Collaborative Intelligence Week in Review - 13Sep2024
Best business article(s) I read this week…
This article explores the impact of generative AI on various business sectors and the skills professionals need to succeed in this era. It points out that non-technical users can leverage generative AI in 40%+ of U.S. work activities across industries such as legal, finance, retail, and healthcare. To excel, workers must develop "fusion skills" that involve collaborating with AI systems to achieve better outcomes.
Best technical article(s) I read this week…
Google DeepMind releases new papers on how they are improving robot dexterity
While you may not be interested in the technical papers about ALOHA Unleashed and DemoStart, you may enjoy the videos of dexterous robots tying shoes and hanging polo shirts on hangars.
Other items I found valuable/interesting…
OpenAI launches new models that can reason about complex tasks
OpenAI announced the release of two new models: o1 and o1-mini. The company trained the models to spend more time thinking before responding. OpenAI claims these new models “can reason through complex tasks and solve harder problems than previous models in science, coding, and math.” Professor Ethan Mollick provides an excellent overview of their capabilities.
The AI Spending Spree, in Charts
The article provides several interesting charts on how tech giants and VCs spend on AI. As the first chart depicts, Amazon, Microsoft, Google (Alphabet), and Meta spent a combined $52.9B on AI in the past three months.
Generative AI is looking like a big dud
For a contrarian view, read this Boston Globe op-ed piece that argues (incorrectly, in my view) that generative AI has not, and may not, “have much impact on the world.”
How digital twins of Earth are spinning up safer decisions for the planet
This article provides a status report on ongoing efforts by NASA and others to create a digital twin of Earth. The article lists several valuable applications of such a twin but notes that “it's a many-years-long project.”
Coolest thing I saw…
A breakthrough in stretchable electronics has enabled the construction of new forms of flexible soft robots. While still under development, check out some that exist already…
A company that caught my eye…
This Tokyo, Japan-based firm just closed a $100M Series A round that included New Enterprise Associates and Khosla Ventures. It caught my eye because it is being positioned as a “Sovereign AI” initiative, wherein countries seek to “capture and codify their data, culture and language through their own unique large language models.” This is not the first such effort, but it may be the best funded.