- Business Bloopers
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- SAP to reorganize 8,000 jobs for AI
SAP to reorganize 8,000 jobs for AI
Plus: Deepfake Biden robocall tells residents not to vote
Business Bloopers
January 25, 2024
Todays Business Bloopers:
Read Time: 5 min
LATEST ADVANCEMENTS
The Bloopers: A manipulated phone message, utilizing AI to mimic President Biden's voice, advised New Hampshire residents against participating in the Democratic presidential candidate polls on Tuesday.
The Details:
The fabricated audio message, incorporating recognizable Biden phrases like "What a bunch of malarkey," reached numerous voters in New Hampshire, urging them to "save their vote for the November election."
Originating from the personal cellphone of Kathy Sullivan, former Democratic party chair, the incident was reported to authorities as "outright election interference" and an attempt to harass both Sullivan and other New Hampshire voters.
Though the exact number of recipients is unknown, Sullivan's spokesperson estimated at least a dozen, with those affected encouraged to contact the election law unit.
The responsible party behind the calls remains unidentified. Dean Phillips' representative, challenging Biden for the presidential candidate role, and The Trump campaign have denied involvement.
My Thoughts: This incident is a concerning trend where AI technology is increasingly exploited in campaigns to illegitimately suppress voters and sway public opinion in elections worldwide.
The Bloopers: Google has integrated Gemini (Google’s AI Model) into its Google Ads platform, to make it quicker and easier to create relevant, optimized, and conversational ad campaigns.
The Details:
features include suggested creatives and keywords aligning with people’s search intent
Preliminary testing has revealed that the AI-driven conversational ads powered by Gemini’s integration improve the quality of search advertising campaigns while decreasing the need for manual work.
They’ve launched a beta version to advertisers in the US and UK and plan to make it available globally over the next few weeks—further strengthening the power of ad customizability for advertisers.
My Thoughts: Google has some of the best potential when it comes to AI. They run the most popular search engine in the world, capturing nearly 92% of the search market.
The Bloopers: SAP SE is heavily investing in generative AI technologies and reorganizing its structure, which will impact 8,000 jobs.
The Details:
Restructuring Plan: SAP announced a 2 billion euro restructuring plan impacting 8,000 roles. This move is part of a strategy to concentrate on AI-driven business areas.
Investment in Generative AI: SAP is investing over $1 billion in generative AI, indicating a strong commitment to integrating AI into its business strategies. It also involves investments in AI-powered technology startups through Sapphire Ventures.
Implementation of the Restructuring: The restructuring will mainly be executed through voluntary leave programs and internal re-skilling measures, aiming to maintain the headcount at current levels through 2024.
My Thoughts: SAP is worth around 220 billion dollars with approximately 110,000 employees. It will be interesting to see how their re-jig of jobs go when taking into account the sensitive business information that they hold for both themselves and other massive companies.
❤️ MY FAVOURITE AI TOOLS THIS WEEK
🤖 Holly- AI-powered recruiting assistant with access to over 750M+ profiles (link)
✍️ Axonn- An AI writing assistant that creates on-brand content for Twitter and LinkedIn (link)
🔮 Top GPTs- Access the best OpenAI GPTs without a Plus subscription (link)
💻 Brainner- Streamline talent acquisition by automating AI-driven resume analysis (link)
🌎 AI NEWS ROUNDUP
An internal document leaked from Google unveiled the tech giant's key goal for 2024 — to "deliver the world's most advanced, safe, and responsible AI”.
Gmail has announced voice-activated prompt support (yet to be released), allowing users to converse within the application. Now, using generative AI, users can say “Help me write…” rather than manually typing out the same sentence.
The MIT study found that artificial intelligence is not currently a cost-effective replacement for humans in 77% of jobs, particularly those using computer vision.
Although AI deployment in industries has accelerated, only 23% of workers could be economically replaced by AI, mainly due to high implementation and operational costs.
Future projections suggest that with improvements in AI accuracy and reductions in data costs, up to 40% of visually-assisted tasks could be automated by 2030.
Loughborough University in the UK plans to use hologram technology to bring in guest lecturers, such as sports scientists from MIT.
The technology, provided by LA-based startup Proto, is expected to make educational sessions more engaging by presenting speakers in 3D and could be integrated into the curriculum next year.
Proto is working towards making the hologram system more accessible by developing smaller units projected to cost less than $1,000 each.
The leaked final text of the EU AI Act, due for a vote in February, signals a boost for open-source AI in Europe. It restricts third-party developers providing AI tools, services, or components under an open license from certain compliance obligations, except for foundational models. This move aims to foster trustworthy AI systems within the EU by encouraging standard documentation practices like model maps and datasheets. The Act recognizes the potential of open-source software and data, including models, to spur innovation and economic growth within the Union.
Last December Musk had publicly stated that xAI was not raising any funds, but upon further inspection by US securities regulators, xAI has publicly filed to raise $1B.
🪜OpenAI is investing billions to create their own chips in order to handle demand for their upcoming GPT-5 model
GPT-4 currently does 10% of the work that humans do, and it's anticipated that GPT-5 will take on 15% to 20%. GPT-5 is such a big project for OpenAI that their CEO, Sam Altman, is raising billions of dollars to establish a global semiconductor foundry network to meet the increasing chip demands for GPT-5 training. GPT-5 is going to be a big step up from GPT-4. (GPT-4 = ChatGPT's current most advanced model GPT-5 = soon to be the most advanced ChatGPT model that has yet to be released)
Google researchers just revealed Lumiere, a new AI model that can generate videos with extreme realism. Lumiere utilizes an advanced "space-time" neural network to generate 5-second video clips in a single pass, as opposed to other models which create distant keyframes.
💭 Quote of the Week
❝
It could be terrible, or it could be great. But one things for sure, we will not control it
Elon Musk
🐦 THAT’S A WRAP
That’s it for this week.
Keep Embracing the Future, One Byte at a Time! 🔄
See you next week
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