This Week in AI

Zoom Will Let AI Avatars Talk To Your Team For You

Zoom continues adding AI features to its platform and has just announced that next year, it will add AI avatars to its Zoom Clips feature. You upload a short video of yourself speaking, and Zoom’s AI will create an avatar that looks and sounds like you. This will enable you to send short video updates for your colleagues, perhaps on bad hair days when you don’t want to be on camera. The use case isn’t that clear. Zoom will use advanced authentication, watermarking, and strict usage policies to guard against deepfakes. This new capability is seen as the first step towards a vision where you would send a digital twin of yourself to attend a meeting on your behalf whenever you’re otherwise occupied.

Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield Win Nobel Prize in Physics for Work in Foundational AI 🤖

Geoff Hinton, known as ‘the godfather of deep learning’ because he invented the foundational backpropagation algorithm that makes it possible to train neural networks, has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for his decades-long services to artificial intelligence. Hinton has been vocal about his growing concerns for AI safety and this week shared that he was proud of Ilya Sutskever for firing Sam Altman from OpenAI. John Hopfield, also awarded, developed the Hopfield network, a type of recurrent neural network that can serve as a type of memory.

Google DeepMind Boss Wins Nobel for AI Protein Breakthrough 🔬

Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, CEO and senior researcher at Google DeepMind, have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their breakthrough work with AlphaFold, an AI-powered tool to decode the structure of proteins, which are the building blocks of life. Before the invention of AlphaFold, it took a PhD student about five years to determine the shape of a single protein. Knowing its shape makes it easier to figure out what it does and how it works. AlphaFold accurately predicts the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its 2D amino acid sequence within seconds. DeepMind released the structures of all 200 million known protein structures, for free, in the AlphaFold protein structure database, accelerating the work of every medical researcher on Earth almost overnight. Hassabis and Jumper share the award with David Baker of Baker Labs, who built on DeepMind’s work.

Quick Hits

• Meta AI Launches in Six New Countries - News for our international readers: The Meta AI chatbot is now available in the UK, Brazil, and the Philippines, with more countries and languages supported later this year.

• Amazon Launches New AI ‘Shopping Guides’—The shopping giant is rolling out new AI guides for over 100 product categories through its mobile website and apps. The guides are designed to be educational and help consumers make more informed purchase decisions. 🛍️

Videos: The Road to AGI

Paul Roetzer gives an excellent overview of artificial general intelligence—what it is, when it might come, what happens next, and what it will mean for humanity. It’s a solid overview that everyone can understand, and Roetzer is an excellent presenter. It’s worth 30 minutes and 20 seconds of your time to watch it. 🧠

AI Tech and Innovation

Brain-like Computers Deliver Milliwatt AI Inferences at the Edge 🪫

BrainChip has developed a new chip, Akida Pico, for use in power-constrained devices. The chip uses neuromorphic computing approaches to consume only one milliwatt of power. The chip swaps logic gates for artificial neurons that communicate using ‘spikes,’ signals that trigger other neurons when they reach a certain threshold. In this spiking neural network, each neuron has an internal state, allowing output to depend not only on current inputs but also on history. 🧠

This AI-Powered Invention Machine Automates Eureka Moments 💡

Many new ideas aren’t truly original. They often combine two or more previous ideas and then apply them in a novel way. Swiss software company Iprova has built an AI that automatically develops proposals for patentable inventions in an area of interest. It scans literature in immediate, related, and far-off fields to suggest inventions made of old, previously disconnected ideas. The company claims its customers have already created over 2,500 inventions using their platform. 📈

AI Insights

College Students Used Meta’s Smart Glasses AI to Dox People in Real Time 👓

Get ready to wave goodbye to any chance of remaining anonymous in public. Two Harvard students built a demo using Ray-Ban’s Meta Smart Glasses, facial recognition, and public databases. Their program used AI to identify faces and trawl public databases to find names, addresses, phone numbers, and more. This information is then surfaced on a phone app. Watch the video in the article. Not good. Not good at all.

Sam Altman: The Intelligence Age 🧐

When Sam speaks, people listen. As the CEO of OpenAI, he is one of the most powerful people on the planet and makes decisions that affect everyone’s future. Sam only posts to his blog occasionally, and his latest post is worth a read. In it, Altman shares his perspective on the potential of a new era for humanity, its upsides and potential downsides, and the need to begin conversations now about how our society will navigate the massive change that’s coming. 🌪️

Meet the Guys Dating AI Girlfriends 👧🏻

AI companion use is on the rise. People use these chatbots for a variety of reasons: mental health support, friendship, or a romantic relationship. Some users find the companions to be a source of comfort and support, especially those who struggle with social anxiety or loneliness. However, these AI girlfriends come with risks, potentially leading to social isolation, difficulty forming healthy emotional attachments, codependency, and unrealistic expectations for real-world relationships.

Toolkit for the Future

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HireLogic: Turbo-charge job interviews with AI

Invite the HireLogic AI to your next phone, video, or in-person interview. It analyzes the conversation, provides specific insights, and highlights the interviewee’s strengths, skills, and any potential concerns. It creates a full interview transcript so you can focus on the conversation. Free to try.

ElevenLabs: Generate voices, music & sounds

Recording, editing, and refining audio demands more time than most entrepreneurs can spare. Generate voices, high-quality music, and sound effects efficiently and cost-effectively with a single click. Create multilingual voice tracks in up to 29 languages to reach new markets. Try it for free.

Looka: AI Logo Design and Branding

Make a logo in minutes—no design skills required! Auto-create a brand kit with fonts and colors to complement your new logo and create a brand identity. Instantly create branded marketing materials, then use over 300 templates to customize branded business cards, social profiles, email signatures, and more.

Notion: Organize and share team information

Notion helps you focus on the things that actually matter. Organize information, thoughts, to-do lists, calendars, articles, tasks, notes, and team discussions in one well-organized space. Use Notion AI to create content, translate languages, and ask your notes questions.

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.

SaneBox: Get rid of inbox clutter

Focus on the email that matters. Deep Clean automatically identifies old, unimportant emails so you can delete them. Snooze emails until a better time and easily track emails that need a response. Automatically filters unimportant emails into specific folders. It works across every device where you check your email. Get to inbox zero with the award-winning SaneBox.

Seamless.AI: Boost your sales

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