AI’s Ascent: Voice Clones, Drones, and Trillion-Dollar Disruptions
AI’s Ascent: Voice Clones, Drones, and Trillion-Dollar Disruptions
The future: a realm both foreign and strangely reminiscent. Sit back, savor a cup of coffee, and delve into your weekly assortment of artifacts pulled directly from the world of tomorrow.
The Thin Wisps of Tomorrow
Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” Checkouts Walk Out. Amazon is bidding farewell to its “Just Walk Out” technology in grocery stores, which relied on a combination of cameras, sensors, and a hidden army of over 1,000 human video watchers in India to ensure accurate checkouts. The irony of the supposedly automated system being powered by a significant human workforce behind the scenes has led to the company’s decision to phase out the technology in more than half of its Amazon Fresh stores.
Prepare to question your auditory perception. AI-powered voice cloning technology continues to improve at a remarkable pace. Introducing OpenVoice, a flexible and instantaneous voice cloning system that pushes the boundaries of what’s possible. Meanwhile, OpenAI is holding back its own voice cloning tech out of fear of misuse (which is, quite frankly, massive). Better prepare yourself for a world where you will need to do security checks (“What’s the passphrase?”) before trusting anyone’s voice anymore. Meanwhile, AI safeguard companies such as Wolfsbane AI offer technology to protect you and your voice from being cloned. Alas, it requires that every bit of uploaded content be processed by their tech first—not a particularly realistic scenario for anyone in the public sphere.
Google’s AI Search Threatens Publishers’ Pockets. Just weeks after us discussing the impending demise of traditional search, initial data from Google’s GenAI-enhanced search indicates that AI-driven search could obliterate 60% of organic traffic, along with billions in advertising revenue. In a desperate attempt to keep the cash flowing, publishers are scrambling to revamp their SEO strategies, diversify traffic sources, and even consider selling their souls (or at least their content) to the AI overlords.
Enterprise AI Spend Skyrockets in 2024. In a not-exactly shocking turn of events, enterprises are going all-in on generative AI, with the average company spending a sweet $7 million on foundational models and related tooling in 2023 and planning to quintuple that budget in 2024. As they frantically mix and match models to find the secret sauce, one thing is clear: AI is the new black, and everyone’s dying to wear it (even if they’re not quite sure how to accessorize yet). Meanwhile AI company valuations are stupidly high…
Microsoft Digs Deep for OpenAI’s AI Gold. Microsoft has started constructing a data center in Wisconsin to house OpenAI’s next supercomputer, which could cost up to $10 billion by 2027. The company is also considering an even more powerful $100 billion supercomputer, codenamed Stargate, although its location remains undecided due to its significant energy requirements. Just like Levi Strauss, who built his jeans empire by selling trousers to gold diggers during the California Gold Rush, the companies building data centers for AI might be the true winners in this digital gold rush.
Ukraine’s DIY Drone Strikes Deep in Russia. Ukraine has transformed a $90,000 locally-produced ultralight sport plane into an unmanned long-range drone that can carry substantial amounts of explosives into Russia. This innovative and affordable weapon, highlighted (and somewhat enthusiasticly celebrated) in a recent Forbes article, raises alarming concerns about the potential for future terrorism on a global scale.
What We Are Reading
🚀 How To Spot The Next Technology Breakthrough When driving your company’s technology strategy, don’t just focus on the road ahead; consider past investments, emerging complements, and public attention to avoid blind spots and anticipate inflection points. @Jane
🚫 These Are The Disastrous Lego Kits That Almost Ruined The Company A short read about Lego’s near demise due to bad management and very expensive, unpopular new products. @Mafe
🚀 Strategies For An Accelerating Future Rather than getting lost in the churn of weekly AI model progress headlines, we should focus on answering a few key questions about organizational strategy in an accelerating AI future. @Jeffrey
👾 A Chilling Near-miss Shows How Today’s Digital Infrastructure Is Vulnerable “Few inventions have been as important for civilization and as poorly understood as the Internet” is a fantastic start to an argument around the increased need for governance of our digital infrastructure. @Julian
🤔 The Crypto Story What is the origin of cryptocurrency? What significance does it hold, and why does it continue to be relevant? @Pedro
🥺 A Nostalgic Look Back At When The Internet Still Felt Joyful Do you remember LAN parties? The Internet used to be a joyful and exciting place. @Pascal
Bits & Pixels
Advancement: In the relentless AI arms race, a new contender emerges—The open-source DBRX model clinches a razor-thin lead over last week’s champion.
Breakthrough: SyntheMol, an AI designed to create novel drugs (which are can’t be found in nature) targeting antibiotic-resistant bacteria, generated six promising drug candidates to combat Acinetobacter baumannii, a significant resistant pathogen.
Efficiency: Say goodbye to project paralysis and hello to productivity with Plandex AI’s clever task-tackling sidekicks. Utilizing persistent agents, Plandex tackles complex tasks across multiple files, executing a step-by-step approach.
Empowerment: We are the robots! Build your own, highly capable, $250 robotic arm with this open source project.
Groundbreaking: In a surprising twist, scientists discover that forming long-term memories involves breaking DNA in brain cells. Could unraveling this damage-and-repair cycle hold the key to understanding memory loss in neurodegenerative diseases?
Manipulation: Let’s exploit children’s social anxiety by charging them to see their standing within their friends’ digital circle. Snapchat’s premium feature contributes to teenage anxiety.
Peaking: You can tell you’ve reached the peak of the AI hype mountain when Taco Bell and Pizza Hut declare themselves as “AI first” companies.
Pioneering: In a groundbreaking procedure, clinicians at Austin Health have implanted the world’s first bionic device in a patient with Crohn’s disease to prevent post-surgical inflammation and recurrence. The innovative device stimulates the vagus nerve, activating the body’s innate defense mechanisms to suppress inflammation in the gastrointestinal tract.
Promising: A developer created a GPT interface for an open-source library of US tax scenarios. While the interface demonstrates impressive capabilities, it often requires significant user input and guidance to generate accurate results.
Reckoning: Snap, the tech giant behind the wildly popular teen app Snapchat, has joined the growing list of companies demanding a return to the office. With a stark ultimatum of “come back within 60 days or face termination,” Snap is taking a hard-line approach. This begs the question: is the era of lenient work-from-home policies drawing to a close?
Revolutionary: Octopus v2 could be a game-changing on-device language model that outperforms GPT-4 in accuracy and latency. Unleashing the power of AI agents on your device, without compromising privacy or cost.
Transformative: From smartphones that identify pests to autonomous tractors plowing fields, AI is revolutionizing American agriculture. As farmers face an aging workforce and climate change threatens crop yields, could these high-tech tools be the key to feeding the world’s growing population?
Some Fun Stuff
You know we have reached peak iPhone when all we got to get excited about is thinner bezels…
Some random fun links:
Those lame captcha’s will never be the same: Doom Captcha is here.
Scan a heap of Lego bricks and let AI inspire your next construction masterpiece.
