announces 5 new innovations to help everyone build with generative AI | Amazon is making some upgrades of its own to Q and Bedrock. Some are targeted toward developers and some toward a less technical user to enable them to build Gen-AI based apps. The one that caught our attention most is the update to Guardrails, which now offers contextual grounding to root out hallucinations and can be used on any model, whether supported by Bedrock or not. Some nice progress from Amazon who's been seen as lagging competitors. |
| 07/11/2024 | Optional | AMD To Acquire AI Lab, LLM Developer Silo AI For $665 Millions | The work by Nvidia competitors to catch up continues, and AMD is seen as one of the most capable of making real progress. This acquisition of an open-source LLM developer is meant to help them offer models built on AMD's chips, giving customers an end-to-end solution and a faster track to LLM-based applications. It's still a long road to cutting into Nvidia's overpowering market share. |
| 07/11/2024 | Optional | AI startup Hebbia raised $130M at a $700M valuation on $13 million of profitable revenue | Like other startups, Hebbia got a valuation of about 50 times sales, which has emerged as a "standard," and outrageous, valuation for GenAI-focused startups. This while their asset-manager-targeted application doesn't seem all that differentiated: it can "ingest multiple files of unlimited length, and respond to users’ inquiries in a tabular format, similar to a spreadsheet." GenAI is real but there is certainly some overexuberance happening here... |
| 07/11/2024 | Optional | Alibaba: Generative AI Tools Drive 30% Increase in eCommerce Orders | This article title is inaccurate - the 30% figure comes from "internal tests." Alibaba's GenAI tools deliver capabilities like translation that are helpful for the Chinese e-commerce companies on its platform, but there's nothing mentioned in this piece that is novel. |
| 07/11/2024 | Optional | A data leader’s technical guide to scaling gen AI | This article from McKinsey doesn't really deliver on the promise of the headline so we're marking it as an optional read. |
| 07/12/2024 | Essential | Claude Introduces Sharing and Remixing for Artifacts | This is just a quick listing of some new features from Claude, but we think they're worth flagging. Users can now publish their Artifacts (which could be code, charts or simple games) so other users can use or tinker with them. It's like a GitHub for both developers and, more importantly, the emerging "citizen programmers." |
| 07/12/2024 | Essential | In Constant Battle With Insurers, Doctors Reach for a Cudgel: A.I.I | This is a fantastic case study and a hint at the future. Doctors are using a GenAI tool called Doximity to apply for prior authorizations in seconds vs. hours and their "win" rate on them significantly improves. On the other side, insurance companies are likely using their own AI to accept or reject the PA. Robots talking to robots to get things done for humans is only going to become more commonplace. Of course, it would be great if our broken health system didn't require this at all... |
| 07/12/2024 | Important | A Deep Dive on AI Inference Startups | This talks about the landscape of tools that sit on top of LLMs to provide the wiring needed to use them. It's a good overview (even though it's focused on investing in the space). The author's previous article on the AI stack is worth reading as well. |
| 07/12/2024 | Important | Moving GenAI from proof of concept to production on AWS | This piece isn't entirely focused on GenAI but it includes a few good use cases like contract redlining and using LLMs to "talk to" building infrastructure devices in natural language, making it a worthwhile read. |
| 07/12/2024 | Optional | Generative AI meets application modernization | IBM is working on GenAI-powered tools to help update applications created in older coding languages, which is a great use case we've talked about before, but they're not available yet and the company didn't give a specific release date making this optional news for now. |
| 07/12/2024 | Optional | OpenAI Develops System to Track Progress Toward Human-Level AI | We used the word "bullshit" a lot when discussing this development on our daily briefing. The 5-point scale OpenAI has created to track the levels of intelligence of systems as they progress toward AGI is nonsensical. We really hope the AI ecosystem rejects this. |
| 07/12/2024 | Optional | Google says Gemini AI is making its robots smarter | Google released research showing how Gemini is enabling interaction with its robots in natural language and this short piece includes a video showing it in action. Cool, but optional. |
| 07/15/2024 | Optional | It’s Time for AI to Start Making Money for Businesses. Can It? | The answer to the question posed in the title, is "yes," but it would be unreasonable to think this can happen instantaneously. We've seen examples, and the article also provides a good one: IKEA's GenAI-powered tool that enables customers to upload an image of their room and swap out the items in it with options from IKEA to see how they'll look. They found customers who used it were 4X more likely to make a purchase than those simply using the app and 7X more likely to buy something than those using only the IKEA website. |
| 07/15/2024 | Optional | DeepMind’s PEER scales language models with millions of tiny experts | This research is definitely compelling and, given DeepMind's outsized contribution to GenAI, it's worth noting. The mixture of experts approach is being increasingly used in LLMs, but this approach, which expands the numbers of experts and shrinks each one's size, is still being explored. |
| 07/15/2024 | Optional | SpreadsheetLLM: Encoding Spreadsheets for Large Language Models | Any technique to improve the ability to analyze spreadsheets with GenAI is worth noting. Send this to your developers, but you can stick to reading the abstract and conclusions. |
| 07/15/2024 | Optional | Meta researchers distill System 2 thinking into LLMs, improving performance on complex reasoning | This is a potentially promising way to reduce the cost and improve the speed of models in their performance of tasks that require step-by-step (aka chain of thought) reasoning. But, as the authors assert, there's more work to do here to see if it's a truly viable technique, so we're marking as optional for now. |
| 07/15/2024 | Optional | AI can make you more creative—but it has limits | This research out of MIT asserts something we already know - people who are good at something get less of a boost from GenAI than people who aren't as skilled. It also used a method to assess whether the study participants were innately more creative that is a bit questionable. This one is optional. |
| 07/16/2024 | Essential | Top ten ways Intuit is revolutionizing personalization with generative AI | A worthwhile use case full of practical insights on how Intuit is using GenAI for personalization. Note a creative use of deterministic rule based tools to avoid hallucinations with probabilistic GenAI tools to explain the logic behind the answers in TurboTax. A great combination that can be used in many applications. |
| 07/16/2024 | Important | Captain's log: the irreducible weirdness of prompting AIs | The article reviews current prompting methods and highlights that it is still the case that small changes in a prompt input can generate significant changes in the output result. Several methods that have proven to work better than others are discussed and a link to a prompt library is included. |
| 07/16/2024 | Important | The AI Future Is Already Here, It’s Just Not Productized Yet | A thoughtful short article offering a framework for productivity gains using GenAi tools in an enterprise: Tasks contained to a specific role? AI agent. Tasks contained to an industry function? AI vertical software. Tasks spread throughout your workflows? AI horizontal software. |
| 07/16/2024 | Important | Lynx: State-of-the-Art Open Source Hallucination Detection Model | Reducing hallucinations is one of the critical areas of work in GenAI. Lynx appears to be a powerful model trained to identify hallucinations and a new benchmark to test them. But is there someone benchmarking the benchmarks? |
| 07/16/2024 | Important | Internet of Agents: Weaving a Web of Heterogeneous Agents for Collaborative Intelligence | A well researched article outlining a way to combine agents into a distributed architecture to boost GenAI applications' performance. Note that there is a capability to select agents in real time for a specific task and add them to collaborate with the existing distributed agent team. A powerful framework to be aware of. |
| 07/16/2024 | Optional | Synchron integrates generative AI speech to brain interface software | An amazing advance in enabling people living with conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to communicate using a brain-computer interface (BCI) and GenAI. |
| 07/17/2024 | Important | The future of GenAI will rocket fuel modernisation of core legacy systems | We've talked about how big the market will be for updating applications created in older coding languages, and this article goes into some detail about that. We would have given this essential if the article was written better. |
| 07/17/2024 | Important | Apple, Anthropic, and other companies used YouTube videos to train AI | Using YouTube transcripts to train AI is against their policies. But an investigation by Proof News found that these transcripts are in datasets from EleutherAI that LLM providers have likely used. TBD whether YouTube owner Google will have the nerve to sue when they've likely infringed on some policies to train their own models. Either way, it has already been widely reported that LLM providers were doing this. But we had a lively discussion about it and it's good to keep in mind that there's a chance the LLMs we know and love will be in jeopardy if the companies that created them are ever asked to remove copyrighted data from their models because it's impossible to do so. |
| 07/17/2024 | Important | ColPali: Efficient Document Retrieval with Vision Language Models | The idea here is to speed up the processing of visual data (including, for example, charts in PDFs) when it's ingested into LLMs. AI leaders should pass this onto their development teams if they're working on models, but otherwise, this will just end up being incorporated into models you're getting off the shelf so you can just sit back and wait for that to happen. |
| 07/17/2024 | Optional | This HR company tried to treat AI bots like people — it didn’t go over well | A company called Lattice was making employee records for its AI assistants and then stopped doing so due to backlash. What was the point of doing this in the first place besides maybe trying to get some press attention? Who knows - this is odd and optional. |
| 07/17/2024 | Optional | Mistral launches Codestral Mamba and Mathstral | New models to consider if you're looking for cheaper-to-run open source LLMs for math and coding. Also an indicator of the trend toward verticalization and specialization of LLMs that we expect to continue. |
| 07/17/2024 | Optional | Anthropic releases Claude app for Androids | Anthropic continues to productize and catch up to OpenAI and others. Expected, so optional. |
| 07/17/2024 | Optional | Andrej Karpathy launches Eureka Labs | Karpathy is a data science rockstar who's educational videos are very popular. His new venture seeks to disrupt the education space, and he's training a new model geared toward teaching as part of it. Education is a competitive space but he's certainly capable. Good luck to him, but this is optional news. |
| 07/18/2024 | Essential | Docusign and Elastic supercharge generative contract and search solutions | Search applications within an enterprise are becoming critical for productivity improvements. This article describes new ways of taking search to the next level. Similarly, contract negotiations and management is one of the emerging GenAI applications with large impact that can benefit almost any company. The article offers insight into capabilities that are coming to the market that are worth being aware of. |
| 07/18/2024 | Optional | Hugging Face Releases SmoLLM, a Series of Small Language Models, Beats Qwen2 and Phi 1.5 | Hugging Face release of an on-device small model joining a slew of other similar models confirms a trend that on-device LLMs are here to stay. |
| 07/18/2024 | Optional | Building Pinterest Canvas, a text-to-image foundation model | Fascinating work to showcase a product against a good background canvas with impressive results. |
| 07/18/2024 | Optional | CHAI, Generative AI Startup in Palo Alto, Sees Strong Growth Through User Generated AI Content | CHAI selected the ELO rating system that is used in chess and other games as a core of their offering. It scores users' LLM models against others in the CHAI community. Developers can improve their models as a result. An interesting business model that is generating revenue for CHAI as the community grows. |
| 07/18/2024 | Optional | Cohere teams up with Fujitsu to launch Japanese LLM ‘Takane’ for enterprises | Another partnership in the global world of GenAI expanding the global reach for Cohere in this case. |
| 07/18/2024 | Optional | TTT models might be the next frontier in generative AI | There are several efforts to develop GenAI models that are not transformer based to minimize training and run-time costs. This one is Test-Time-Training (TTT) based on a well-researched article published earlier. Another one is State-Space-Models (SSM). A fascinating competition to watch. |
| 07/18/2024 | Optional | Prover-Verifier Games improve legibility of language model outputs | A summary of OpenAI efforts to create an automated process to verify LLM output. Small steps in the right direction demonstrating that we are certainly in the early days in solving this critical open issue for GenAI. |
| 07/19/2024 | Important | GPT-4o mini: advancing cost-efficient intelligence | AI leaders gravitated toward OpenAI's models to start because they performed best, but then realized they were way too expensive to run in production. As a result, they started looking elsewhere for smaller, cheaper models. OpenAI looks to stop the bleeding with this smaller model, in an announcement that really marks a shift for them and shows where we are in the GenAI movement. |
| 07/19/2024 | Important | These AI Models Are Pretty Mid. That’s Why Companies Love Them. | We went Important on this one for the same reason as the previous article - to remind AI leaders that there are smaller models that will get the job done for a lot of the narrow applications they're working on. We know swapping out models isn't easy, but you should be doing so where possible. |
| 07/19/2024 | Important | Generative AI Business Value Emerges In Diverse Use Cases | This sponsored content piece from Dell shares two use cases. One is reading radiology reports, which has been done with AI assistance for a while now. But they note that junior radiologists could perform at a level of those with 15 years of experience with the help of AI - a reminder of how AI can up-level human performance significantly. The other use case featured more "garden variety" AI but was super cool - a system taking photos of a train as it moves at 125 mph to capture a 360-degree view for predictive maintenance. |
| 07/19/2024 | Important | The State of Chinese AI | We've been noting the significant amount of solid research coming from Chinese computer scientists for months. This article shares insight on the Chinese AI ecosystem. It notes that, because China's compute power is constrained due to their restricted access to high-end chips, they've focused on model efficiency. Per our comments on articles above, this is of course very important to the AI leader. You should be conversant in what's going on around the world, and it's the weekend, so this is worth reading over your morning coffee. |
| 07/19/2024 | Optional | Nvidia and Mistral’s new model ‘Mistral-NeMo’ brings enterprise-grade AI to desktop computers | An interesting hardware/model provider partnership for on-device GenAI - not the first and won't be the last. Good to note, but we don't think you need to read this one. |
| 07/19/2024 | Essential | CustomGPT.ai Wins Again in Tougher, More Thorough Evaluation | This piece was written by our own Adam Rappaport and shares results of benchmarking work he did with CustomGPT on its RAG offering (so, yes, we are slightly biased here). But we like that they chose a benchmarking methodology that aligns to the actual application of RAG in search and is less academic than many used today. Plus it's good for the AI leader to note that there are some lower-profile companies like CustomGPT that offer highly performant RAG solutions - CustomGPT beat Open AI's RAG solution in hallucination rate, accuracy and latency in these tests. |
| 07/22/2024 | Essential | The Prompt Report: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Techniques | The authors of this meta-analysis have done a nice job of creating a comprehensive manual for prompt engineering and establishing a foundation for a common taxonomy for this nascent field. Being that developers are still learning how to do this well, we marked this as essential. AI leaders should read it and pass it on to their teams. |
| 07/22/2024 | Important | The Data That Powers A.I. Is Disappearing Fast | Companies are increasingly using the robots.txt file to block web crawlers. This NYT article references a study that found that about 5 percent of all data and 25 percent of quality data in three commonly used training datasets is now restricted. As we know, model makers are clamoring to find new data to improve their models' performance - it's not going to get any easier to do so. |
| 07/22/2024 | Important | Robotics won’t have a ChatGPT Moment | A nice compendium of the progress in robotics and how AI is accelerating that, though it will be a gradual road to robots becoming pervasive. The authors predict that the cost of humanoid hardware will drop below the cost of labor sometime in 2026 - a bold prediction. Be sure to flip through the presentation embedded in this one. |
| 07/22/2024 | Optional | Salesforce to release autonomous AI customer service agents | The company is testing an "Einstein Service Agent" that reportedly will operate across messaging platforms like What'sApp to help a company's customers solve their issues. Will it work or be incredibly frustrating? We don't yet know, and there's no timetable on when this will be available so we're marking this optional for now. |
| 07/22/2024 | Optional | Apple shows off open AI prowess: new models outperform Mistral and Hugging Face offerings | Apple has partnered with Toyota Research and a few others to test data curation techniques to see which ones made two smaller models (7B and 1.4B) perform best. And they've open-sourced the two models. Interesting, but optional. |
| 07/22/2024 | Optional | Figma explains how its AI tool ripped off Apple’s design | We continue to applaud Figma for the way it has handled the problem of their GenAI-powered 'Make Designs" tool spitting out designs from Apple. In addition to pulling the tool down, they've now published to their website a full explanation of how it happened. AI leaders might want to note their approach to addressing the screw-up in case they have a similar issue, but otherwise optional. |
| 07/23/2024 | Important | Confronting Impossible Futures | This article from GenAI thought leader Ethan Mollick discusses how companies need to plan for the different potential development paths that AI could take - a capabilities plateau, linear growth in capabilities, exponential growth, or AGI. He poses that not enough companies are doing this and should be. Not the most well-baked scenario planning, but still a worthy read. |
| 07/23/2024 | Important | From Principles to Practices: Lessons Learned from Applying Partnership on AI's (PAI) Synthetic Media Framework to 11 Use Cases | This is a good piece from the Partnership on AI that lays out best practices to ethically use GenAI to generate synthetic media. It uses several real cases, eg OpenAI building disclosures into DALL-E generated imagery, to inform a framework AI leaders can use in practice. We think this is worth your time to read. |
| 07/23/2024 | Optional | Quest IndexGPT: Harnessing generative AI for investable indices | Interesting that JP Morgan is using GenAI in a core part of its business, but it seems that they're only using GPT-4 to search for keywords in news articles to help them put together indices based on a particular theme for clients. Seems like a bit of a GenAI paint job so we're marking it optional. |
| 07/23/2024 | Optional | Planning for Agents | This blog post from Langchain points out that, to get agents to do complex planning and reasoning tasks, you need content, context, domain knowledge and other elements. It's pretty basic and ultimately is steering you toward their products, so we're marking this as optional. |
| 07/23/2024 | Optional | New compliance and administrative tools for ChatGPT Enterprise | OpenAI is playing catchup here on offering basic tools like access controls that enterprises need for compliance. Good to note, but this announcement isn't worth digging deeply into. |
| 07/23/2024 | Optional | Cohere raises $500M to beat back generative AI rivals | Impressive that Cohere has managed another huge raise at a $5.5B valuation off of just $35M in sales. Big names like Nvidia, AMD and Cisco were participants. Bubblicious or fair? You decide... |
| 07/24/2024 | Essential | Meta releases the biggest and best open-source AI model yet | As you may have heard, Meta dropped Llama 3.1 yesterday, its 405B open source-ish model (training data was not released) that it purports to be competitive with the frontier models. Meta teaming up with Groq, which offers cheaper AI chip technology than competitors, could lead to the commoditization of inference. Is the Linux moment for LLMs near? |
| 07/24/2024 | Important | Open Source AI Is the Path Forward | Mark Zuckerberg explains why Meta is pushing open source, noting something we've been talking about - many companies want to "own their own intelligence" rather than port it to a hosted closed-source model. This is a well-written and supported piece that's worth a read. |
| 07/24/2024 | Important | A year in: Nestlé employees save 45 minutes per week using internal generative AI | A good case study for a well-known company. Nestle has really committed to training its employees on GenAI tools and its efforts are bearing fruit. We see a lot of companies making the mistake of simply turning on a tool like Copilot and just expecting employees to understand how to use it. They're wasting their money on these subscriptions if they don't help employees figure out how to leverage them. Read this article to see how it's done. |
| 07/24/2024 | Important | Legal software company Clio raises massive $900M round to power AI advances | Clio is akin to the SAP of law, and it's looking to upgrade its platform using this sizable new raise. The company says it hopes the productivity gains that will come from infusing GenAI in its platform will open legal access to companies and individuals that could not otherwise afford it. That's certainly possible, as is law firm partners simply pocketing the savings... Either way, important to be aware of what's happening in the sector as it will spread to others soon enough. |
| 07/24/2024 | Optional | Introducing Rerank 3 Nimble: Faster Reranking for Enterprise Search & Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Systems | Cohere is pretty laser-focused on RAG and enterprise search. Good to see an upgrade to its offering, but no need to read the article. Just be aware of the improvements. |
| 07/24/2024 | Optional | Trust at scale: Auto-evaluation for high-stakes LLM accuracy | This is a basic educational piece on the movement toward some level of automated evaluation of LLM outputs that's not particularly well-written. Skip it. |
| 07/25/2024 | Essential | Mistral Large 2 | Another day, another model release. Mistral claims this model is competitive with frontier models on coding, math and reasoning. And they've trained it to tell the user when it doesn't know the answer to minimize hallucinations. A license from Mistral is required for commercial use. Uptake of this one TBD, of course, but definitely of note. |
| 07/25/2024 | Important | ‘Model collapse’: Scientists warn against letting AI eat its own tail | While this isn't the first time we've seen publishing on the potential for LLMs to lose their capabilities as they consume more and more AI-generated content, the research on which this article is based is well-done and worth a read. |
| 07/25/2024 | Optional | Stability AI steps into a new gen AI dimension with Stable Video 4D | A cool development for game creators, animation artists, and movie makers, but no need to read this article. |
| 07/25/2024 | Optional | Airtable’s New AI Tool Can Generate Apps From Just A Prompt | A nice tool that uses uses OpenAI's GPT-4 under the hood, but the article title pretty much tells you all you need to know here. |
| 07/25/2024 | Optional | Improving Model Safety Behavior with Rule-Based Rewards | As this post from OpenAI states, the company has been using this machine-based method for alignment in addition to human feedback for a while now, so this feels like a "yes-we-blew-up-our-safety-team-but-we-still-are-being-safe" kinda piece as opposed to anything earth-shattering. |
| 07/25/2024 | Optional | How Colonial First State is using AI to transform wealth management | This is an article from Microsoft with a lofty title that the GenAI application doesn't remotely live up to. It essentially shares that Colonial is using Copilot. |
| 07/26/2024 | Essential | OpenAI announces SearchGPT, its AI-powered search engine | While the company is only pushing out a prototype to 10K test users at this point, this truly kicks off Search Wars 2.0. OpenAI notes that they're paying publishers for content that will get served up by this (though unlikely it will ONLY surface purchased content) after they've sucked the Internet dry for free to contrast themselves with Perplexity. We're all on the waitlist to test the tool, but will report back on the experience if we get access. |
| 07/26/2024 | Important | AI achieves silver-medal standard solving International Mathematical Olympiad problems | Google DeepMind shares some info about progress with its AlphaGeometry 2 and AlphaProof models in math and reasoning. Apparently Sam Altman responded to Google's X post on this with an "lol" which might indicate he thinks this is child's play compared to something OpenAI is working on but, who knows, and we think the AI leader should keep track of important research by top computer scientists so we marked this as a worthy weekend read. |
| 07/26/2024 | Important | Who will control the future of AI? | The fact that Sam Altman wrote an opinion piece on the geopolitics around AI for the Washington post is of note (albeit with clear motives to influence the government). While we didn't find it to contribute any groundbreaking new thinking, it's a decent summary of the issues. |
| 07/26/2024 | Optional | Anthropic’s crawler is ignoring websites’ anti-AI scraping policies | The website for iFixIt was apparently getting pinged like crazy by Anthropic's bots, but once iFixIt implemented robot.txt, the bots stopped. So this really isn't anything more than a reminder to do the same if you want to try to turn away scrapers (though no guarantees it will work as we've seen Perplexity's bots ignore this signal). |
| 07/26/2024 | Optional | OpenDevin: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents | While noteworthy that this team has open-sourced an agent-building platform, no need to read this research paper about until you're ready to use the platform. Bookmark this for the time being. |
| 07/26/2024 | Optional | Generative AI for urban simulation | We surfaced this piece thinking it would be an interesting use case to discuss, but then found it was so poorly written and unclear that it we quickly marked it optional. Skip it. |
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