A week in Generative AI: Apps, Translators & Long reads galore

News for the week ending 10th September 2023

cyberpunk news presenter, male, long hair, behind desk, facing camera, in clean pixel art style, neon colors --ar 16:9

So many long reads to share this week, including some fabulous pieces from Time (The TIME100 Most Influential People in AI) and Wired (What OpenAI Really Wants) that I really would encourage everyone to read.

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OpenAI announces it’s first developer conference

6th November - put it in the diary. Will be interesting to see what they announce, expect it to be an evolution of plugins (obvs), new API features, probably an update to DALL-E and more multi-modal features in ChatGPT. Probably some surprises too - long shot for a GPT-5 announcement.

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Anthropic launches a paid plan for its AI-powered chatbot

$20 a month seems to be the settling point for GenAI subscriptions right now. It’ll be interesting to see how these subscriptions fare with more and more apps/platforms releasing their own GenAI features every week.

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Salesforce announces Slack AI

I think we’ll look back in a couple of years time and wonder how we coped without generative AI features in every single application we use. Expect many more of these announcements coming to all apps and platforms in the coming weeks and months!

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Thanks to AI, hearing aids offer translation, other high-tech features

Star Trek Universal Translator? ✅

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Walmart will give 50,000 office workers a generative AI app

Similar to McKinsey’s Lilli, I suspect this Walmart app is powered by Cohere who seem to be the emerging player for creating these sorts of apps in the enterprise at the moment.

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This week’s AI Ethics news

• Microsoft to defend customers on AI copyright challenges

• Artists sign open letter saying generative AI is good, actually

• Major AI players are getting in sync, but it’s what comes next that really matters

• Advertising agency Oliver sets up global council to regulate AI use

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This week’s long reads

• Time - The TIME100 Most Influential People in AI

• Wired - What OpenAI Really Wants

• Ben Evans - Generative AI and intellectual property

• The Information - How Midjourney’s Founder Built an AI Winner While Rejecting Venture Capital

• Time - Inside Elon Musk's Struggle for the Future of AI

• NY Times - A.I. Is Coming for Mathematics, Too

• ForeignAffairs.com - The AI Power Paradox

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“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson