This Week in AI 🧠

Pope Leo XIV Wants to Stop AI Playing God 👼

Pope Leo XIV has made curtailing the risks of runaway AI a defining mission of his pontificate. He is positioning himself as a guardian of the social fabric in the face of unchecked modern technologies, echoing the stance of his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, who promoted workers’ rights during the Industrial Revolution. The Vatican, under Leo’s predecessor, has been actively involved in AI ethics, advocating for the development of accountable and socially beneficial AI.

Tech Prophet Mary Meeker Just Dropped a Massive Report on AI Trends - Here’s Your TL;DR 📊

Mary Meeker is a legend in the tech world. She has sometimes been dubbed the “Queen of the Internet.” Her annual presentations on the state of the internet and tech industry were always devoured by the tech crowd the moment they were released. She’s now shining her insightful light on AI, and the new report is well worth your time to look through. It’s filled with charts, graphs, and thoughtful insights into the current state of the AI industry and where AI is heading next.

Don’t Let AI Companies Off the Hook ⚠️

Writing in the opinion section of The New York Times, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has emphasized the need for transparency and regulation to ensure that AI companies properly test their new models for safety. Amodei highlights the potential risks of AI and advocates for a federal transparency standard requiring companies to disclose their testing and evaluation policies. Amodei believes this standard will encourage industry learning, help Congress understand AI development, and ensure responsible AI practices.

Quick Hits

• New AI Test Can Predict Which Men Will Benefit From Prostate Cancer Drug - The AI tool determines the best candidates for abiraterone, which can halve the risk of death from the disease. 💊

• Amazon Testing Humanoid Robots to Deliver Packages - The retail giant is reportedly building a “humanoid park” to test the robots. 📦

• Meta Aims to Fully Automate Advertising with AI by 2026 - According to The Wall Street Journal, Meta plans to enable brands to create and target ads using AI. 🎯

• Investor Laurene Powell Jobs Has Seen Jony Ive’s Mystery AI Device - The billionaire tech investor and widow of Steve Jobs is a major investor in Jony Ive’s LoveFrom design firm. She appears to be impressed with what she’s seen. Synthetic first reported on the new OpenAI/Jony Ive AI device in last week’s issue. 🫆

• ChatGPT Introduces Cloud Connectors for Business Users - New integrations for Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint, Dropbox, Box, and others make ChatGPT much more useful by connecting your data and making it searchable and accessible. ChatGPT now supports MCP, the de facto standard for connecting data resources and tools. 🔗

• New York Times Inks Deal with Amazon to License Content - In its first deal, the New York Times has licensed its intellectual property to Amazon, including the content of its newspaper, NYT Cooking, The Athletic, and more. The Times is still in litigation with other tech companies, including OpenAI and Microsoft. 📰

• Perplexity’s New Tool Can Generate Spreadsheets, Dashboards, and More - Perplexity Labs is a research and analysis tool that generates detailed reports for you, complete with visualizations. 📊

• Microsoft Plans to Use AI to Accelerate Scientific Discovery - The software giant has created a new agentic AI platform named Microsoft Discovery, designed to transform the scientific process. It seems similar to Google’s Co-Scientist platform.

• Driveless Trucks Are Now Hauling Freight in Texas - Aurora Innovation has launched commercial runs between Dallas and Houston. 🚛

Video: Echo Hunter (AI-generated short film)

Want to see how good AI-generated video is now? Look no further than this fully AI-generated short film. The near-future sci-fi short is named “Echo Hunter,” and the images produced using tools from Arcana Labs are impressive. (22 mins)

Synthetic’s Take: Remember, AI is the worst it’s ever going to be. It’s only going to get more capable from here on out. I can’t wait to watch the AI-generated sequel I’ve been waiting for now for 40 years…Ferris Bueller’s Day Off 2! 🚘 It’s only a matter of time.

AI Tech and Innovation 💡

Highlights From World’s First Humanoid Robot Kickboxing Tournament 🥊

In case you missed it, China recently hosted an unusual kickboxing tournament, one for robots. Unitree provided six of their G1 EDU robots for the tournament, which were controlled remotely by humans. The robots were pre-trained for combat, where they learned various techniques, including punches, hooks, jabs, kicks, and more. Check out the article to see the robots in action!

Nvidia Rival Groq Makes Bold Prediction on What’s Next for AI 🔮

Groq is a lesser-known but important tech company. They build chips to accelerate AI inference, the computing needed to use large language models like ChatGPT and Claude. Nvidia’s chips are used to train these models, and also for inference. Groq refers to their chips as LPUs (Language Processing Units). Groq founder and CEO Jonathan Ross believes the next frontier for AI will be models that can not only retrieve and present existing information but also develop novel theories and approaches of their own: AIs that can invent.

In related news, Sam Altman has recently made similar comments, expecting AI will soon be able to “discover new knowledge” and solve business problems.

AI Insights 🔮

AI Can’t Be Your Friend and Pretending It Can Is Harmful, Says Reid Hoffman

AI Investor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is sounding the alarm about AI systems marketed as digital friends or romantic partners. “I don’t think any AI tool today is capable of being a friend…and I think if it’s pretending to be a friend, you’re actually harming the person in so doing,” said Hoffman. His remarks stand in stark contrast to those of Mark Zuckerberg, who views chatbots as a potential cure for the loneliness epidemic and has plans to promote AIs as digital friends.

Google’s Demis Hassabis Says AI Will Create New ‘Very Valuable Jobs’

Speaking at SXSW London, Sir Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, said he expects AI to be a bigger transformation for humanity than the Industrial Revolution. Hassabis is a deep thinker on the implications of AI for humanity. He said, “I think new jobs will appear, new very valuable jobs,” and recommended that students today study STEM subjects.

In related news, billionaire Mark Cuban believes that AI will create new roles, rather than eliminate jobs, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai has pushed back on concerns that AI will make up to half of Google’s engineers redundant, citing expansion plans.

Now, for the counterargument….

What Happens When AI Replaces Workers

Last week, Synthetic reported that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. The shift to AGI could lead to widespread technological unemployment, posing a challenge to the traditional work-based economy. While Universal Basic Income (UBI) is often proposed as a solution, Time Magazine argues that UBI may not provide people with sufficient bargaining power or societal influence, and that business leaders should focus on using AI to augment work rather than automate it.

In related news, Business Insider has gone ‘all-in on AI’ and laid off 21% of its staff. AI is already erasing some entry-level coding jobs. CNBC’s Jim Cramer says AI might be ‘the most important force’ when it comes to the future of employment. Axios’s CEO recently warned that AI will ‘reorder society’ and told people, “What we’re saying is: just pay attention.”

Humans Have 4 Years Before AI Can Do Everything They Can Do, OpenAI COO Says

Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s "The Future of Everything” Conference in New York City, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said that AGI (human-level intelligence) will be reached within the next few years. “I think it is possible that in the next four years, we do approximate something like [AGI], and it’s a testament to how fast things are moving,” he said.

Synthetic’s Take: This is the central issue of our time that nobody is talking about. Or if they’re talking about it, they’re not talking about it enough. Whether AGI (human-level intelligence) arrives next year or two decades from now, its impact on employment will be profound. Some jobs will remain, no doubt about that, but there won’t be enough to go around. We need to start having serious conversations about what a post-AGI economy looks like, how it will work, and how we can make life amazing and full of purpose for everyone in a world without work.

Toolkit for the Future 🛠️

10x Your Outbound With Our AI BDR

Your BDR team is wasting time on things AI can automate. Artisan’s AI BDR Ava automates lead research, multi-channel outreach and follow-ups on behalf of your team.

Ava operates within the Artisan platform, which consolidates every tool you need for outbound:

• 300M+ High-Quality B2B Prospects, including E-Commerce and Local Business Leads

• Automated Lead Enrichment With 10+ Data Sources

• Full Email Deliverability Management

• Multi-Channel Outreach Across Email & LinkedIn

• Human-Level Personalization

Book a demo to see how Ava can 10x your outbound.

Capacity: Deflect tickets, emails, and calls

With a support automation platform, you can relieve pressure on your support team and serve customers better and faster. AI answers 90% of queries and escalates the rest to your team. It automatically updates its knowledge database so it’ll never escalate the same issue again. The platform supports SMS, social, email, and phone communication.

ElevenLabs: Create an AI assistant on your website!

Building a helpful AI assistant for your website is so easy now. Just pick a hyper-realistic voice, give your new assistant a simple prompt (e.g., “You are a helpful customer service agent for a keynote speaker”), upload relevant FAQ documents, and integrate it with your website. Done! We used ElevenLabs for stevebrown.ai, and love it. Super easy to set up and configure. ElevenLabs is also great for creating audiobooks or multilingual voice tracks in up to 29 languages to reach new markets. Try it for free. It’s one of the best AI solutions out there.

PandaDoc: Streamline document workflows

Try this easy-to-use, AI-powered alternative to DocuSign to write proposals, create quotes, get eSignatures on contracts, build online forms, collect payments, and much more. Great for sales, HR, legal, finance, and IT. Free 14-day trial.

LearnWorlds: AI-enhanced course creation

Create and sell online courses from your website with this top-rated platform. It’s easy to use, with hundreds of beautiful templates and a powerful generative AI assistant that makes content generation a breeze. This is the platform where Synthetic will launch a new AI training course this summer. The AI helps you create lessons, exams, assessments, and more. Free to try. Use promo code 10XR to get 30% off your first two months.

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 filter unimportant emails into specific folders. It works across every device where you check your email. Get to inbox zero with award-winning SaneBox.