📈 How are companies using AI?

➜ Banks Are Launching GenAI Departments. Lloyds has hired an executive from AWS as its first AI director, and Wells Fargo hired a new CTO, and moved the current CIO to head up a newly-created GenAI team. “Generative AI can help us transform our businesses, improve our customer and client experiences, and enhance the way we work,” – commented Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf. 

Finextra

➜ 200 Data Experts Needed ASAP. Canadian bank CIBC plans to hire more than 200 data and artificial intelligence roles over the next 12 months. The country’s fifth-largest bank has been using AI for years to help manage risk, fraud and information security, but now it’s stepping into a new phase of AI-driven growth (just as its competitors). 

Financial Post

➜ eBay Launches Shop the Look and Magical Listing. Whether you buy or sell, eBay makes sure your experience is top-notch – now with the help of GenAI. The giant recently introduced Shop the Look, which lets customers see what different items would look like together, and Explore, which recommends options based on a customer’s size & style. As for the seller experience, eBay launched Magical Listing that automatically fills in listing information. The goal here is to make selling on eBay easier than throwing old items away, says eBay CEO Jamie Iannone. Now this sounds good! 

Retail Dive

➜ Andy Jassy Is Hungry For More. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wants even more AWS capacity for AI: “The reality right now is that while we’re investing a significant amount in the AI space and [on] infrastructure, we would like to have more capacity than we already have today,” Jassy said on Thursday’s Q2 2024 earnings call. “We have a lot of demand right now, and I think it’s gonna be a very, very large business for us.” A “multi-billion dollar revenue run rate” calls for unimaginable investment.

The Verge

➜ Faster and More Personalized Results With AI. ThredUp on Monday launched multiple new AI-driven shopping tools for improved product discovery. The recommerce company said the tools are designed to understand natural language and visual cues to help customers get more personalized results. Shoppers can now use specific text prompts like “swimsuit for a triathlon” or use images from their phone or Instagram to find the items they’re seeking. The company also introduced an AI chatbot to help shoppers get styling advice. Chapeau bas!

Retail Dive

➜ Dame Judi Dench To Lend Her Voice. Dreamt of chatting with Dame Judi? Meta plans to incorporate Hollywood’s stars' voices and secure the right to use them for as many situations as possible across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. With their consent. Negotiations under way but word is Awkwafina, Judi Dench and Keegan-Michael Key are considering participating in the project. I have to say it does sound fun. 

Tech Radar

💡 What are the nerds up to?

➜ Can AI Therapy Be More Effective Than Drugs? Daniel Cahn, co-founder of Slingshot AI talks about the potential of AI in therapy and modelling the mind with AI in one of the latest episodes of Machine Learning Street Talk. Can AI improve the quality of therapy? Definitely worth tuning into if you’re curious about the ethical side of treatment models enhanced by AI. 

YouTube

➜ Let There Be Light. Tsinghua University scientists have developed the first fully optical AI chip called Taichi-II, which significantly boosts efficiency and performance of modeling and training - and is based ENTIRELY on light. Unlike the previous Taichi chip which required the assistance of electronic computers, the newest version is a big step towards addressing the growing demand for computational power with low energy consumption.

SCMP

➜ New Service from Supabase. Paul Copplestone, CEO at Supabase, announced they’re launching a new service: Postgres.new. It’s as if ChatGPT and Postgres have a love-child: launch as many databases as you want, build them with AI, create charts, create embeddings. 100% open source. Just so so cool.

Postgres.new

➜ Nvidia Scraping ‘A Human Lifetime’ of Videos Per Day to Train AI. Leaked documents show that Nvidia scraped videos from Youtube, Netflix and several other sources to compile training data for its AI products. According to 404 Media, many employees have raised concerns about the legality and ethics of the move, but project managers have consistently assured them. When challenged, the company defended the practice as being “in full compliance with the letter and the spirit of the copyright law.” Massive legal gray area we’re yet to address. For the time being there is no specific law that deals with AI training. 

404 Media

➜ The World’s Most Capable Software Engineer. Meet Cosine Genie – world’s best AI software engineer achieving 30.08% on SWE-Bench. SWE Bench is a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the coding abilities of LLMs across various software engineering tasks and Genie’s score leaves competition faaaaaaar behind. “We believe this is just the starting point and we can codify human reasoning for any job or industry,” – claims Alistair Pullen, Co-Founder at Cosine.

Cosine

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