AI Top-of-Mind for 6.3.24 — Apple Greymatter and WWDC

Published in

AI.society

6 min readJun 3, 2024

Top-of-mind is Apple’s ‘Project Greymatter,’ first leaked last week and set for the reveal at the upcoming WWDC 2024. This is their first attempt to integrate AI into many of Apple’s applications and services, much like the Google announcement of a few weeks back. As ‘iClarified’ reports, Apple AI will run on-device for simpler tasks, and in the cloud for more compute-intensive features, the latter still ensuring privacy. Remember the ACDC post? What will be missing from the Apple innovation front, but most likely part of the announcement, is chat capabilities via their recent OpenAI partnership. Expected iOS 18 features:

Transcription: Transcribe voice memos.
• Photo Editing: AI-powered photo retouching.
• Enhanced Search: Faster and more reliable Spotlight searches.
• Improved Safari Search: Enhanced web search capabilities.
• Smart Replies: Automatic suggestions for replies to emails and text messages.
• Siri Upgrade: More natural-sounding interactions and advanced features for on-the-go tasks on Apple Watch.
• Developer Tools: AI enhancements in Xcode.
• Generative AI for Emojis: Create custom emojis based on user texts.
• Smart Recaps: Summarize missed notifications, individual text messages, web pages, news articles, documents, notes, and other media.

How do you develop an effective AI adoption plan for the enterprise? Ali Arsanjani offers a structured approach based on maturity and what types of projects to take on. From his post:

Turning to Google, what is the impact of ‘AI Oveviews’ on content creators? For example, if the AI generated synopsis results in searchers just ending at the summary vs going to the creator’s website, as they would have done in the past. The ‘NY Times’ looks into this question with some of the following reporting:

· Media executives said in interviews that Google had left them in a vexing position. They want their sites listed in Google’s search results, which for some outlets can generate more than half of their traffic. But doing that means Google can use their content in AI Overviews summaries.

· When Frank Pine searched Google for a link to a news article two months ago, he encountered paragraphs generated by artificial intelligence about the topic at the top of his results. To see what he wanted, he had to scroll past them.

After recent reports on Google’s Gemini offering off-the-reservation search results, ‘The Washington Post’ reports that they’ve toggled back their ‘AI Overviews’.

· Google said it was scaling down the use of AI-generated answers in some search results, after the tech made high-profile errors including telling users to put glue on their pizza and saying Barack Obama was Muslim.

· The change is the latest example of Google launching an AI product with fanfare and then rolling it back after it goes awry. In February, the company blocked users from making images of people with its AI image tool after conservative commentators accused it of anti-White bias.

Also on the Google front, leaked documents describing their SEO technology including link value, click behavior evaluation, and classification of smaller sites. As the ‘eMarketer’ article relates, the data is more useful as background and marketeers still need to focus on SEO basics. But the first thing that came to mind for me was whether future AI agents could leverage this.

We can’t go a week without mentioning deepfakes. I’ve covered this a few times over the past month, but as elections in India draw closer, what are we doing to combat misinformation, and can we use these findings in Nov? The ‘NY Times’ dives into this question

“We have to be ready,” said Surya Sen, a forestry officer in the state of Karnataka who has been reassigned during the election to manage a team of 70 people hunting down deceptive A.I.-generated content. “Social media is a battleground this year.” When Mr. Sen’s team finds content they believe is illegal, they tell social media platforms to take it down, publicize the deception or even ask for criminal charges to filed.

In a video that appeared a few days before voting began in April, a resurrected H. Vasanthakumar, who died of Covid-19 in 2020, spoke indirectly about his own death and blessed his son Vijay, who is running for his father’s former parliamentary seat in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. This apparition followed an example set by two other deceased titans of Tamil politics, Muthuvel Karunanidhi and Jayalalithaa Jayaram.

Pratik Sinha, a founder of Alt News, the most venerable of India’s independent fact-checking sites, said that the possibilities of deepfakes had not yet been fully harnessed. Someday, he said, videos could show politicians not only saying things they did not say but also doing things they did not do.

And good reporting by ‘The Information’ on enterprise software stocks and recent declines. The key takeaway is that as enterprises begin to look at where to invest in AI, they are holding back on traditional SaaS and on-prem SW purchases. Will they purchase AI tools from their existing vendors (i.e., Einstein GPT), or from AI specialists? This question will probably take a few years to work its way out, remembering a decade ago when CIOs had to re-allocate budget between on-prem and cloud. Doesn’t help the near-term outlook for the likes of Salesforce, though.

Continuing coverage of the ‘Stanford AI Index Report,’ this time the impact of AI on the economy. From the report:

The data is in: AI makes workers more productive and leads to higher quality work.

In 2023, several studies assessed AI’s impact on labor, suggesting that AI enables workers to complete tasks more quickly and to improve the quality of their output. These studies also demonstrated AI’s potential to bridge the skill gap between low- and high-skilled workers. Still other studies caution that using AI without proper oversight can lead to diminished performance.

And from the slides, first, the shift in AI investment to infrastructure and governance as adoption becomes more mature.