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Superworkers, a Universal Translator, and AI in Spycraft

Plus, New AIs Fight Cancer and Lethal Snake Bites 🐍

Author

Steve Brown
January 16, 2025

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

This Week in AI

AI and automation are coming for Wall Street jobs. A recent survey by Bloomberg Intelligence featured input from banking giants JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs, among others. The conclusion is that middle office and operations jobs are at high risk. Global banks may eliminate up to 200,000 positions in the next 3-5 years as generative AI boosts productivity and automates repetitive and routine tasks.

Meta’s new Seamless model can translate text in over 100 languages and perform near-instant speech-to-speech translation of 36 languages. Whether you prefer Gene Roddenberry or Douglas Adams will determine whether you instantly start thinking of the Universal Translator or the Babel Fish. Details were published in Nature. With over 7,000 languages spoken globally, we still have a long way to go to realize either Roddenberry’s or Adams’ dreams.

We are all touched by cancer. One-third of us will battle it at some point in our lives, and many of us have lost loved ones to the big C. An estimated 610,000 people died from cancer last year in the U.S. alone, a year when two million more people were given a cancer diagnosis. New work at Columbia University published today in Nature describes a new medical AI model that accurately predicts gene activity at the cellular level. This insight should help researchers better understand the gene mutations that cause cancer and make accurate predictions about the processes that govern cell behavior. AI is also used to spot tumors in imaging studies, predict which patients will respond best to immunotherapy treatment, and discover new therapies for drug-resistant cancers.

Quick Hits

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Video: AI Companions | Posthuman with Emily Chang

In her ongoing series Posthuman, Bloomberg’s Emily Chang explores people’s use of AI companions to combat loneliness and provide on-demand relationships. It’s a fascinating story of love, sadness, self-discovery, healing, technology, and naked commerce. CarynAI made influencer Caryn Marjorie a millionaire at 24. The show examines whether, in the longer term, artificial intimacy will help or hurt people. (25min)

AI Tech and Innovation

Snake bites kill hundreds of people every day

According to the World Health Organization, roughly 100,000 people die each year from snake bites, and there are an estimated 5.4 million snake bites each year. In lab tests, custom-designed proteins saved the lives of mice that were given an otherwise lethal dose of snake toxins. Standard antivenoms are expensive and time-consuming to develop. This new, more cost-effective method designs proteins that bind tightly to venom toxins, stopping them from docking with receptor cells in the body where they cause damage.

Science fiction legend Isaac Asimov introduced his Three Laws of Robotics in 1942.

  • First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

  • Second Law: A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

  • Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The proliferation of AI deepfakes, misinformation, and scams shows us that a fourth law may be needed: A robot or AI must not deceive a human by impersonating a human being.

Replit’s CEO talks about their new coding assistant that’s built on Anthropic’s Claude technology. Their new platform puts software creation within reach for noncoders and moves us closer to a time when the new coding language is…human.

AI Insights

The digital revolution accelerated existing business processes by supporting people with better tools and automation. The AI revolution will be different. It will make it possible to redefine business processes and give every employee superpowers. The shift towards copilots, agents, digital twins, and intelligence platforms will force every company to rethink how it’s organized, what it does, and how jobs are defined. The new imperative for every company will be to redesign and then reengineer work, jobs, and business processes around AI.

A recent survey revealed that 72 percent of corporate leaders are aware AI sucks enormous amounts of energy, but only 13 percent monitor the power consumption of AI they have deployed. AI servers with GPUs like Nvidia’s latest Blackwell chips (each consumes 1200 watts) require far more energy than traditional data servers running Intel or AMD chips. Denser computing power characterized by GPUS can also require expensive liquid cooling. In related news, a CalTech and UC Riverside study estimates AI will produce more air pollution than all of California’s cars by 2030, when AI data centers may consume about 12% of all U.S. energy.

The intelligence community gathers and analyzes vast amounts of data, looking for patterns and connections that might generate a time-sensitive warning. Speed is of the essence, and AI is a vital tool to identify potential threats and alert human analysts. Multimodal AI and reasoning models can cross-reference satellite images with signals intelligence to build threat assessments and make judgments about military movements. AI is also used extensively for language translation. Policymakers can also interact with lengthy intelligence reports using chat interfaces so they can ‘ask’ the document relevant questions.

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