Applied AI Weekly News

Justin Grammens

Welcome Applied AI Weekly Readers to the latest issue! I'm thrilled to once again share with you the most interesting articles I've found this past week on Artificial Intelligence. I decided to be liberal regarding my selection process this week; thus, this issue is packed with tons of great content. Connect with me and let me know if you like this approach or prefer less content. Regardless, there is something for every reader to get value from.

Before we go there, here are a few things I wish to share.

Upcoming Events

I will be speaking at the City of Lakes Rotary Club on October 9th. The topic is AI: Shaping the Future of Business and Community
If you haven't heard already the Fall Applied AI Conference is scheduled for Nov 15th. The call of speakers is open and tickets are on sale. THIS WILL SELL OUT - so hurry and get your tickets today!

A Bit of Thanks

I hand an amazing time speaking at the 55th Annual Meeting of the Texas Association for Home Care & Hospice on Sept 11th. I'm extremely blessed to have been asked to come to Austin, TX, and share my thoughts on how Artificial Intelligence is already impacting Home Care & Hospice!
I completed two speaking sessions at the Midwest Health Promotion Conference on Wednesday, September 25th. The theme this year is Memories, Milestones, Momentum. Thank you to everyone who attended and all the diligent work that was done by the conference organizers
I'm continuing to offer free consultations and workshops with many business leaders on how AI is changing the landscape of how you will run your business today and into the future. Connect today and book a meeting with me.

Now that we have that covered, please enjoy the articles and videos I have spent time finding and curating for you this past week. The videos provide a much more interactive and real-world experience of the applications.

Finally, please do reach out if there's anything you feel I might have missed. Enjoy!

News

Apple Upgrades watchOS With AI-Powered Features, Including Translation

On the Apple Watch Series 9, Apple Watch Series 10 and Apple Watch Ultra, Translate can work without a phone connection. Apple says that they’re the only Apple Watch models with enough storage to download the necessary language models; you can download up to 20 models at a time.

Meta’s AI Products Just Got Smarter and More Useful

You can now talk to and share photos with Meta AI, unlocking new ways to communicate with your assistant and get answers faster.

OpenAI Reportedly in Talks to Raise at $150B Valuation

OpenAI is reportedly in talks with investors to raise $6.5 billion at a $150 billion pre-money valuation, according to Bloomberg.

The new valuation is significantly higher than OpenAI’s previously reported valuation from earlier this year, $86 billion, and far higher than any other AI startup today. The funding round will reportedly be led by Thrive Capital, a major investor of OpenAI in previous rounds. Other reported investors include Microsoft, Apple, and Nvidia — OpenAI partners that are all invested in the success of the AI startup, in one way or another.

Ilya Sutskever's Startup, Safe Superintelligence, Raises $1B

Prior to SSI, Sutskever headed the now-dismantled Superalignment team at OpenAI, which focused on general AI safety research. Sutskever quietly departed OpenAI months after a highly publicized fallout between him, several former OpenAI board members and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over what Sutskever has referred to as a “breakdown in communications.”

Zillow’s Upgraded AI Search Will Show You More Homes You Can’t Afford

Zillow is upgrading its AI search feature with the ability to find homes or rentals based on how far away they are from your office, school, or other points of interest. Instead of narrowing your search by selecting specific locations or filters, you can now simply enter, “Homes 30 min drive from Millennium Park.”

Anthropic Launches Claude Enterprise Plan to Compete With OpenAI

Anthropic is launching a new subscription plan for its AI chatbot, Claude, catered toward enterprise customers who want more administrative controls and

Sponsor

Applied AI Conference Fall 2024

Join us for a full day of conversation on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and their applications to our world. Together we will explore all aspects of Artificial Intelligence and its applications in areas such as Healthcare, Retail, Marketing, the Internet of Things, Agriculture, and all aspects from developer tools to applications with ChatGPT, Computer Vision, NLP, and Voice with chatbots. Everyone and all skills and interests are welcome!

Business

Every White-Collar Role Will Have An AI Copilot. Then An AI Agent.

We believe every white-collar role will have an AI copilot. Some of these roles will be fully automated with AI agents.

While incumbents are often slow to respond to changes in technology (there’s a reason why the average tenure of an organization in the S&P 500 has fallen from 35 years in the 1970s to less than 20 years today!), the most natural place for these copilots and agents to live is the incumbent workflow or system of record (e.g., sales agents launched from Salesforce). The system of record (SOR) is where the data agents need to complete specialized tasks lives, and it’s also a natural launchpad for any new user interface to reside (e.g., prompting the agent).

Introducing Copilot Labs and Copilot Vision

AI is still a technology very much in development. The pace of change and diffusion alike are among the fastest in history.

Mark Zuckerberg: Creators and Publishers ‘Overestimate the Value’ of Their Work for Training AI

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says there are complex copyright questions around scraping data to train AI models, but he suggests the individual work of most creators isn’t valuable enough for it to matter. In an interview with The Verge deputy editor Alex Heath, Zuckerberg said Meta will likely strike “certain partnerships” for useful content. But if others demand payment, then — as it’s done with news outlets — the company would prefer to walk away.

Amazon Is Allowing Audible Narrators to Clone Themselves With AI

Amazon will begin inviting a small group of Audible narrators to train AI-generated voice clones of themselves this week, with the aim of speeding up audiobook production for the platform. The US-only beta test was announced on Audible’s creator marketplace and will be extended to rights holders like authors, agents, and publishers “later this year,” according to Amazon.

Enterprise

Lex Raises $2.75M for Its AI Writing Tool That Helps Writers Get Past Blocks

So how does Lex meld AI into a writing tool so that writers would want to use it? After testing Lex, digesting its onboarding material, and speaking to the company, it appears that the service wants to create a super-clean writing interface that has a fair number of features that power users — people who write a lot, I suppose — expect. The AI is included as a way to extend and smooth out the user’s workflow.

OpenAI Co-Founder Sutskever's New Safety-Focused AI Startup SSI Raises $1 Billion

The company declined to share its valuation but sources close to the matter said it was valued at $5 billion. The funding underlines how some investors are still willing to make outsized bets on exceptional talent focused on foundational AI research. That's despite a general waning in interest towards funding such companies which can be unprofitable for some time, and which has caused several startup founders to leave their posts for tech giants.

You.com raises $50M Series B

You.com has raised a $50M Series B led by Georgian, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, NVIDIA, Gen Digital, SBVA (formerly Softbank Ventures Asia), DuckDuckGo, Day One Ventures, and others, bringing our total funding to $99 million.

We've made incredible strides in the decade-plus since my early days in deep learning and AI research. Collectively, we're living through the most significant technological revolution in human history. And with You.com, you can be part of it and future-proof your business.

Video

Watch An AI Prompt Engineer Shares Her Secrets

An expert prompt engineer demonstrates how smart prompting leads to smart outputs. Watch as Teodora Danilovic, a Prompt Engineer at Autogenai, structures prompts for nuanced responses and deploys zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot techniques, using examples from marketing, advertising, human resources, and customer service.

Development

Build Your Own Llama 3 Architecture from Scratch Using PyTorch

A step-by-step guide to building the complete architecture of the Llama 3 model from scratch and performing training and inferencing on a custom dataset.

Meta's VFusion3D: A leap forward in AI-powered 3D content creation

Researchers from Meta and the University of Oxford have developed a powerful AI model capable of generating high-quality 3D objects from single images or text descriptions.

Google's AI Note-Taking App NotebookLM Can Now Explain Complex Topics to You out Loud

Google announced on Wednesday that its AI note-taking and research app, NotebookLM, is adding an “Audio Overview” feature. Audio Overview will give users another way to digest and comprehend the information in the documents they have uploaded to the app, such as course readings or legal briefs