AI: Weekly Summary
…week ending January 12, 2024
Welcome to the Saturday weekly AI summary here on ‘AI: Reset to Zero’.
Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2024 wraps up an AI-laden week: CES 2024 wrapped up this week with almost every company having an AI featured announcement. Or so it seemed. Useful rounds ups of the plethora of announcements across Electronics, PCs/Laptops/TVs/Automobiles, and gadgets of every type can be read hare, here and here amongst many others, Of particular note of course was the focus by both chip and PC vendors to highlight the AI capabilities of their next generations of products this year. And Intel, AMD and other chip vendors did their best to make their case that they were also in the AI chip race vs Nvidia, which at the moment is running away with the AI infrastructure market. Now it’s on the software and services companies to ramp up their offerings to leverage the local hardware with innovative AI apps and services.
CES also saw a range of new AI Devices and Services: Ahead of Apple’s much-anticipated launch of its Vision Pro glasses which go up for pre-order on January 19, CES also saw new AI devices and services on offer. Sony previewed 'Spatial Content’ Headset against Apple’s upcoming focus on ‘Spatial Computing’. A new company launched its Rabbit R1 $200 AI device product below (no subscription), with an ambition similar to Humane AI’s pin product rolled out a few weeks ago. Samsung had fun with its Ballie AI robot. We’re going to see a cambrian explosion of AI gadgets and services this year, including AI services like ChatGPT stuffed into our VWs and BMWs. My deeper take on this trend here.
OpenAI rolls out ChatGPT Store and Team: OpenAI continues its product/services rollout pipeline for 2024, with ChatGPT Store and ChatGPT Team. The former was of course a highlight announcement at its November 6 first Developer Day. Media reception for both rollouts was fairly anticipatory, with some examples here and here. Both are targeted for early adopters, and of course for small and large businesses. And both will likely leverage and at times overlap with consumer and enterprise offerings by its partner Microsoft.
White House AI Executive Order hits execution cycle: Axios points out that with the new year, the President’s AI Executive Order from last October, faces scores of deadlines for various agencies and departments charged with the gnarly next steps of funding and execution. Lot of the load falls on the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST), particularly with the AI Risk Management Framework Nist laid out early last year. Congressional funding for many of the initiatives also remains an open question and challenge in an Election year.
OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere assist behind the Scenes with China on AI Safety: Some of the leading US AI companies held talks in Switzerland with Chinese state-backed entities to move the global ball forward on AI Safety. The discussions were tacitly blessed by US and China government parties and groups. The US and China continue to ‘thread the needle’ on their contentious geopolitical and trade tech issues, which remains a key headwind issue for AI this year and next at least. Encouraging to see private company and entities engaged as well.
Other AI Readings for weekend:
Tropicana gets my CES 2024 award for going against adding AI to their pitch. They creatively took ‘AI’ out of ‘Tropicana’.
AI is also ramping up its impact on basic and applied Science projects across industries this year, as I review here.
Thanks for joining this Saturday with your beverage of choice.
Up next, the Sunday ‘The Bigger Picture’ tomorrow. Stay tuned.
(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)