Hard at work or hardly working? 👩‍💻 From papyrologists being able to virtually ‘unwrap’ and read 2000-year-old papyrus scrolls, spontaneous Star Trek-like language, to ‘making scientists hyper-productive’, artificial intelligence (AI) is doing the tasks we can’t - or don’t want to do - at a rapidly accelerating pace. But while 73% of business leaders say hiring AI-skilled talent is a priority, and more than 90% of surveyed employers predict they’ll ‘use AI-related solutions in their organizations by 2028’, according to a survey by Access Partnership and Amazon Web Services (AWS), are business leaders ‘failing their workers’ for not getting onboard generative AI?

AI notched up 30,000 mentions in company earnings calls in the final quarter of 2024 - up nearly 6,000% from the first quarter of 2022, according to Accenture’s Technology Vision 2024 Report: Human by design. Yet Salesforce’s (CRM) recently released Slack Workforce Lab study found workplace adoption of AI increased by just 24% in the last quarter of 2023 - with Australia leading the charge with 40% of workers who have used AI automation for work, and all respondents reporting that around 80% of those using AI say that this technology is already improving their productivity.

Companies have the chance today to reimagine how information works throughout their organization, and in doing so, invent the next generation of data-driven business.’ Accenture, Technology Vision 2024 report

Some countries are pouring money into AI. 🌏 Singapore is growing their ‘AI talent pool to 15,000 over the next five years’ through paid training and scholarships, and China has set aside money to subsidise AI start-ups. University degrees are being developed globally, including the University of Pennsylvania’s first AI engineering major, and the Universidad de Alcalá’s master of AI. And Kiwi academic-founded Flower Labs has raised US$20 million to continue developing their AI training ‘federated learning’ model, a system that enables AI training that addresses security concerns by not needing all the training data transferred to a central server.

OpenAI opened the AI chat

OpenAI is again hitting the news. 📰 While AI research began in earnest in 1950 when Alan Turing posed the question ‘Can computers think?’ AI swept headlines when ChatGPT launched in November 2022 - attracting 100 million users in just two months. Among OpenAI’s 2015 founders, who came together to understand and deploy deep learning research, are Sam Altman - who was controversially rapidly fired and rehired as CEO in late 2023 by the board - former Stripe CTO and Harvard and MIT drop-out, Greg Brockman, PayPal (PYPL) and Palantir (PLTR) founder, Peter Thiel, and Tesla (TSLA), SpaceX and xAI founder, Elon Musk. 

I’ll see you in court. 👨‍⚖️ Last week, the latter - being Musk - sued the company for breaching their own agreed structure that ‘The for-profit would be legally bound to pursue the Nonprofit’s mission’. Musk used examples like OpenAI’s US$13 billion Microsoft (MSFT) partnership (and 49% ownership), and the wall of silence around their latest generative AI, saying: 

‘It does seem weird that something can be a Nonprofit, open source and somehow transform itself into a for-profit, closed source’. - Elon Musk, Teslaconomics on X

Meanwhile, OpenAI, which is segmented into their OpenAI Nonprofit research operation and their for-profit OpenAI Global, has delivered a suite of products, including: 

• Free ChatGPT, and subscription-based GPT-4, capable of searching the web
• DALL-E 2 and DALL-E 3 text-to-image AI 
• Sora text-to-video AI - with extraordinary visual results - prompting Google (GOOGL, GOOG) and Meta (META) to also announce their own text-to-video creators, and China’s Peking University developing its own text-to-video AI using an open source community

Virtual assistant competition heats up 🔥 

Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant, which replaced Bing Chat in late 2023, integrates Bing real-time search with GPT-4 and DALL-E 3, and was developed by OpenAI, appears to be in direct competition with OpenAI, according to observers, and has been called out for going off the rails with ‘Godlike’ demands. Other AI applications include Character.ai and Claude.ai, both in beta, and SambaNova, which is ‘is gunning for OpenAI’, according to TechCrunch.

Meanwhile, red flags lit up chat about Google Gemini. 🚩 When Google replaced their AI assistant Bard with Gemini, they were forced to push pause following AI generated images of Black Vikings, multiple ethnic and female popes and a Black George Washington, leading some far-right commentators to us it as proof that Big Tech has an ‘anti-white bias’.

Others advances in AI include:

• Meta (META) Llama 3 is planned for release in July, which may even be ‘Outsmarting GPT-4, Gemini and Humans’ according to some, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg backing AI with research group FAIR and an intense talent search from a limited pool
• Apple (AAPL) is spending ‘a tremendous amount of time and effort’ into AI according to Apple CEO Time Cook, with commentators expecting big things in Apple’s iOS 18 update scheduled for later this year
• Adobe (ADBE) last week unveiled their Project Music GenAI Control that creates music from text prompts

Samsung showed at the Mobile World Congress, Samsung’s Galaxy S24 Ultra stood out for having ‘the richest in AI features’, according to Adam Clark at Barron’s

Are AI robots becoming more ‘human’?

Tesla unveils life-like Robotic taking a stroll.🦿 Last week Tesla (TSLA) chief Elon Musk shared their robot ‘Optimus strolling around the lab’ on X - which Tesla hopes to start shipping by 2025. But Tesla has humanoid competition, with money pouring into a growing robotics industry: 

• Canada’s Sanctuary AI’s Phoenix robot is making news for its human hand dexterity
• Robotic startup Figure AI has raised US$675 million from investors including Amazon (AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos, Nvidia (NVDA), Microsoft and OpenAI
• Unitree Robotics is ‘breaking humanoid robotic speed world records’, according to their makers

The Magnificent Seven (mostly) keep climbing

The so-called ‘Magnificent Seven’ tech companies have been propping up the US share markets which, according to Finimize, may continue. The seven companies include trillion dollar mega-cap companiesAlphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. Despite being temporarily ‘pummelled’ by last year’s October tech stock sell-off, Big Tech continues to invest billions into AI, and investors have responded in both directions:

• Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) stock is has dropped 3.49% YTD but has climbed 40.18% in one year
• Amazon (AMZN) stock has grown 18.44% YTD, and has lifted 89.42% since March 2023
• Apple (AAPL) stock is down 5.68% YTD, and has decreased over one year by 13.83%
• Meta (META) stock has climbed of 43.86% YTD, and surged ahead 169.44% over one year
• Microsoft (MSFT) has surpassed a US$3 trillion mega-cap, and their stock has climbed 11.88% YTD, and 61.53% over one year
• Nvidia (NVDA) captured attention with the company’s 230% ascent in 2023, and their stock has grown 76.96% YTD and soared 261.88% since the same time last year  
• Tesla (TSLA) has fallen 24.27% YTD, and is down 2.93% over one year

Warnings or smooth sailing ahead? 🏴‍☠️ There are still warnings around the potential negative fall-out of AI in all its forms, such as running out of power and transformers, according to Musk, and generative AI worms that can steal your data. But an in-depth Stanford paper released last week commended AI for its benefits of ‘distributing decision-making power, reducing market concentration, increasing innovation, accelerating science’, as wrote Axios. The paper’s writers concluding that:

‘Overall, we are optimistic that open foundation models can contribute to a vibrant AI ecosystem, but realizing this vision will require significant action from many stakeholders’ - On the Societal Impact of Open Foundation Models, Stanford paper

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