The week's top generative AI updates - July 29, 2024

Welcome to this week’s SymphonyAI generative AI weekly newsletter summarizing all the important AI industry developments and technology advancements you need to know. Notable highlights this week include:??

Industry projections?

• EY Study Highlights Growing AI Adoption and Investment Boom Among US Businesses : 95% of senior leaders say their organizations are investing in AI—30% plan to invest $10 million or more next year, up from 16% now. AI investments yield tangible returns, with 77% seeing improved efficiency, 74% increased productivity, and 72% higher customer satisfaction.?

• Gen AI Investment to Surge by 30%, Promising High ROI : BCG reports a 30% rise in gen AI investment, with top companies expecting triple the ROI of low-adopters. IT budgets are increasingly focused on AI, cloud services, and security.?

• Massive Hyperscaler GenAI Spend Raises Questions on Costs : AWS, Microsoft, and Google are boosting AI server investments, with datacenter spending set to rise 24% in 2024. Gartner predicts spending on gen AI servers could hit $500 billion by 2028 due to high compute demands of advanced AI models.?

• The AI Financial Results Paradox : Significant investments in AI technologies often do not result in immediate financial gains, creating challenges for companies justifying expenses. Companies face pressure to adopt AI to stay competitive, even if ROI is uncertain.?

• China Leads in GenAI Usage; US Leads in Maturity : China leads global business AI adoption with 83% usage, surpassing the US and Europe. US organizations show higher AI maturity, with 24% fully implementing AI, for customer service, cyber threat detection, and automation.?

• New HFS Research and Tech Mahindra Report on Generative AI Adoption Finds Most Significant Risk is Doing Nothing : A report by HFS Research and Tech Mahindra finds 90% of leaders see gen AI as crucial for competitiveness. Today 35% of enterprises are implementing it, 36% are testing it, and 39% plan to integrate it into IT initiatives within 12-18 months.?

• Augury Report: 83% of Manufacturers Will Increase AI Spending in 2024 : 83% of manufacturers plan to boost AI spending in 2024, trusting its value for production health. The report highlights better quantification of AI benefits, focusing on machine health and process optimization, driving higher investment and adoption.?

• SnapLogic Uncovers High Costs and Technical Debt from Legacy Tech : Maintaining and upgrading legacy technology costs businesses nearly $3 million on average, with 65% investing over $2 million in updating legacy systems, and 57% planning to modernize to integrate gen AI.?

Public policy?

• Major AI Companies Form Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI) : Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, and others formed CoSAI under OASIS to tackle AI security and privacy. CoSAI aims to develop open-source standards for AI security practices.

• Magic Announces AGI Readiness Policy to Mitigate AI Risks : Magic's AGI Readiness Policy focuses on safety and security for advanced AI models. It includes risk monitoring, dangerous capability evaluations, and mitigations to prevent misuse and ensure responsible development.?

• CCC Launches Collective Licensing for AI : Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) introduced a licensing solution for AI systems' use of copyrighted materials, ensuring legal access and compensating creators for their work.??

• AI Models Trained on YouTube: Legal and Ethical Concerns : AI models from Apple, Nvidia, and other tech giants were trained on transcripts of over 173,000 YouTube videos without explicit permission from content creators.??

• Implications of the EU AI Act: The EU AI Act comes into force on August 2, 2024. It applies across sectors and affects entities that market or use AI systems within the EU. It categorizes AI systems into unacceptable, high, medium, and low-risk levels.?

Technology news?

• GPT-4o Mini: Advancing Cost-Efficient AI Intelligence : OpenAI introduced GPT-4o Mini, an affordable, compact AI model, designed to deliver powerful natural language processing capabilities at a lower cost, broadening accessibility for developers and businesses.??

• OpenAI Enhances Control and Compliance for ChatGPT Enterprise : OpenAI introduces new enterprise controls for ChatGPT Enterprise, with features like timestamped interaction records and integration with third-party compliance providers to meet GDPR, HIPAA, and FINRA regulations.?

• OpenAI Pits AI Models Against Each Other to Produce Clearer, More Verifiable Text : Prover-verifier Games uses two AI models, one to generate solutions and another to verify them, for clarity and verifiability, improving transparency and trust in AI applications.?

• OpenAI Clocks $3.4 Bn in Revenue from ChatGPT Subscriptions : OpenAI has generated $3.4 billion in revenue, primarily from ChatGPT Plus ($1.9 billion), while it has substantial operational costs, spending around $700,000 daily to run AI models, making it one of the most capital-intensive startups.?

• OpenAI in Talks to Develop New AI Server Chip : As part of a strategy to diversify hardware sources, OpenAI is in discussions with Broadcom and others to develop a new AI server chip, reducing reliance on Nvidia's GPUs.?

• Microsoft Unveils SpreadsheetLLM for Enhanced Data Tasks : SpreadsheetLLM is a new LLM for business and data management productivity. A framework called SheetCompressor significantly reduces token usage by 96%, for efficient data processing and better spreadsheet performance.?

• Microsoft's Copilot AI Enhances Handwriting Recognition in OneNote : Microsoft introduced Copilot AI for OneNote to convert handwritten notes into editable text, for productivity and note organization.?

• Microsoft Launches Designer AI Image Generator on Mobile Platforms : Designer AI image generator is a free app on iOS, Android, and Windows that uses OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 to create images and designs. Competing with Midjourney and Adobe, it can create avatars and emojis, replace backgrounds, and generate borders.?

• Microsoft's $1.5B UAE-Based G42 Investment Faces Scrutiny : U.S. lawmakers are scrutinizing Microsoft’s $1.5 billion investment in G42 over potential technology transfer risks, particularly involving export-restricted AI model components.?

• Microsoft Faces UK Antitrust Investigation Over AI Staff Hiring : The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is investigating Microsoft's hiring of Inflection AI staff over concerns about potential antitrust violations and competition in the AI sector.?

• Google Open-Sources Project Oscar for AI Agent Development : Project Oscar is an open-source platform for AI agents for software development, initially for open-source projects with plans to expand to closed-source projects.?

• Google DeepMind Develops Open-Source AI to Tackle Biases in Evaluating Language Models : FLAMe is an open-source AI system for evaluating LLM-generated text quality, addressing biases in existing evaluation methods.???

• Chat with Google's Gemini AI Even When Android Phone is Locked : Gemini can now answer general questions even when an Android phone is locked, for non-secure tasks like checking the weather, solving math problems, and setting reminders.?

• Google Vids Gemini AI-Created Presentations : Google launched Vids, an AI-powered video presentation tool in Workspace Labs that can create videos from slides, documents, and recordings with ease, using Gemini AI.?

• Google’s AI Results Show Reduced Visibility in Searches : Google's AI Overviews for enhanced search results are now appearing less frequently, declining from 11% to 7% in June, according to a study by BrightEdge.?

• Mistral Releases CodeStral Mamba for Faster, Longer Code Generation : CodeStral Mamba is a new AI model for faster and extended code generation. Mistral also introduced Mathstral 7B, a model for mathematical reasoning.?

• Mistral-NeMo: Enterprise AI on Your Desktop : Nvidia and Mistral AI launched Mistral-NeMo, a 12-billion-parameter AI model with enterprise-grade AI for desktop computers, for access to advanced AI tools without expensive cloud infrastructure.?

• Groq’s Llama AI Model Outperforms Industry Giants : The open-source language models, Llama-3-Groq-70B-Tool-Use and 8B, outperform proprietary models like GPT-4o and Claude in function calling tasks, topping the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL).?

• Hugging Face’s SmolLM Models Bring Powerful AI to Your Phone, No Cloud Required : SmolLM is a series of compact language models designed for on-device AI processing, eliminating the need for cloud support and enhancing user privacy.?

• New AI Chatbot Helps Answer Industrial Automation Questions : The International Society of Automation (ISA)’s MimoSM is a specialized large language model for access to knowledge in industrial automation and operational technology (OT) cybersecurity.?

• DeepL Embraces LLMs with New AI Translation Model : DeepL launched its first LLM-based translation service for more precise and versatile translations.?

• H2O.ai Launches H2O-Danube3 Series to Expand AI Accessibility : The H2O-Danube3 series models provide high efficiency and accessibility NLP capabilities.??

• Cohere and Fujitsu Launch Japanese LLM ‘Takane’ for Enterprises : Cohere and Fujitsu developed Takane, a Japanese LLM for Japanese companies, focusing on customer service, content creation, and data analysis.?

• Haiper 1.5: A New AI Video Generation Model Challenging Sora and Runway : AI video startup Haiper launched its advanced model for generating high-quality video content from text and image prompts.?

SymphonyAI news?

• Article: Microsoft Azure Partners Shine Bright at the 2024 Partner of the Year : Business Transformation: AI Innovation – SymphonyAI??

• Webinar: Five ways retailers are getting real results with generative AI . Join industry experts on Tuesday, Aug 13 at 8:00 am PT to learn how retailers are capturing value with gen AI.??

• Webinar: Cutting through the hype to unleash true enterprise AI value . Join Constellation Research’s Ray Wong, SymphonyAI CTO Raj Shukla, Microsoft’s Eve Psalti, and MIT’s Daniela Rus for a look at real-world AI use cases and pragmatic analysis of what’s in store for enterprise AI on Thursday, August 22 at 12:00 pm PT.??

• Article, Fintech Global: SymphonyAI introduces a game-changing entity resolution solution for modern finance ?

• Article, KM World: The KMWorld AI 100: The Companies Empowering Intelligent Knowledge Management ?