GenAI has been one of the hottest topics this year as we’ve watched an explosion in understanding and production of new tools. As GenAI technologies advance, we will see applications impact a myriad of industries, from enterprise technology to healthcare, to aerospace. The GenAI arms race has begun – below is a round up of recent media coverage showcasing advancements and technology leaders.
Let’s Start Thinking Of Breathtaking Ways To Leverage Generative AI Far Beyond What We Are Doing Right Now – Forbes
I will share with you some additional possibilities that are generally underway but still in the early stages of exploration:
- Game playing. You can use the same precepts to get AI to play games. Moves are actions that can be described and converted into tokens. Patterns can be identified. By collecting lots of games being played, data is plentiful.
- Stock market predictions. Consider stock prices as potential tokens. If you want to include other factors, such as the status of the economy, those can be similarly tokenized. Patterns can be presumably found and lots of data is available.
- Molecular structure predictions. Take the shapes or structures of molecules and convert them into tokens. There are patterns to be found. Lots of data is available.
- Route optimizations. Routing of traffic is essential and currently tends to be solved via symbolic or traditional mathematical means. The traffic parameters could be tokenized, patterns figured out, and lots of such data would be available for this.
Those are paths that are seriously being pursued. You are encouraged to jump in and help out. They are still cooking those meals, and the results are not yet finalized. There is ample room to make progress.
Companies Had Fun Experimenting With AI. Now They Have to Show the Returns. – Wall Street Journal
“This is a year where you have to be expecting business results,” Brynjolfsson said, adding that the technology is mature enough to deliver them. “This is a time when you should be getting benefits, and hope that your competitors are just playing around and experimenting.”
The problem is, roughly 70% of business customers’ generative AI projects are still stuck in pilot or testing phase, Philip Rathle, CTO of graph database software company Neo4j, said at the event. Generative AI models are good at summarizing text, for instance, but less capable of more sophisticated tasks, he added.
Naveen Rao, vice president of generative AI at cloud data firm Databricks, said that some 90% of generative AI experiments aren’t making it beyond the lab. “Accuracy and reliability is a big problem,” he said.
NYT sends AI startup Perplexity ‘cease and desist’ notice over content use – Reuters
Perplexity had previously assured publishers it would stop using “crawling” technology, according to the letter. Despite this, NYT said its content still appears in Perplexity.
“We are not scraping data for building foundation models, but rather indexing web pages and surfacing factual content as citations to inform responses when a user asks a question,” Perplexity told Reuters.
The startup also said it plans to respond by an Oct. 30 deadline set by NYT to provide the requested information.
NYT is also tussling with OpenAI, which it had sued late last year, accusing the firm of using millions of its newspaper articles without permission to train its AI chatbot.
Earlier this year, Reuters reported multiple AI companies were bypassing a web standard used by publishers to block the scraping of their data used in generative AI systems.
Investments in generative AI startups topped $3.9B in Q3 2024 – TechCrunch
Some of the biggest winners in Q3 were coding assistant Magic ($320 million in August), enterprise search provider Glean ($260 million in September), and business analytics firm Hebbia ($130 million in July). China’s Moonshot AI raised $300 million in August, and Sakana AI, a Japanese startup focused on scientific discovery, closed a $214 million tranche last month.
Generative AI, a broad cross-section of technologies that includes text and image generators, coding assistants, cybersecurity automation tools, and more, has its detractors. Experts question the tech’s reliability, and — in the case of generative AI models trained on copyrighted data without permission — its legality.
But VCs are effectively placing bets that generative AI will gain a foothold in large and profitable industries and that its long-tail growth won’t be impacted by the challenges it faces today.
Perhaps they’re right. A Forrester report predicts 60% of generative AI skeptics will embrace the tech — knowingly or not — for tasks from summarization to creative problem solving. That’s quite a bit rosier than Gartner’s prediction earlier in the year that 30% of generative AI projects will be abandoned after proof-of-concept by 2026.
What’s the Biggest Misconception About How AI Will Transform Professional Services? – WIRED
“Generative AI is getting all the attention at the moment, and that’s understandable. Anyone with an internet connection can try ChatGPT and see how incredible it is. It’s probably the first time they’ve consciously ‘used AI’ for anything, even if really a lot of things they’ve done for years have had AI involved on the back end. Nevertheless, the upshot is it has taken AI into mainstream conversation.
“But while generative AI is great for tasks that involve creating content—and I use that phrase very broadly—it’s not the be-all-and-end-all for professional services. Conventional machine learning is going to remain absolutely vital and will continue to have a major impact. It is ideally suited to recognizing patterns and making predictions and decisions based on known factors in a way that generative AI is not. And for a lot of businesses, that is essential to automating tasks and making systems more effective.
“We use machine learning in both the offensive and defensive side of what we offer. It is fantastic for finding anomalies in network traffic, fraud detection, automated response—absolutely brilliant.”
Navigating The Shift From Generative AI To Agentic AI– Forbes
Traditional intent-based systems are a current hurdle because they sometimes misinterpret user queries if the exact intent isn’t defined. Agentic AI, however, can help act on complex requests, delivering a more intuitive conversational experience that can accelerate decision-making and enhance user satisfaction.
One challenge to avoid is the proliferation of standalone SaaS app-based AI copilots. Instead, there should be a unified interface that is accessible anywhere, whether in your email, Slack or mobile app. This means having an enterprise-wide, universal and agentic AI copilot.
Amazon CEO Says GenAI Is Growing Three Times Faster Than Cloud Computing Did– Investopedia
Amazon’s (AMZN) AI business is growing three times as fast as its cloud business did at a comparable stage of evolution, CEO Andy Jassy said on a conference call with analysts Thursday. “And we thought AWS grew pretty quickly,” Jassy added, referring to the Amazon Web Services cloud-computing division he led before becoming CEO in 2021.
Amazon on Thursday topped Wall Street’s estimates with its third-quarter earnings. Cloud revenue grew 19% to more than $27 billion. Sales at the unit have accelerated this year amid surging demand for AI. Amazon’s AI business, which Jassy said is already growing by triple-digit percentages, could grow even faster once the company has the infrastructure to support booming demand, the CEO said.
Main GenAI benefit so far is time saved, finance execs say– CFO Dive
“The way things are priced right now, even a single digit percentage increase in productivity is really high from an ROI perspective, because our people are our number one asset and… people’s time is super important as well,” Collins said, adding that more precise ROI might be more easily calculated in the future.
Similarly, Zhou, Brex’s CAO, noted that AI’s ROI is somewhat elusive. But, while a quantifiable ROI calculation may be challenging, it is easy to see that his company’s investments in AI have made a difference, comparing AI’s impact to the effects seen previously in the company’s move to cloud computing.
Do you have a GenAI project or technology that needs media coverage?
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***GenAI PR news roundup guest post from FischTank PR interns Baylee Matthews and Kaylee Seitz***
