Category Archives: Ai
Salesforce to hire 3,300 staffers as it eyes generative AI opportunity – CIO
After laying off 8,000 staffers in January, Salesforce is now planning to hire at least 3,300 employees. The plan includes rehiring some of the former employees.
Salesforce is looking at a large recruitment drive as it plans to invest in new areas such as generative AI and push some of its popular products, such as the Data Cloud, CEO Marc Benioff, and chief operating officer Brian Millham told Bloomberg in an interview.
The company already has made several product enhancements, especially integrating new generative AI features into its Data Cloud.
This week at its annual Dreamforce conference, the company said it has rebuilt its Data Cloud to support generative AI and will begin rolling out the omnipresent chatbot to some customers by year-end.
In August, Salesforce released a newno-code, interface-based AI andgenerative AImodel training tool, dubbed Einstein Studio, as part of its Data Cloud offering.
Earlier in June, Salesforce showcased a new offering, dubbed AI Cloud, which combines its previously announced Slack GPT, Tableau GPT,Apex GPT, MuleSoft GPT, Flow GPT, Service GPT, Marketing GPT, and Commerce GPT along with the new Einstein Trust layer and a prompt engineering tool for traininglarge language models (LLMs).
The new hires, according to Millham, will be divided between sales, engineering, and the team handling the development of its Data Cloud.
The top executives said that some of the new positions are more likely to be filled by what the company terms as boomerang hires. These are essentially employees who worked at Salesforce earlier before moving to other companies.
Salesforce sees boomerang hires as a new success metric, the top executives said, adding that there still might be strategic layoffs in the future.
Strategic layoffs, such as trading non-technical staff for more engineering and technical talent, could become common for most large technology companies. This week, Google-parent Alphabet laid off hundreds of HR employees citing less demand for such staff within the company for the next few quarters.
The plan to hire 3,300 new employees by Salesforce is expected to restore nearly 40% of the staff laid off during the 10% workforce reduction in January.
Salesforce, which had nearly80,000 global employeesas of February 2022, currently employs about 70,000 staffers after eliminating at least 8,000 roles in January citing reduced customer spending due to macroeconomic uncertainty.
Just two months before the downsizing, the company decided to reduce at least 950 roles despite it experiencing a relatively successful year financially, with the companys second-quarterrevenue rising 22%year on year, driven by the rapid adoption of its cloud-basedCRMand other sales management tools.
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Salesforce to hire 3,300 staffers as it eyes generative AI opportunity - CIO
Is AI the next frontier in preventing gun violence? This Prince … – WTOP
Artificial Intelligence seems to be able to do everything these days. Can it also detect a gunman before a gunshot is even fired? A Prince Georges County company is betting that it can.
WTOP/John Domen
WTOP/John Domen
WTOP/John Domen
A Prince Georges Co. company said its AI technology could stop the next mass shooting
Artificial intelligence is one of those terms you hear about all the time now. These days it seems it can write a paper, flavor your Coca-Cola and do so many things humans used to do on their own. Can it also detect a gunman before a gunshot is even fired?
A Prince Georges County, Maryland, company is betting that it can.
Wave Welcome occupies a small office in the National Harbor area, and is led by Vennard Wright, a former Chief Information Officer in Prince Georges County and for WSSC Water, among lots of other companies.
He grew up in the Hillcrest Heights area and lives in Clinton now, and was inspired to come up with the technology back in the spring when a group of teenage boys rushed on to a school bus and tried to shoot another student.
Weve developed a platform called PerVista, which leverages AI to analyze security cameras video streams, and the goal is to detect firearms, said Wright.
So a good example of that would be, if someones walking up to a school with an AR-15, we can see in real-time by analyzing frame by frame, whether or not theres a firearm detected, he added. Once a firearm is detected, we notify public safety in real-time. And the goal is really to cut down on dispatch time, and to also make sure were identifying the person who could be the perpetrator.
Wright said the technology is 100% accurate when it comes to detecting long guns now.
We did start with that use case because a lot of school shootings do occur with AR-15s and long guns, he said. So that was an easier use case to go after. But we are also working on making sure theres a match to smaller guns, like 9 mm as well. We are training the algorithm to be able to detect shorter guns as well.
The cameras can be set up inside and outside. Drones can also be used to further track a suspect carrying a weapon. Alerts and video are then sent immediately to police, and they can also be sent to other people who might need to know, like security guards or teachers and principals if the technology is deployed in a school.
Even homes and businesses could use the cameras to monitor for the same kinds of threats. Or, to hearken back to the event that inspired this idea, a school bus.
The way I understood that incident is they walked up to the bus with the gun out. So at that point, the way were looking at that scenario is immediately we call the police, we let the police know, Hey, the bus is at this location, there are three people, heres what they look like, said Wright.
You cut down the amount of time that it takes in order to get the perpetrators, he added. Were also looking to make sure that people are not on the run for a long time as well, which tends to happen theyre looking for days or weeks for the shooter. Immediately, the police are able to respond and get the people.
Wright said the technology is ready to roll out now. He also hopes that even if the platform cant stop every single shooting, the immediate detection and dispatch to police could end up reducing the impact, and eventually lower the number of shootings that occur.
And as a Maryland native, hes hoping to utilize this in area schools.
Its unfortunate that a solution like this is needed, he admitted. Im also optimistic that by applying technology in the right way, we can start to serve as a deterrent. So were looking forward to being a big part of the solution. And hopefully by doing that, we will also be able to scale and make some incredible things happen here in Prince Georges County.
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Is AI the next frontier in preventing gun violence? This Prince ... - WTOP
Intel Celebrates AI Accessibility and Enables the Next Generation of … – Investor Relations :: Intel Corporation (INTC)
Intel is celebrating AI accessibility innovation by next-generation technologists with its AI Global Impact Festival
SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Whats New: Today, Intel announced the global grand-prize winners at its third-annual AI Global Impact Festival. The festival brings together future developers, and educators who are working to solve real-world problems using artificial intelligence (AI), with the support of policymakers and academic leaders. Students from 26 countries participated in the competition at this years festival, Enriching Lives with AI Innovation. Intels event program focused on building digital readiness for all students and celebrating AI innovations that drive inclusion, accessibility and responsible impact.
I am constantly amazed by the innovative young technologists who understand the potential of AI to be a force for good. I am excited to celebrate this year's innovative winners. The success of the technology of tomorrow relies on them, as they embody the Intel purpose to improve the life of every person on the planet.
Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO
Why It Matters: Artificial intelligence has the potential to unlock powerful new possibilities and improve the life of every person on the planet. It can also be integral in helping people with disabilities live independently and participate fully in all aspects of life. This year, centered on Intels goal of making technology fully inclusive, Intel introduced a new award for projects focused on AI innovation for accessibility. Accessibility was a key pillar of the festival platform, which includes closed captioning, screen readers for those with visual disabilities and translation to more than 120 languages.
Although AI technology has the power to create positive change, there are also potential ethical risks associated with its development. Intel is committed to responsibly advancing AI technology. The company follows a comprehensive responsible AI approach to guard against the misuse of AI.
Students were judged on how well their projects relate to and address potential risks, and the winners projects went through an ethics audit by Intels Responsible AI team, inspired by the protocol followed for every company AI project. This years festival platform also featured a new, self-paced lesson on Responsible AI skills, in which all participants earn a certificate.
Who was Awarded: During the global competition, participants competed for more than $500,000 in cash prizes, certificates, Intel laptops and mentorship opportunities. The following students were named Global Award winners for AI Impact Creator:
For the 13- to 17-year-old age group:
For the 18-year-old+ age group:
For the accessibility award:
About Intels Role: Intel is committed to bringing AI skills everywhere, regardless of a person's ethnicity, age, gender or background. The AI Global Impact Festival provides opportunities and platforms for future innovators to learn, showcase and celebrate the impact of AI innovations.
Intel has committed to expand digital readiness to reach 30 million people in 30,000 institutions in 30 countries. Currently, Intel has expanded Intel Digital Readiness Programs globally by collaborating with 27 national governments, enabling 23,000 institutions and training more than 5.6 million people worldwide. The festival is part of Intels 2030 RISE Goals and the companys dedication to using tech as a force for good, underscoring its aim to make technology fully inclusive and to expand digital readiness worldwide.
More Context: Visit the AI Global Impact Festival website.
About Intel
Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) is an industry leader, creating world-changing technology that enables global progress and enriches lives. Inspired by Moores Law, we continuously work to advance the design and manufacturing of semiconductors to help address our customers greatest challenges. By embedding intelligence in the cloud, network, edge and every kind of computing device, we unleash the potential of data to transform business and society for the better. To learn more about Intels innovations, go to newsroom.intel.com and intel.com.
Intel Corporation. Intel, the Intel logo and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
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Orly Shapiro1-949-231-0897orly.shapiro@intel.com
Source: Intel
Released Sep 14, 2023 12:00 PM EDT
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AI detects eye disease and risk of Parkinson’s from retinal images – Nature.com
Retinal imaging allows researchers and physicians to observe small blood vessels whose condition could hint at a health-care issue.Credit: ipm/Alamy
Scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool capable of diagnosing and predicting the risk of developing multiple health conditions from ocular diseases to heart failure to Parkinsons disease all on the basis of peoples retinal images.
AI predicts chemicals smells from their structures
AI tools have been trained to detect disease using retinal images before, but what makes the new tool called RETFound special is that it was developed using a method known as self-supervised learning. That means that the researchers did not have to analyse each of the 1.6 million retinal images used for training and label them as normal or not normal, for instance. Such procedures are time-consuming and expensive, and are needed during the development of most standard machine-learning models.
Instead, the scientists used a method similar to the one used to train large-language models such as ChatGPT. That AI tool harnesses myriad examples of human-generated text to learn how to predict the next word in a sentence from the context of the preceding words. In the same kind of way, RETFound uses a multitude of retinal photos to learn how to predict what missing portions of images should look like.
Over the course of millions of images, the model somehow learns what a retina looks like and what all the features of a retina are, says Pearse Keane, an ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in London who co-authored a paper published today in Nature1 describing the tool. This forms the cornerstone of the model, and classifies it as what some call a foundation model, which means that it can be adapted for many tasks.
A persons retinas can offer a window into their health, because they are the only part of the human body through which the capillary network, made up of the smallest blood vessels, can be observed directly. If you have some systemic cardiovascular disease, like hypertension, which is affecting potentially every blood vessel in your body, we can directly visualize [that] in retinal images, Keane says.
Scientists used ChatGPT to generate an entire paper from scratch but is it any good?
Retinas are also an extension of the central nervous system, sharing similarities with the brain, which means that retinal images can be used to evaluate neural tissue. The rub is that a lot of the time people dont have the expertise to interpret these scans. This is where AI comes in, Keane says.
Once they had pre-trained RETFound on those 1.6 million unlabelled retinal images, Keane and his colleagues could then introduce a small number of labelled images say, 100 retinal images from people who had developed Parkinsons and 100 from people who had not to teach the model about specific conditions. Having learnt from all the unlabelled images what a retina should look like, Keane says, the model is able to easily learn the retinal features associated with a disease.
Using unlabelled data to initially train the model unblocks a major bottleneck for researchers, says Xiaoxuan Liu, a clinical researcher who studies responsible innovation in AI at the University of Birmingham, UK. Radiologist Curtis Langlotz, director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging at Stanford University, in California, agrees. High-quality labels for medical data are extremely expensive, so label efficiency has become the coin of the realm, he says.
The system performed well at detecting ocular diseases such as diabetic retinopathy. On a scale where 0.5 represents a model that performs no better than a random prediction and 1 represents a perfect model that makes an accurate prediction each time, it scored between 0.822 and 0.943 for diabetic retinopathy, depending on the data set used. When predicting the risk for systemic diseases such as heart attacks, heart failure, stroke and Parkinsons the overall performance was limited, but still superior to that of other AI models.
RETFound is so far one of the few successful applications of a foundation model to medical imaging, Liu says.
Researchers are now looking ahead to what other types of medical imaging the techniques used to develop RETFound might be applied to. It will be interesting to see whether these methods generalize to more complex images, Langlotz says for example, to magnetic resonance images or computed tomography scans, which are often three- or even four-dimensional.
Is the world ready for ChatGPT therapists?
The authors have made the model publicly available, and hope that groups around the world will be able to adapt and train it to work for their own patient populations and medical settings. They could potentially take this algorithm and fine-tune it, using data from their own country to have something thats more optimized for their use, Keane says.
This is tremendously exciting, Liu says. But using RETFound as the basis for other models to detect diseases comes with a risk, she adds. Thats because any limitations embedded in the tool could leak into future models that are built from it. It is now up to the authors of RETFound to ensure its ethical and safe usage, including transparent communication of its limitations, so that it can be a true community asset.
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AI detects eye disease and risk of Parkinson's from retinal images - Nature.com
Maximising Growth and Accelerating Value Creation with Digital … – Alvarez & Marsal
Advisors love to tout the failures of traditional transformation (75 percent of all transformations fail). At A&M, we are increasingly seeing and helping clients overcome an even more pressing matterless than 50 percent of all digital, data, and AI spend by the F1000 is delivering ANY value to shareholders, customers, or employees.
We believe business strategy and transformation have evolved, shifting from digital transformation within a technology function to a catalyst for CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and heads of business to drive a step change in how they capture the next wave of value with greater pace and certainty.
In the first part of the series, we will focus on how to deliver value from digital investment, redefining why, what, how, and when to invest, spanning the use cases and exciting solutions tech has to offer, new organizational muscles including new delivery models, and effective technology partnership models with a clear case and payback.
Technology and technologists have evolved and become mainstream over the past decade, infusing the breadth, depth, and pace by which companies transform and deliver greater results. Digital, a catch-all term for many, has redefined how companies emerge from traditional cost-cutting measures in the back office or SG&A (Selling General and Administrative Expenses) and get fit for exponential growth in product and service development, customer engagement across touchpoints, complex supply chains, and growing partner ecosystems.
Tech has evolved, with the continued growth of industry stalwarts, such as Microsoft, Google, and SAP leading the way in the mainstream adoption of as a service business models, the internet of things (IoT), advanced analytics through gen AI, and AR/VR in both the consumers living room and enterprise workspace. The rise of the software defined enterprise has crossed over from OEMs (Original Equipment manufacturers) in Telco and High Tech to more traditional industries such as Automotive and Industrial Products, delivering new levels of configuration, personalization, and value-added services to customers. Multi-cloud and low code platform-based apps, along with microservices-based platforms, are the norm and the path forward to lower the barriers of entry for smaller technology players and competition, while driving greater reuse, scale, and economics for those investing in the technology in the first place.
External forces have accelerated these trends: COVID-19 forced companies to work and operate remotely, setting a new standard for workplace technology and security. ChatGPTs recent rush into the spotlight has put into question age-old processes in creative or product management, customer care or employee services. Sustainability Scope 2 and 3 requirements are driving a level of end-to-end visibility, controls, insights, and intelligent automation never thought possible in todays global supply chain.
Companies are now approaching a new wave of technology hype and investment renewals, without a clear payback from the last wave. CDOs, CIOs, and CTOs need to evolve from being the new kid on the block, an evangelist or a corporate investment, to becoming a tech Profit & Loss (P&L) owner or driver. Financial and operational rigour are table stakes, with medals earned based on meeting and exceeding your annual plans, measured through the lens of traditional P&L Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). IT functions have an incredible opportunity to set the tone for a dynamic step change in performance improvement within their functions and lead the way for reinvestment across the enterprise. (Read more about our perspective on how to practically align your IT investments to business value here).
More importantly, leading CFOs, COOs, CMOs, and heads of sales or product understand the technology functions, the services they provide, their value, and cost compared to peer groups across the industry. Effective digital and data leaders are acutely aware of the concerns of the shareholders and CEO that digital investments are not delivering the outcomes or value based on the original case. They focus on specific, well known and understood use cases, rewiring the business to both drive and benefit from the technology change, and a shift to only owning core capabilities while relying on strategic partners to overcome the gaps.
Leaders must go beyond the illusion of new use cases defined by technology vendors and resist the temptation to spend time creating new ones or focusing on unproven technology platforms (anyone remember the promise of 5G and Edge for Enterprise, or the Metaverse?). Instead, they should focus on existing and well understood use cases and how emerging or mature tech will benefit them further based on todays KPIs, baselines, and targets.Moreover, leaders must effectively deliver complex use cases and their solutions by combining relevant base technologies (e.g., AI, IoT sensors, geo-location, and AR/VR powering very different solutions in personalized retail offers or industrial plant visual inspections). This requires an advanced understanding of each and a practical view on how well their organization can quickly architect, integrate or engineer, and maximize their value together.
Finally, leaders should ask themselves: Which use cases are of highest value? What problem are we trying to solve, how does it align to P&L contribution, and who owns solving it? What is the starting point and intended outcome? Whats the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) required to validate those assumptions? How do we get to scale fast? Should we let others invest first and be fast followers? Build practical business cases that embed the costs of building, changing and operating the technology over time as well as the business change required to adopt and evolve solutions with market feedback.
For example, a global Consumer Goods leader fully loaded the IT and SI cost of deploying and operating its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform as well as its data transformation as part of its cost to sell, attributing future improvements in its customer targeting, traffic, basket sizes, and conversion to those investments. This created joint accountability for outcomes and commitments across business and technology functions and accelerated a change in behaviour as part of a broader shift in the business model to agile commercial teams.
Use cases and technology solutions in isolation dont drive the change required to meet the case. The business operations in commercial, the plant, field or supply chain, and support functionsneed to adapt their workflows, organization and skills, ways of working and RACI, and ability to use new forms of information, insight, or tools to drive faster and more efficient actions and/or more effective results. The business needs to operate as modern software engineering and product companies, embracing what digital, data, and AI have to offer to accelerate the journey.
In turn, technology functions should elevate the importance of Portfolio Management and Target Architecture Management. Leaders must go beyond the basics: maintaining legacy, ensuring nothing breaks, and meeting rising security standards. They should define and steer tech investments with a strong financial grip and continuous Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) improvement to balance where to invest to save, where to invest in the new, and where to continue to sweat the asset. Return on investment in tech requires the careful balance of delivering point solutions with capabilities that enable and deploy many use cases with a common technology platform.
For example, a global Industrial Products leader, recently transformed its asset management functions to harness the full benefits of technology, data, automation and AI, resulting in a radical improvement in asset productivity and maintenance cost reduction. To ensure the successful implementation of the business case at scale across geographic sites, the work included the redesign of the manufacturing and supply chain processes. This transformation infused new perspectives drawn from transferrable technology solutions proven in other industries, while setting out clear changes to the RACI, KPIs, and incentives across the business and with partners.
Transforming technology functions in isolation yields limited return on investment. The true value lies in framing and extending those tech investments in support of critical use cases and new business models. Leading technology functions evolve into internal tech service providers and focus on mastering fewer core capabilities, effectively consuming those few services at scale. With that clarity on what is core, leaders deeply entrench themselves in the business, supported by agile digital factories delivered by strategic partners an ecosystem that is incentivised to invest in areas that directly contribute to the P&L.
Successful tech service providers effectively tap into the ecosystem to access and co-develop in-demand capabilities and skills. They then focus on exposing and addressing business needs, while maximizing delivery flexibility. Critical to this journey is the evolution of procurement in support of the business and technology areas to ensure this ecosystem is proactively engaged and given a front row seat to the challenges, opportunities, and upside of helping leaders grow.
At A&M, we partner with industry leaders to shape, create or transform, and operate high-performing and modern businesses. We help clients understand, adopt, and get the most out of technology investments to accelerate business transformation and growth. This is achieved through data-driven analysis and monitoring of P&Ls, defining and launching new products or services, acquiring and retaining great customers with intelligent commercial, supply chain, and service delivery operations.
We draw from our heritage as business owners and operators in Private Equity and Corporates not only to assess and guide but to take action. We work alongside executives to make practical decisions fast, pivot to execution, and always balance the need for near-term efficiency with cash to fuel future investments in growth and innovation with confidence. Our results speak for themselves; across sectors we help clients deliver 20 to 25 percent reductions in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in 12-18 months, with an additional upside of 10 percent in reductions complemented with targeted reinvestments to fuel new sources of top-line growth over a 24-month time horizon.
A&Ms Digital and Technology Services team supports companies through the full lifecycle of a business transformation across the enterprise, within business functions in the front office and support functions, and within IT / OT and other technology service areas.
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Maximising Growth and Accelerating Value Creation with Digital ... - Alvarez & Marsal
India’s Infosys signs $1.5 billion contract to leverage AI solutions – Reuters
An employee walks past a signage board in the Infosys campus at the Electronics City IT district in Bangalore, February 28, 2012. REUTERS/Vivek Prakash/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights
BENGALURU, Sept 15 (Reuters) - India's second-largest software services exporter Infosys (INFY.NS) said it signed a $1.5 billion contract for a 15-year period with a "global company".
Under the deal, Infosys will provide enhanced digital experiences and business operation services, leveraging the company's platforms and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, it said on Thursday.
Infosys did not name the company nor mention whether it is an existing client.
Earlier in the month, U.S. chip maker Nvidia (NVDA.O) announced AI partnerships with Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries (RELI.NS) and the Tata group's Tata Consultancy Services (TCS.NS) to develop generative applications.
In July, Infosys signed a $2 billion deal with an existing client to provide AI and automation services for five years.
Shares of the company were marginally high at 0.4%, trimming the stock's losses to 0.1% so far this year compared to a 15.46% rise in the Nifty IT (.NIFTYIT) index.
Reporting by Manvi Pant in Bengaluru; Editing by Janane Venkatraman
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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India's Infosys signs $1.5 billion contract to leverage AI solutions - Reuters
An A.I. Leader Urges Regulation and a Rethink – The New York Times
Mustafa Suleyman is one of the worlds leading artificial intelligence entrepreneurs, having co-founded not one but two start-ups at the cutting edge of the most transformative technology since the internet.
Mr. Suleyman, 39, is C.E.O. of Inflection AI, the company he started last year with Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn. In June, the firm closed a $1.3 billion funding round that included Microsoft and Nvidia, the leading A.I. chip maker, and that reportedly valued the company at about $4 billion. (Its chatbot, Pi, is designed to be a personal digital companion.)
Mr. Suleyman also co-founded DeepMind, an A.I. pioneer that Google acquired in 2014. He left Google early last year and joined Greylock Partners, a venture capital firm, where Hoffman is also a partner.
Now he has written a book, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Centurys Greatest Dilemma, that calls for an urgent shift in how we think about and contain A.I. Failing to do so, he says, will leave us humans in the worst position: unable to tap into the huge opportunities of A.I. and at risk of being subsumed by a technology that poses an existential threat.
Mr. Suleyman wants governments to regulate A.I. and appoint cabinet-level tech ministers, and says the United States should use its dominance in advanced chips to enforce global standards. He has also called for the creation of a governance regime modeled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to make the work of private companies in A.I. more transparent.
Such agreements may be difficult to achieve at a time of growing global tensions, but they are timely as lawmakers unveil proposals about how A.I. should be overseen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate leader, will meet top tech executives, including Elon Musk and Satya Nadella, the C.E.O. of Microsoft, this week to discuss regulations.
Mr. Suleyman spoke to DealBook about his book, which was released last week. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Why write a book a very analogue approach to outline your ideas?
It is a form of radical accountability. I want to be able to look back in a decade and see if my predictions were correct. And doing that on the record is intellectually very honest and healthy, rather than doing it in a series of tweets, blog posts and op-eds.
Why do you describe the book as a love letter to the nation-state?
Its a wake-up call to policymakers, politicians and citizens. We have invented a system of noncommercial checks and balances which holds centralized power accountable in the public interest. That system has evolved over many years away from monarchy, dictatorship and authoritarianism toward free and open liberal democracy. It means that we can do sensible taxation and redistribution to prevent inequality. This is the best tool we have, so we should stick with it and keep trying to defend it.
Youve suggested a new Turing test to understand the capability of A.I. and what jobs will be replaced: Give an A.I. $100,000 and ask it to make $1 million on an online retail platform. How would that work?
The real question for the next decade is what can an artificial capable intelligence do in practice? I proposed a very simple framework which tries to cover a wide range of skills that a small entrepreneur might have. Can you come up with a new product idea, can you have it designed, get it manufactured and promote it, and then try to turn a profit? Those skills creativity, imagination, planning negotiation, logistics, prioritization, collaboration are fundamental to what makes us successful in the workplace. If an A.I. can do 20, 50 or 90 percent of those tasks, that tells us something quite profound about what we are unleashing in the world and which other kinds of jobs it might replace.
How have your peers responded to your ideas?
There are lots of different clusters in Silicon Valley. People like Satya are very forward thinking about these things and definitely lean into the responsibility that the companies have to do the right thing.
But there are definitely skeptics. Marc Andreessen, the venture capital investor, just thinks that theres not going to be much of a downside. Its all going to be fine and dandy. Im as much of an accelerationist as Andreessen, but Im just more wide-eyed and comfortable talking about the potential harms, and I think that is a more intellectually honest position.
How do you see the state of relations between democratic governments and Silicon Valley?
We are seeing a lot of positive signs on this front. Tech companies are meaningfully engaging, and governments are starting to get proactive. This hasnt always happened, so we are already going in the right direction. Truth is, this is only just the beginning. A lot more hard work is needed, but the foundations are starting to come into view.
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An A.I. Leader Urges Regulation and a Rethink - The New York Times
AI now generates music with CD-quality audio from text, and its only getting better – Ars Technica
Imagine typing "dramatic intro music" and hearing a soaring symphony or writing "creepy footsteps" and getting high-quality sound effects. That's the promise of Stable Audio, a text-to-audio AI model announced Wednesday by Stability AI that can synthesize stereo 44.1 kHz music or sounds from written descriptions. Before long, similar technology may challenge musicians for their jobs.
If you'll recall, Stability AI is the company that helped fund the creation of Stable Diffusion, a latent diffusion image synthesis model released in August 2022. Not content to limit itself to generating images, the company branched out into audio by backing Harmonai, an AI lab that launched music generator Dance Diffusion in September.
Now Stability and Harmonai want to break into commercial AI audio production with Stable Audio. Judging by production samples, it seems like a significant audio quality upgrade from previous AI audio generators we've seen.
On its promotional page, Stability provides examples of the AI model in action with prompts like "epic trailer music intense tribal percussion and brass" and "lofi hip hop beat melodic chillhop 85 bpm." It also offers samples of sound effects generated using Stable Audio, such as an airline pilot speaking over an intercom and people talking in a busy restaurant.
To train its model, Stability partnered with stock music provider AudioSparx and licensed a data set "consisting of over 800,000 audio files containing music, sound effects, and single-instrument stems, as well as corresponding text metadata." After feeding 19,500 hours of audio into the model, Stable Audio knows how to imitate certain sounds it has heard on command because the sounds have been associated with text descriptions of them within its neural network.
Stablility AI
Stable Audio contains several parts that work together to create customized audio quickly. One part shrinks the audio file down in a way that keeps its important features while removing unnecessary noise. This makes the system both faster to teach and quicker at creating new audio. Another part uses text (metadata descriptions of the music and sounds) to help guide what kind of audio is generated.
To speed things up, the Stable Audio architecture operates on a heavily simplified, compressed audio representation to reduce inference time (the amount of time it takes for a machine learning model to generate an output once it has been given an input). According to Stability AI, Stable Audio can render 95 seconds of 16-bit stereo audio at a 44.1 kHz sample rate (often called "CD quality" because it matches the technical specifications of the CD format) in less than one second on an Nvidia A100 GPU. The A100 is a beefy data center GPU designed for AI use, and it's far more capable than a typical desktop gaming GPU.
While the generated audio may meet CD specifications in bit depth and sample rate, it's worth noting that the actual perceptual quality of the music Stable Audio produces can vary wildly, particularly because the audio is generated from a compressed representation in the dataset.
As mentioned, Stable Audio isn't the first music generator based on latent diffusion techniques. Last December, we covered Riffusion, a hobbyist take on an audio version of Stable Diffusion, though its resulting generations were far from Stable Audio's samples in quality. In January, Google released MusicLM, an AI music generator for 24 kHz audio, and Meta launched a suite of open source audio tools (including a text-to-music generator) called AudioCraft in August. Now, with 44.1 kHz stereo audio, Stable Diffusion is upping the ante.
Stability says Stable Audio will be available in a free tier and a $12 monthly Pro plan. With the free option, users can generate up to 20 tracks per month, each with a maximum length of 20 seconds. The Pro plan expands these limits, allowing for 500 track generations per month and track lengths of up to 90 seconds. Future Stability releases are expected to include open source models based on the Stable Audio architecture, as well as training code for those interested in developing audio generation models.
As it stands, it's looking like we might be on the edge of production-quality AI-generated music with Stable Audio, considering its audio fidelity. Will musicians be happy if they get replaced by AI models? Likely not, if history has shown us anything from AI protests in the visual arts field. For now, a human can easily outclass anything AI can generate, but that may not be the case for long. Either way, AI-generated audio may become another tool in a professional's audio production toolbox.
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AI now generates music with CD-quality audio from text, and its only getting better - Ars Technica
Adobe Earnings: Creative Cloud Drives Strength While Firefly AI … – Morningstar
Key Morningstar Metrics for AdobeWhat We Thought of Adobes Earnings
Wide-moat Adobe ADBE reported good third-quarter results, including revenue and non-GAAP earnings per share that exceeded the top end of guidance and our expectations along with it. We characterize managements fourth-quarter guidance as in line with investor expectations, which, given recent strength and Firefly AI now generating revenue, could be interpreted as a slight disappointment. We think this mentality misses the mark given such a short-term focus. Further, management will provide fiscal 2024 targets within its fourth quarter results in December, so in-line guidance for one quarter matters less to us here. To begin to accommodate recently announced price increases in the area of 10% for various Creative Cloud and single-app instances, we are modestly raising our growth estimates over the next several years. We have increased our fair value estimate to $510 from $485, although after a strong run we see shares as fairly valued.
Adobe is juggling many balls at present, with the recent general availability of Firefly along with several other solutions, price increases, the looming Figma acquisition, and other changes on the pricing and packaging front. We see these as uniformly positive for the company and expect Adobe to remain the clear leader in the creative market as a result. We will be looking for more details on innovation, bundling, and growth opportunities at Adobe MAX, Adobe Summit, and fourth quarter results, which are all on the horizon. Net new creative ARR was $464 million in the quarter, compared with guidance of $410 million.
Third quarter revenue grew 13% year-over-year in constant currency (10% as reported) to $4.89 billion, exceeding the top end of guidance at $4.87 billion. Digital media grew 11% year-over-year as reported and effectively drove all of the upside in the quarter relative to our model, while digital experience grew 10%. Within digital media, we see both Creative Cloud and Acrobat as having strong quarters.
The author or authors do not own shares in any securities mentioned in this article.Find out about Morningstars editorial policies.
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Adobe Earnings: Creative Cloud Drives Strength While Firefly AI ... - Morningstar
EU announces initiative to fast-track supercomputer access for AI … – Cointelegraph
European Union President Ursula von der Leyen announced a new initiative to give artificial intelligence (AI) startups expedited access to European supercomputers.
The announcement came during the presidents 2023 EU State of the Union address on Sept. 13.
In introducing the topic of AI, von der Leyen invoked an open letter sent by members of the global AI community calling for increased regulatory scrutiny of the potential for extinction from AI.
Per von der Leyens speech:
The president called for the assemblage of a new global framework for AI, built on three pillars: guardrails, governance and guiding innovation.
In describing the necessary guardrails, the president invoked the EUs AI Act, calling it a blueprint for the whole world. For the governance pillar, von der Leyen beseeched the global community to form a governance council similar to the International Panel on Climate Change.
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Lastly, in support of the tenant of guiding innovation, President von der Leyen announced an EU-wide initiative to accelerate access to Europes supercomputers for artificial intelligence startups wishing to train models and conduct research.
Europe has now become a leader in supercomputing with 3 of the 5 most powerful supercomputers in the world, the president said, adding, We need to capitalise on this.
President von der Leyen also lauded U.S. technology companies that have chosen to voluntarily adopt AI standards and ethics and praised EU companies that have done the same. Now, the president added, we should bring all of this work together towards minimum global standards for safe and ethical use of AI.
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EU announces initiative to fast-track supercomputer access for AI ... - Cointelegraph