Synthetic: This Week in AI

Hi everyone, and welcome to Synthetic, my newsletter on all things AI. Each episode, I’ll curate articles that I think you’ll find valuable. All the summaries are written by me (not by AI!), so you’ll get my take on each story and why I think it’s relevant.

I hope you enjoy the newsletter and will consider sharing it with others who might find it useful. Now, on with the news…

Steve

Dell CEO: We could need 100x more data centers in 10 years

When audiences ask me the factors most likely to slow the rollout of powerful AI, I tell them its energy and money. We are going to need a lot more data centers to build out AI capabilities and make them available at scale, so billions of people can use them every day. Moore’s Law and new architectures will help—The performance of AI chips has increased 1-million-fold in the last ten years, and Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, predicts it’ll increase another million-fold in the next decade—But Open AI CEO Sam Altman thinks the industry will need to invest $7 trillion in manufacturing capacity, and at SXSW last week, Michael Dell predicted “We’re maybe year 1 or 2 of the big AI revolution” and we will need 100x more data centers than we have today. The big question is…how will we power them all?

AI detects heart defects in newborns 

Researchers at ETH Zurich and the KUNO Clinic in Regensburg have developed an AI that provides an automatic and reliable method of detecting certain heart defects in newborn babies. The model suggested the correct diagnosis in around 80-90% of cases and was able to determine the correct level of disease severity in 65-85% of cases. This is a great example of how AI will partner with clinicians to help them improve their diagnostic abilities and to see things they can’t see unaided.

Le Monde and Open AI sign partnership agreement on artificial intelligence

For a while now, content creators have been battling with AI companies who scraped their data to train their large language models. First the law suits flew, and now the agreements are coming. This one is between Le Monde, France’s national newspaper of record, and Open AI. Expect many more of these agreements in the coming months. They will pave the way for big AI companies to move forwards while providing a nice revenue stream to struggling media companies.

Interview with Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of Nvidia

I watched this interview with Jensen Huang from start to finish and loved every moment. It’s filled with great insights on leadership, innovation, business culture, and of course Jensen’s views on the future of artificial intelligence. Something to listen to during your next workout or stroll in the sunshine.

AI Innovation

Apple quietly releases details on its MM1 multimodal models

Apple continues to do what they always do….quietly work away in the background on technology until they have something terrific to do with it. Some people have written them off as laggards and losers in the AI race, but this new paper reveals a state of the art model (for it’s size) and hints at more to come from Cupertino. Apple continues to make AI acquisitions, this week picking up Darwin AI. It’s expected that iOS 18, when previewed at WWDC in June, will be chock full with exciting new generative AI-based features.

ANYmal can do parkour and walk across rubble

ANYmal has been around for a while now, but it’s a great showcase for the rapid advancement in robotics over the last couple of years. ANYmal learns more like a child does, through trial and error. Its designers hope that eventually ANYmal might be used in disaster areas to inspect collapsed buildings and search for survivors. The article includes a video of the robot in action.

AI Insights

Sora: One step away from The Matrix

Sora, Open AI’s video generation model, was released about a month ago, and caused quite a stir. This article argues that Sora is more than a video generator, and should be thought of as a primitive world model, with understanding of style, character, objects, scenery, movement, and how the physical world works. This was Open AI’s intent when building Sora as a research project; an attempt to build a model that understands the world we live in. The road to AGI will be paved by impressive work like this to fill in the gaps in AI’s understanding.

HBR: Heavy machinery meets AI

This Harvard Business Review article, available in their March-April 2024 edition, explores how big manufacturing companies like Rolls Royce and John Deere have begun to apply generative AI and machine learning to create innovative designs and solve customer problems at unprecedented speed, all by fusing computer hardware and software with industrial machinery; A fusion of the digital and analog worlds. The article explains how fusion is different than the Internet of Things, and how it can be used for competitive differentiation and to generate exponential growth.

UK National Health Service embraces AI to cut waiting times

Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) is using AI to try and reduce the number of missed appointments, an issue that costs the NHS £1.2 billion ($1.5 billion) annually. Initial trials have yielded a 30% drop in non-attendance by accurately predicting the likelihood of no-shows and offering patients appointments at more convenient times.

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Shoeboxed: AI turns your receipts into data. Ideal for tax season!

I travel quite a bit, so I’ve always got armfuls of receipts in my bag that need to be scanned, categorized, and cataloged. Shoeboxed makes it easy. Capture receipts on the go using their app, forward email receipts, or grab them using the web portal. They also have an option to mail in a pile of physical receipts. Their AI saves you time by extracting all the information you need from the receipt: vendor, amount, sales tax, location, and so on, and organizing them in an easy-to-search database complete with IRS-approved, secure image scans. Shoeboxed makes it easy to create expense reports and output expense data to spreadsheets. Perfect for freelancers/individuals or larger businesses with many users. Chosen as Hubspot’s #1 choice for tax season prep and the best receipt tracking app for emailed receipts by Forbes, Shoeboxed also has 4.4/5 stars on Capterra and a score of 4.5/5 on Techradar Pro. Try it FREE for 30 days with this link.

Maika AI: An AI companion for content creators

I talk a lot about AI assistants, both in my keynotes and also in my book, The Innovation Ultimatum. This versatile AI assistant from Maika AI is built for content creators, which these days means most of us. It’s free to try and helps you 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. Worth checking out for anyone who creates content of any kind.

ElevenLabs: The leader in AI-generated speech

Creating audio content can be a daunting task. Recording, editing, and refining audio often demands more time than entrepreneurs can spare. Imagine being able to produce human-like audio effortlessly with just a single click. ElevenLabs makes that a reality by allowing you to generate unbelievably high quality audio efficiently and cost-effectively in 29 languages. A game changer for content creators aiming to increase efficiency and reach a global audience through multilingual content. To see ElevenLabs in action, check out this super fun clip (not by ElevenLabs) that an AI researcher put together where he has Open AI’s GPT-4 describe a scene and then uses ElevenLabs to voice the narration in the unmistakable tones of Sir David Attenborough. Just wild. Anyway, you can try ElevenLabs out for free here.

HireLogic: Turbo-charge job interviews with AI

HireLogic is a really cool AI assistant you can use to aid your interview process. Invite the HireLogic AI to your next phone, video call, or in-person interview and it will listen to and analyze the interview to provide specific insights, highlight strengths and potential concerns, and catalog skills, metrics/KPIs, key topics discussed, and a full transcript of the interview. Impressive stuff, and integrates fully with HR platforms like Workday, Greenhouse, and Crelate. And HireLogic is free to try! Really cool product.

Seamless.AI: Company and lead search to boost your sales

Prospecting, trying to generate leads and close deals? This impressive sales software finds phone numbers, emails, and even builds out org charts of companies for the people you need to get to. Stay connected with old contacts who have moved jobs, fill in gaps in your contact info, auto-generate follow up emails, and get help to identify new target markets. Get 50 free credits with no credit card down and discover why over 500,000 companies use Seamless.AI to grow their business. Comprehensive and impressive.