This Week in AI

Arm CEO warns AI's power appetite could devour 25% of US electricity by 2030

The energy consumed by AI is on an unsustainable path. Rene Haas, CEO of ARM (the company that provides the designs for about 85% of the processors on the planet—it’s inside every Apple product, Android phone, and most cars, for starters), shared his concern that AI could consume 20 to 25% of US energy output by the end of the decade. The main culprit is large language models. A single ChatGPT inquiry uses the same amount of energy as about 10 Google searches, and as models grow in size and generative AI is deployed across the enterprise in all major companies in the coming years, power consumption is due to skyrocket, despite continued improvements in energy efficiency. Will we need to choose between having EVs or AI?

Spotify announces new AI playlist feature

“Make me a chill-out playlist of background music for when I’m working”, “I want a surfer rock playlist to cheer me up”, “Put together some upbeat dance music from the 70s, 80s and 90s for a retro party, and don’t include any glam rock.” Spotify has announced a new AI playlist feature that will enable you to explain what you want to hear in plain language, and have the perfect playlist created for you. Now in beta in the UK and Australia and coming to other markets later in the year.

Jony Ive and Sam Altman want $1 Billion to fund new AI hardware

For a while now, Sir Jony Ive (the designer who shaped the iPod, iPhone, iMac, and other iconic Apple devices) and Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, have been rumored to be collaborating on a future AI device. If the availability of low-power computing, miniaturization, MEMS and other sensors (GPS, accelerometers, cameras etc) led to the creation of the iPhone and sparked the smartphone revolution, what new device categories will generative AI unlock?

Musk predicts superhuman AI will be smarter than people next year

Oh, Elon. Whether you love him or hate him, Elon Musk is behind many of today’s big tech innovations and he has a finger on the pulse of technology innovation. While he likes to make predictions, many of them turn out to be somewhat dicey, so take this one with a pinch of salt. Currently the smart people in the industry are thinking 2028-2029 is a more likely timeframe for AGI, let alone artificial super intelligence.

News. Without Motives. That’s 1440. Join Today!

Frustrated by biased news? Tired of trying to sift through 100s of news sources to find the facts? Leave behind the opinions and receive a daily digest of pure facts. Say hello to 1440! Delve into politics, business, science, sports, culture, and more. Join the other 3 million Americans who read 1440 each morning. 

Video: UBTECH Robot Demo

Here come the Chinese robots. This is Walker S, a robot from UBTECH. Built using Baidu’s ERNIE LLM, the robot is shown folding a t-shirt, sorting objects on a table, and then explaining its actions and conversing in Chinese. (2m 30s)

AI Innovation

Intel goes after Nvidia with their Gaudi 3 chip

Intel is elbowing its way into the AI space with their new Gaudi 3 chip. Designed specifically to accelerate AI workloads for both training and inferencing, Intel claims the new Gaudi platform will outperform Nvidia’s H100, which was the darling of the AI world until they announced their new Blackwell platform last month. Intel announced Gaudi 3 at their Vision event in Arizona. First chips are already with customers. Alongside performance and power efficiency advantages over the H100, customers will likely be drawn to Intel by significantly lower total cost of ownership and most of all…..availability. Getting enough Nvidia chips has been challenging, even for tech titans, so there is likely plenty of room in the market for both Intel and Nvidia. More analysis here.

Open AI and Meta ready new models capable of reasoning

Meta’s Llama 3 and Open AI’s GPT-5 models are expected to launch this summer. One of the advances over previous models is expected to be improved reasoning abilities. Reasoning and planning skills are important steps on the journey towards building artificial general intelligence. These advances may bring another level of AI breakthrough and power a new generation of autonomous agents and AI assistants. Meta imagine putting Llama 3 into a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses so the wearer could look at a broken coffee machine and the AI would guide them on how to fix it, for example.

AI Insights

Jamie Dimon says AI could be as transformational as the printing press and steam engine

The JP Morgan CEO, seen by many as a financial and business sage, made the remarks in his annual shareholder letter. While he said its impossible to predict the pace of AI development, he shared that “AI has the potential to augment virtually every job.” JP Morgan has over 2000 employees working on AI, machine learning, and data science and they already have over 400 AI use cases in production inside the company.

AI will revolutionize higher education (if universities will allow it)

Excellent article from Fast Company on the impending transformation of education, particularly higher education. As AI pervades every part of business, universities will need to change both how they teach and what they teach to students. To prepare the workforce of the (very near) future, we need to do something different. And sooner rather than later to remain competitive.

AI-powered camera takes pictures of people and instantly makes them naked

A prime entry into the “what were they thinking” category of new products this year? Actually, no. This is a project by two German artists trying to bring attention to the potential privacy invasions made possible by deepfake technology and sending a warning that generative AI has the potential to erode the fabric of reality itself.

Toolkit for the Future

Firstbase: The easy way to start a new company

Incorporate your company, access one-click growth tools, stay compliant, and manage everything your business needs — all online, from anywhere. Launch your U.S. business in minutes with no paperwork or legal headaches.

ThirstySprout: Hire top-tier tech talent, fast

Hire top talent with industry-specific expertise to build world-class engineering teams and solve complex business problems. AI-assisted sourcing, vetting, and hiring delivers the right talent, at the right time, globally!

Laxis: AI meeting assistant for revenue teams

Help your sales team stay focused on customers during meetings. Laxis captures attendees’ comments verbatim and flags items for follow up. Auto-generates meeting summaries and follow-up emails in seconds, quickly identifying customer requirements, pain points, and action items. Free to try.

Browse AI: Extract and monitor data from any website

Extract data from websites and place it in a spreadsheet that fills itself and notifies you of any changes. Pre-built robots make it a breeze to get started. Extract whatever you need: job listings, property details, TikTok videos, hotel info, or competitor pricing. Free to try. No coding required.

Melio: Pay and get paid, exactly how you want

Melio is a free and easy-to-use payment solution that helps U.S. small businesses pay any expense by bank transfer or credit card - even where cards are not accepted. No setup or monthly fees.