AI Top-of-Mind for 5.22.24 — Recall, recall, recall
Top-of-mind is this week’s Microsoft announcement, with standouts including Recall, Copilot Plus PCs, and GPT-4o plans. ‘Reuters’ offers details:
· Able to handle more artificial-intelligence tasks without calling on cloud data centers, the new computers (based on Qualcomm) will start at $1,000 and begin shipping on June 18. Intel and AMD will follow.
· The ability to crunch AI data directly on the computer lets Copilot+ include a feature called “Recall.” “Recall” tracks everything done on the computer, from Web browsing to voice chats, creating a history stored on the computer that the user can search when they need to remember something they did, even months later.
More on Recall from ‘The Verge.’
Not to be left on the sideline, another review of GPT-4o and its language interaction skills. Sabrina Ramanov offers a five-part test-drive with very deep conversations. And Lars Wilk compares performance against GPT-4 and Gemini 1.5. He created a special topic dataset for comparison, with the following results:
Before moving on, yesterday I covered issues with voiceover copyrights and OpenAI’s ‘Her.’ Suno, an AI-driven music generator, is said to be raising additional capital, as ‘The Information’ reports, but they’ve got to be careful with their training data. From the article:
In an era where AI researchers and developers are increasingly facing scrutiny and lawsuits around their training data, Suno’s lawyers will need to work longer hours. Just last week, Sony Music, whose artists include Lil Nas X and Celine Dion, sent letters to more than 700 companies warning them against using their music without explicit permission.
Another update on education, with the ‘Mercury Center’ covering a survey by PwC that looked at jobs that require AI skills. The research found that in the US, salaries are 25% higher, and up to 49% higher for financial analysts.
· “Countries and sectors that have a high demand for AI skills tend to see higher wage premiums, especially if there is a scarcity of skilled professionals,” Mehdi Sahneh, senior economist at PwC UK, said in a statement.
· The report also found that labor productivity in industries most exposed to AI — that is, those where AI can be more readily used to perform certain tasks, such as financial services — is growing 4.8 times faster than in other sectors.
Some of the required skills are obviously in marketing. A recent survey by the ‘CMO Council’ looked at Gen AI investment, cross-functional alignment, personalization, the role of marketing in meeting revenue goals, and how to handle regional differences. From the article:
Further down this path, ‘CB Insights’ looked at mentions of AI on recent earnings calls, with one telling statement by BP including use of Microsoft CoPilot:
· The places that we’re seeing tremendous results on are coding. We need 70% less coders from 3rd parties to code as the AI handles most of the coding. The human only needs to look at the final 30% to validate it. That’s a big savings for the company moving forward. 2nd, things like call centres, the language models have become so sophisticated now.
· They can operate in multiple language, 14, 15 languages, easily. In the past, that hasn’t been something we can do, so we can redeploy people off that, given that the AI can do it. You heard my advertising example last quarter where advertising cycle times moved from 4 to 5 months down to a couple of weeks. So that’s obviously reducing spend with 3rd parties. We’ve now got Gen AI in the hands through Microsoft CoPilot I think I think this is just a tremendous step change in digital for our company, and I continue to look for ways to drive higher margin and reduce costs both on capital and cost.
So, if AI is such a threat, is it even worthwhile to go to grad school? Amanda Claypool asks that very question in her blog. From her article:
· In the past, if you wanted to reskill or change careers all you had to do was go back to school. But as post-Recession Millennials have demonstrated, there is no longer economic value in doing that. All that does is create a surplus of advanced degree holders who hold too much debt in an economy that doesn’t need or want the credentials they’ve worked so hard to obtain.
· The goal of this project is to find an alternative pathway to getting an education without the cost. Is it possible to self-study your way into mastery of a particular topic or skill? And if so, what is the way someone can do it?
This is her basic prompt
Lastly, ‘Campaign US’ details a great AI-driven ad campaign for Moen that is all based on water scarcity. Link to the ads.
