📈 How are companies using AI?

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➜ Get Your News at Lightning Speed. Interactive Brokers just made life easier for traders with AI-generated news summaries. No more sifting through endless headlines – just quick, sharp updates to catch market moves in seconds. If time is money, this AI is saving both.
Finextra

➜ AI Teaches Personal Finance 101. YC-backed Finny is here to help people stop guessing and start managing their money with confidence. Their AI personalizes lessons on budgeting, saving, and investing – because financial literacy shouldn’t feel like rocket science. Finally, a finance coach that doesn’t judge your latte habits.
Yahoo Finance

➜ Gifting Gets Personal. Target’s AI Gift Finder is the shopping buddy we didn’t know we needed. Answer a few quick questions, and it serves up perfect gift ideas – no stress, no last-minute panic. It’s like a personal shopper, minus the fancy fees.
Retail Dive

➜ Old Algorithms, New Tricks. Amazon Prime Video’s new AI topics organize content like never before, saving you from the endless scroll of “what should I watch?” AI now groups shows and movies into hyper-relevant themes, so you discover gems effortlessly. It’s like your algorithm finally gets you.
The Verge

➜ Smart Insights for Smart Businesses. Yelp’s AI-powered insights are like a cheat sheet for small business owners. It turns reviews into real, actionable data, helping you fix what’s broken and double down on what works. “By using AI to harness Yelp’s vast amount of trusted user-generated content, in 2024 we’ve rolled out more than 80 new features that enhance the consumer and business owner experience,” Craig Saldanha, Chief Product Officer at Yelp, said in a release.

PYMNTS

➜ Machine Made Music. LimeWire’s AI music generator is turning creativity up to eleven. Whether you’re a pro musician or just playing around, it helps you create beats, lyrics, and melodies that sound straight out of the future. Who says the machines can’t jam?
Rolling Stone

💡 What are the nerds up to?

➜ Folder Summarization from Gemini. Gemini for Google Drive can now summarize your entire folders. The new feature started its gradual rollout earlier this week and should be available to Google One AI Premium accounts, along with Gemini Business, Enterprise, Education, and Education Premium accounts, in two weeks or less.

NewsBytes

➜ Bye Bye Deepfakes, Hello Watermarks. Meta takes on AI-generated videos with a new tool: Video Seal applies discreet watermarks to AI-created content. What’s more, it’s available open source. “While other watermarking tools exist, they don’t offer sufficient robustness to video compression, which is very prevalent when sharing content through social platforms; weren’t efficient enough to run at scale; weren’t open or reproducible,” explains Pierre Fernandez, AI research scientist at Metal.

Tribune

➜ ChatGPT Now Understands Real-Time Video. OpenAI has finally released the real-time video capabilities for ChatGPT that it demoed nearly seven months ago. Using the ChatGPT app, users can point their phones at objects and have ChatGPT respond in near real time. It’s going to take a longer while though before the feature is available to users worldwide. Patience.

Yahoo Finance

➜ AI-Powered Video Analysis & Search. Twelve Labs trains models to map text to what’s happening inside a video, including actions, objects, and background sounds. Using Twelve Labs’ models, users can search through videos for specific moments, summarize clips, or ask specific questions. Jae Lee, the co-founder of Twelve Labs, promises his models challenge the ones from OpenAI and Google, as they’re optimized for the task. Tried yet?

TechCrunch

➜ A Million Books for Model Training From Harvard. Harvard University debuts a massive dataset of 1 million public-domain books for AI model training, backed by Microsoft and OpenAI.

The university wants to democratize access to quality training data, which has been predominantly controlled by major tech corporations. Big big BIG! 

OpenTools

➜ Boosting R&D With AI. Scientific research sees more and more GenAI adoption. At Netguru, we have our very own example of collaboration with Merck and the recently developed AI R&D Assistant. But there’s much more going on in the market – check Albert Invent, an AI platform trained on data from past chemical experiments, that promises developing new products faster and better. The startup has now secured a $22.5 million Series A funding round. 

TechCrunch

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With this edition, I’m wrapping up 2024 and going on a two-week holiday break. I’ll be back with AI news early January and… in a refreshed format! Look out for the newsletter on Jan 7, 2025.

Happy Holidays!  

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