??Wiser! #141: Ambient Computing | Amazon Invests In Anthropic | Meta's AI For The Masses

What's In Wiser! This Week

It’s been a bumper week for AI. First Amazon announced a massive investment in Anthropic, bringing them into the AI gold rush. The Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote at Meta Connect spelt out the strategy to bring AI to the masses, for free and totally integrated across the family of facebook apps. These are the two stories I lead with.

For paying subscribers, the Plus! article looks at a digital future that is screenless. From wearable computers to hands free assistants to smart glasses, all powered and enabled by a personalised, always on AI assistant.

Chart of the week looks at the size of Amazon’s digital advertising business. Plus there are over a dozen links to other stories you’ll find relevant and interesting.

ATB, Rick

P.S. REMEMBER: Insight and Information Gives You Leverage! (Build your own competitive advantage by being 1% smarter than your competition.)

w/WiserPLUS!

The Rise of Screenless Computing: A Glimpse into a Future Without Screens

In this week’s PLUS! article, I look at the future of personalised AI, ambient computing and interacting with a computer without a screen. This is a world where the technology is seamlessly integrated into your lives, always sensing what’s going on, listening to your every world, but living in the background. Invisible, but aware!

Read it here...??

w/Artificial Intelligence

Amazon’s Entry Into The AI Gold Rush

Amazon has been low key when it comes to AI over the past 10 months. But then, last week, there was the announcement of a new generation for Alexa. Almost a decade since the smart assistant’s launch, Amazon has AI-ified the smart home assistant enabling it to do more than set timers and play music. Hot on the heels of Alexa came the news this week that Amazon are investing up to $4 billion in?Anthropic?to provide advanced deep learning and other services for its Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers.

Here’s The Thing You Need To Know: This is big news because it now matches up Microsoft with OpenAI against Amazon with Anthropic against Google and Meta. Only Apple are missing to complete the BigTech lineup. For me, Anthropic’s Claude is better than ChatGPT, but it’s just a matter of taste. I use both interchangeably, plus Pi as my personal assistant. The key thing that separates GPT and Claude is Claude’s Constitutional AI approach. Instead of relying on human’s to moderate the training data, Anthropic is guided by 10 “foundational” principles of fairness and autonomy. This approach is supposed to be more robust and less vulnerable to human bias being introduced into the AI models.

Amazon’s AI Strategy Is Built On Bedrock | Amazon Invests in Anthropic | Anthropic Press Release | Amazon Updates Alexa

w/BigTech

Meta’s Changing Strategy For The Metaverse

As I put this week’s Wiser! to bed, Meta Connect is under way. This is the annual developer’s conference focused on all things AI, virtual, and augmented. The key thing is that Meta are bringing AI to the masses (or at least the 3+ billion people that use their products today) and its going to be free and really easy to access.

It also signalled how Zuckerberg has shifted his metaverse strategy subtly, but distinctly towards AI. It’s some transformation for Zuckerberg from a year ago and the calls that the Zuck has lost it. Now he’s the reformed tech leader with less metaverse and more AI in his direction of travel.

Here are the key takeaways from the opening keynote:

Emu (Expressive Media Universe): This is Meta’s new text to image generation foundational AI and it’s going to be integrated across the entire family of Facebook apps. Zuckerberg was keen to point out the fun side of the new tech, such the ability to create AI stickers within Messenger, WhatsApp, or design your own filters in Instagram and Facebook Stories. There’s also new AI editing tools which Zuckerberg illustrated using a cute picture of himself as a child and then completely change the clothes he was wearing, seamlessly.

Meta AI: Meta is bringing AI to it’s 3 billion users. Based on Llama 2 (Meta’s equivalent to ChatGPT or Claude), Meta’s AI chatbot is to be integrated into the messaging apps. This includes text to image generation inside of WhatsApp or Messenger. There’s also a bunch of new AI, each with a unique personality. The first round of chatbots were stylised on real celebrities like Mr Beast, Charlie D’Amelio and Paris Hilton. Each have their own style and unique areas of expertise, such as “Max” the chatbot chef, or “Lily” the professional chatbot writer and even “Dungeon Master Snoop Dogg” to play an interactive game of Dungeons and Dragons.

AI Studio: This is a new platform that’ll let any business or ndividual build AI chatbots for the Facebook family of apps and also for the metaverse using Meta’s AI technology. AI Studio will let businesses “create AIs that reflect their brand’s values and improve customer service experiences.” Here’s the thing: Zuckerberg is opening up the capability for users to train an AI chatbot to be just like them. To think like them, talk like them, act like them. And them upload that AI avatar into a metaverse/immersive experience and be a virtual representation of you or your brand.

Ray-Ban Smart Glasses: This is the 2nd generation of the Meta Ray Bans and they come with an upgraded 12-megapixel camera, wrap-around speakers built into the arms and users can now livestream direct to Instagram or Facebook. But the big news is that the Ray Bans come with Meta AI built it. Zuckerberg’s examples were; cooking on a BBQ and asking Meta AI how much longer to cook the meat, or playing pickleball and asking Meta AI if the ball was in. To be clear, the lenses are ordinary lenses, there’s no heads up display, that’ll come. But in the world os screenless computing, this is a big deal. The glasses start around $300.

Meta Quest 3: Remember, Meta are the dominant market leaders in virtual reality headsets. The Quest 3 is their next-generation virtual reality headset and it’s pumped with an improved technical spec that makes the virtual experience better and more “mixed”, over laying virtual screens onto the real space that your in. This looks a big step forward from the VR experiences of a year ago.

Sources: Meta Connect | Techcrunch | Forbes | Decrypt

• 5 Use Cases for Immersive Technology and the Metaverse
• How Meta’s Open Source AI Threatens the Future of Trust in AI

w/Chart Of The week

Amazon's $40 Billion Digital Ads Business

From 2024, Amazon are to charge subscribers extra to keep ads off Prime. They say they need the extra money to maintain their investment in creating content for the streaming channel. It’s no surprise that Amazon are turning to advertising to boost revenues. Their ad revenues grew 22% in 2022. In the most recent quarter, ads on?Amazon?brought in nearly?$10.7 billion. This makes Amazon one of the largest advertising businesses in the world, bigger than YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter combined.

Source:?Chartr

??? Big Tech Little Tech Podcast

What Else Is Happening In Tech?

• Twitter, the app that’s trying to get everyone to call it X, has been identified as the main culprit of social media disinformation in the EU (knock me down with a feather!) Slovakia, Poland and Spain are named, due to upcoming elections, as countries at risk?from the threat of Russian propaganda.
• The world’s first self-stabilising walking exoskeleton, called Atlante X , has?entered a rehabilitation trial in Germany. It will be provided to patients with?hemiparesis, an after-effect of stroke that causes muscle weakness on one side of the body.
• OpenAI’s image generator is called DALL-E and it has been over shadowed by the attention given to ChatGPT, and the superior product that is Midjourney (although MidJourney is technically challenging to use (it only runs in a Discord server). Now OpenAI has announced version 3 of DALL-E with the promise of much better output. They have also integrated the image generator into ChatGPT to make it even easier to access (especially compared to Midjourney).
• As a side note, Microsoft are leveraging their investment in OpenAI in the new Bing app which comes complete with ChatGPT4 and DALL-E fully integrated. The app runs on both iOS and Android and is free to use.
• ChatGPT is getting an upgrade and you will soon be able to speak to the large language model and have it speak back. Users will also be able to upload images and ask questions about them o
• Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI has said it’s possible to get regulation wrong . He also reiterated what he’s said before, which is that it’s important and should not be feared, amid global concerns about rapid advances in artificial intelligence. Hence the next 2 stories…
• The BBC reported on this story from Spain where some local boys took an AI image generator app and made fake nudes of local girls aged 14-17. This isn’t isolated or unique to Spain. Two minutes searching online and you’ll find a dozen “see through” apps that will turn a clothed image of a female into a naked one.
• Speaking of deepfakes, remember Tiananmen Square and the iconic photo of the man standing before the tanks? Did you know he took a selfie with the tanks in the background? Of course he didn’t, it was 1989! But you’d think he did if you googled “tank man” and saw this photo-realistic deepfake .
• Spotify has introduced an AI-powered voice translation feature that can reproduce podcasts in other languages using the original podcaster's voice. The technology relies on OpenAI's Whisper for transcription and likely for voice replication, allowing translations to maintain the podcaster's unique voice
• French tech startup Mistral AI has released its first large language model , Mistral 7B, which outperforms similar models and is available for free download, with no usage restrictions. Mistral AI aims to support the open source AI community and plans to offer a commercial product with code sources and weights available.
• The FT reports that Big Banks are taking on BigTech over Apple Pay and Google Pay. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and others, are to launch Paze, a mobile wallet that will connect directly to the credit and debit card accounts of 150 million customers. Does this signal the end of credit cards? Probably.
• The FAA has given Zipline authorisation to fly drones autonomously for its medical delivery services without requiring a line-of-sight human operator to pilot the drone. Meanwhile, Alphabet’s Wing has teamed up with Walmart for drone delivery in Texas for customers within a 6-mile radius by the end of the year.
• Amazon adds RFID to cashierless?tech to support apparel purchases . The new capability enables?cashierless shopping for softline goods like clothing, fan gear, hats and shoes.
• Diesel partners with DressX on collection for Meta Avatars . The digital wearables are available through the Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and Quest VR online stores.

???Wiser! Insights

• Five Consumer Brands Adopting ChatGPT to Drive Stronger Customer Engagement
• Downsides of Deepfake Technology: From Ethics to Reality TV
• Anthropic’s Approach to AI Safety
• Rick Huckstep Talks To Pi, The Human AI Assistant
• How Consumer Brands Build Customer Engagement Using Virtual Reality

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