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AI Tongue Scanner Diagnoses Illness With 96% Accuracy

Plus, AI in the Boardroom, and Why AI Hasn't Shown Up in GDP Growth (Yet)

Author

Steve Brown
August 15, 2024

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This week’s most interesting and relevant AI news and analysis

This Week in AI

It’s been a busy week in AI land, and there’s a lot of great content to share with you, particularly in the meaty “AI Insights” section. Please consider sharing this newsletter with everyone you think might enjoy reading it. We hope you’re having a great week!

Synthetic hopes you’re all enjoying summer!

This week, Google launched its new Pixel line of products to great fanfare. The new Pixel 9 series of phones includes many AI-powered features, including the Gemini Live assistant (which replaces Google Assistant), upgraded creative tools, and a significantly improved AI-enhanced camera system, which includes a cool, new add me feature. Pixel phones use Gemini Nano, which runs locally on the device’s new Google Tensor G4 chip, for offline operation and more sensitive tasks that require additional privacy. One reviewer called Gemini Live a trainwreck that frequently fails at basic tasks, while others see it as ramping up pressure on Apple. For Apple users, Gemini will be available on iOS devices as a tab in the Google app. Watch a 20-minute supercut of the launch event here. 📱

Oh, Elon. 😞 In an attempt to recapture ground in the race to AGI, Musk’s xAI has released an early preview of Grok-2, its latest frontier model. Grok-2 and its lightweight cousin, Grok-2 mini, are available to X Premium subscribers and, consistent with Musk’s personal brand, seemingly have few filters, especially when it comes to image generation. The new AI image generator will make anything from Taylor Swift in lingerie to Kamala Harris and Donald Trump doing 9/11. While xAI hopes to build the “World’s most powerful AI,” Grok-2 is still not seen as a threat to either Microsoft or Google, who remain frontrunners in the AI race.

DeepMind has begun releasing new episodes of its award-winning AI podcast 🎧. The podcast is informative, not commercial, and a great resource to learn about AI. Previous seasons offer excellent insights into deep learning, reinforcement learning, and artificial general intelligence. Highly recommended. Full disclosure: Synthetic is proud to have played a small part in producing Season 2 of the podcast while working at DeepMind.

Quick Hits

Video: AI-Generated Super Panavision Trailers

For some time now, a group of creators has been trying to answer the question, “What if we used AI to create fake trailers of blockbuster movies as if they had been shot in the 1950s in Super Panavision?” The results are fun and demonstrate both AI-generated video's potential and current limitations. (1 minute)

If you enjoyed the fake Avengers trailer, check out the 1950s trailers for Avatar, The Matrix, Snow White, Top Gun, Frozen, Friends, and Dune. Or check out this tutorial on how to make one yourself!

AI Tech and Innovation

At its foundation, machine learning is essentially a pattern matcher on steroids. It can analyze oceans of data to find patterns that humans can’t see. For example, AI human voice analysis can reveal biomarkers that indicate early disease states such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Congestive Heart Failure (CHF), COVID-19, COPD, and diabetes. Now, a new AI can accurately spot disease based on your tongue's color, shape, and thickness. This fact was long-known to practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine who have examined patients’ tongues for over 2,000 years. 👅

In a paper in Nature, researchers have shown that within a few generations, AI models trained on synthetic data generated by previous AI models could eventually collapse. This presents a major challenge to AI researchers relying on scaling to deliver improved AI performance and capabilities. Scaling models (think GPT-3 to GPT-4 to GPT-5) requires both scaling of the computing power and the volume of data used to train those models. Frontier AI companies are already beginning to run out of data sources for their latest models and are turning to synthetic data as a solution.

AI Insights

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“If you look at the interface between boards and executive management, the traditional way of doing things has been to share PDFs every 90 days of backward-looking performance metrics and hunch-based forecasts. To me, that feels like a fiduciary violation.”

Andy Byrne, CEO of Clari, quoted in the article below

As companies develop comprehensive AI strategies and accelerate decision-making with real-time data analysis, Forbes asks whether boards and the C-suite should integrate AI into their day-to-day work to help them analyze complex data sets, explore trade-offs, and make more sound executive decisions.

Emad Mostaque is a leading but divisive figure in the AI industry. He is the former CEO of open-source champion Stability AI and founder of Schelling AI, and before that, he enjoyed a successful career as a hedge fund manager. Mostaque is vocal about the massive transformation that AI will bring to business, the economy, and society. He believes (as does Synthetic) that exponential improvements to AI will rapidly disrupt work and reshape every industry. Schelling AI is Mostaque’s effort to create a decentralized AI platform that’s shared by all rather than owned by a giant corporation. He outlines why in this essay. If you prefer video content, check out his recent interview with Peter Diamandis.

With new AI tools boosting productivity (90% of coders now use an AI copilot, and 85% of enterprise employees use AI meeting transcription), why hasn’t AI impacted GDP growth? AI adoption is on the rise, but early impact is modest, and productivity gains have been incremental rather than transformative. Steep learning curves (think, prompt engineering), clunky interfaces, and AI’s current limitations have hampered widespread impact. That will likely change with greater AI performance, reliability, autonomy (get ready for agentic AI), and workflow integration. 📈

Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) are grappling with the wide-ranging security risks of AI, including content anomalies, inadequate data protection, potential code hallucinations, and a rapidly shifting AI threat landscape. NIST recently published an updated AI risk management framework that covers unique risks associated with or exacerbated by generative AI. As organizations scramble to deploy new AI capabilities company-wide, CISOs must work closely with AI deployers to manage and minimize risk. ⚠️

Toolkit for the Future

Use AI as Your Personal Assistant

Ready to embrace a new era of task delegation?

HubSpot’s highly anticipated AI Task Delegation Playbook is your key to supercharging your productivity and saving precious time.

Learn how to integrate AI technology into your processes, allowing you to optimize resource allocation and maximize output with precision and ease.

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.

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

AI extracts information from your receipts and organizes it in an easy-to-search database alongside IRS-approved, secure image scans. Capture receipts on the go📱, forward receipts 📧, use the web portal, or mail in a pile of physical receipts🧾. Try it free for 30 days.

This versatile AI assistant helps content creators to write text, edit content, change writing tone, create images, generate audio, easily translate text into other languages, quickly summarize hours-long YouTube videos, generate memes, and more. Free to try.

A new set of generative AI-powered tools to transform images, remove backgrounds and watermarks, create backgrounds, and visualize products. Deliver one-of-a-kind visual experiences and better engagement on the web. Free to try.