📈 How are companies using AI?

➜ Lloyds Bank Automates Trade Finance Checks. The bank is about to implement AI technology from Cleareye to eliminate the manual drudgery of paper processing and compliance checking for trade finance documentation. By joining forces with Cleareye’s, the bank plans to streamline critical parts of trade finance processes that are important to their clients. What’s more, they just appointed Rohit Dahwan, ex AWS, as director of artificial intelligence and analytics. Up up up!
Finextra

➜ New Autonomous Stores From South Korea. Fainders.AI has introduced a compact cost-effective cashierless MicroStore, making autonomous retail accessible to a broader range of businesses. As a part of the initial launch, the company has installed a 15m² prefabricated unit in the local gym in Seoul, showcasing the potential of a store that can be built in one week. Unlike VenHub’s AI-powered autonomous retail units I mentioned two weeks ago – also ready to operate in 7 days – Korean MicroStores let the shopper in. 

Retail Insight Network 

➜ Combating Retail Shrinkage With AI. In the latest interview with Alan O’Herlihy, Founder & CEO of Everseen, you can learn about AI-powered applications that work across the entire supply chain to reduce shrink, increase inventory accuracy, and solve complex retail problems Thanks to Everseen’s computer vision AI technology retailers are able to detect issues at self-checkouts and staffed lanes or reduce the loss and improve processes in the stockroom.

Unite.AI

➜ How Not To Use AI. Dream Unlimited, a Canadian mega landlord, allegedly uses AI ‘pricing scheme’ as it massively hikes rents. There’s evidence that the real estate developer is getting advice on rent increases from an AI software, YieldStar, that is currently the subject of a major U.S. government lawsuit. The company, claiming they’re all about “bold ideas for better communities”, has just found itself in a slight PR crisis.     

The Breach

➜ Bill Gates Optimistic About AI. “For the next decade, we’ll be experiencing increased productivity in a lot of areas, which is overwhelmingly very good news,” – says Gates in an interview for The Verge. He’s not at all worried about AI’s role in boosting misinformation. People “don’t need AI to type out crazy things. And so I’m not sure that, other than creating deepfakes, AI really changes the balance there.” Reassuring? You have to admit he does have a point. 

The Verge   

➜ One Less LLM Maker In Europe. Aleph Alpha, German LLM business, pivots to GenAI support. Its CEO Jonas Andrulis notes that “just having a European LLM is not sufficient as a business model.” This is a theme I keep on bringing up – it’s increasingly hard to stand your ground with category giants expanding by the minute. Will we see some more European companies stand up to the challenge?    

TechCrunch 

➜ Apple’s WatchOS Is Getting AI-Powered Upgrades. ‘Translate’ will leverage AI for speech recognition and translation in a range of languages. AI is also improving Smart Stack, the watchOS feature that uses contextual information to show relevant widgets. What’s more, watchOS 11 has a new “photos” watch face that’ll use ML to curate photos from your library. Not necessarily a business implementation but hey, who can resist the latest from Cupertino, California? 

TechCrunch

💡 What are the nerds up to?

➜ Chat With Your Docs. Here comes AnythingLLM – a full-stack app that enables you to turn any document, resource, or piece of content into context that any LLM can use as references during chatting. Pick a model that suits you and build a private ChatGPT without having to compromise on anything. 100% cloud deployment ready.
GitHub

➜ Deep Dive Into Prompt Engineering. Get together with Anthropic's prompt engineering experts: Amanda Askell (Alignment Finetuning), Alex Albert (Developer Relations), David Hershey (Applied AI), and Zack Witten (Prompt Engineering) to listen to practical tips and look back at how the field has evolved. How will we prompt AI in the future? Good conversation, worth a listen. 

YouTube

➜ LLMs Not So Good At Abstract Reasoning. Know The New York Times’ hit called ‘Connections’? It’s a popular category-matching game people can’t get enough of. New York University researchers recently tested the ability of GPT-4 to create engaging puzzles on par with TNYT. They found that LLMs lack the metacognition necessary to assume the player’s perspective and anticipate their reasoning. “Models like GPT don’t know how humans think, so they’re bad at estimating how tricky a puzzle is for the human brain,” says lead author Timothy Merino, a Ph.D. student in NYU’s Game Innovation Lab.

IEEE Spectrum

➜ Musk Says Colossus Rules Them All. Elon’s xAI claims to have built the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer. Powered by a staggering 100,000 Nvidia AI chips, the machine allegedly creates "untenable levels of smog". As Memphis locals complain, The Rolling Stone wonders: is Musk exaggerating again? According to the magazine: “The billionaire simply can't stop making sh** up.”

Futurism

Thanks for reading!

I share these stories because I believe it's important for all of us to keep up with AI. To support my mission, share this newsletter on LinkedIn.