- The Rundown AI
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- Wall Street's AI growing pains
Wall Street's AI growing pains
PLUS: Shopify launches an AI image generator
Rowan Cheung
February 01, 2024
Welcome, AI enthusiasts.
Wall Street’s AI gold rush hit a snag this week after earnings reports from industry giants failed to live up to investor hype.
Is this a case of short-term greed overshadowing AI’s inevitable disruption? Or will swelling costs to compete lead to more growing pains? Let’s examine…
In today’s AI rundown:
AI stocks plunge after earnings disappoint
Shopify debuts AI-powered image editor
How to convert video to any language with lip syncing
Researchers unveil Weaver for creative writing
6 new AI tools & 4 new AI jobs
More AI & tech news
Read time: 4 minutes
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
WALL STREET
Image source: Midjourney
The Rundown: Shares of major AI players including Microsoft, Google, AMD and Nvidia fell sharply this week after the latest earnings reports failed to impress investors anticipating an artificial intelligence-driven boom.
The details:
Alphabet shares dropped 6% as ad revenue missed expectations while spending on data centers also jumped to stay competitive in AI.
Microsoft stock fell despite strong cloud and Windows growth aided by AI, with the company also ramping up spending to meet AI demand.
AMD plunged 6%, though its new AI chips are selling faster than expected, with forecasts still falling short of some sky-high predictions.
Nvidia also gave up recent gains, though it has tripled in value as the market’s demand for its AI chips continues to surge.
Why it matters: With significant upfront costs to compete amongst the major players in AI, spending has been outpacing monetization in the short term — something Wall Street never likes.
TOGETHER WITH COMMANDBAR
The Rundown: Chatbots are nice, but they’re still too annoying. Long, non-interactive answers are a pain for users to read. Add a user assistant to your site or app instead.
Trigger personalized walkthroughs to teach your users
Take actions on their behalf
Personalized answers based on their history and behavior
CommandBar powers user assistance for 10s of millions of users at leaders like Freshworks, Hubspot, and Hashicorp.
SHOPIFY
Image source: Shopify
The Rundown: E-commerce platform Shopify just launched a free AI image editor to help sellers create professional product photos without studios or pro photographers, alongside additional AI upgrades like semantic search in the company.
The details:
Media Editor lets merchants change backgrounds, styles, colors, etc. to stage item photos with prompts — with no design experience needed.
Semantic search provides AI-powered results with a better understanding of conversational terms to provide more relevant options.
The new tools join a host of AI integrations already on the platform, including automated product descriptions, chatbot integration, and more.
Why it matters: While businesses using AI was initially controversial, its integration will quickly become standard or unnoticeable for the average consumer — especially given the recent advances in image generation and multimodal AI.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: Sync Labs combines multiple AI tools like video-to-text, text-to-speech translation, and lip-syncing to create an innovative video translation tool.
Step-by-step:
Head to Sync Labs and set up your account (for free).
Add a video file or add a YouTube URL. For best results, use a video with a single speaker — where the speaker is in the first frame and the video quality doesn’t exceed 720p.
Choose a target language and select Submit.
After a few minutes, you will have a video where the main character speaks in your chosen language with decent lip sync.
AI RESEARCH
Image source: Midjourney
The Rundown: AIWaves just introduced Weaver, a family of LLMs focused on excelling in creative writing tasks like fiction, blogging, marketing, and more.
The details:
Weaver is pre-trained on books/blogs/articles to absorb more creative styles, avoiding low-quality internet text often used in general LLM training.
Evaluations show Weaver comfortably beats generalist LLMs on a new benchmark assessing creative writing skills.
The 34B parameter ‘Weaver Ultra’ surpasses GPT-4 on both LLM and human evaluations, graded on style, relevance, creativity, and fluency.
Why it matters: While general LLMs have been seeing wild advancements as of late, their creative writing ability has lagged behind other growth areas. As AI becomes more and more integral to content creation, systems like Weaver that are fine-tuned for imaginative outputs will be indispensable.
NEW TOOLS & JOBS
📝 Conveyor- Generate 90%+ accurate AI answers to security questionnaires in seconds (link)*
🛠️ ChatGPT Prompting- Quickly build effective prompts by answering key questions (link)
💼 Job GPT- Find all jobs in one platform, perfectly matched to your skills (link)
🎨 Anima- Converting design to code, automating design systems, and enhancing prototyping (link)
🤖 Blozum- Improve website user experience and increase conversions with AI-powered chat assistants (link)
📣 Ad Copy Generator- Create high-converting ad copies like a digital marketing expert (link)
*Sponsored listing
QUICK HITS
Midjourney announced that V6 of Niji-Journey, a version of its text-to-image model tuned specifically for Anime outputs, is now live.
OpenAI announced an early warning system and released research on if AI models can aid in creating bioweapons, finding that they are currently ‘at most’ mildly useful for the task.
Mistral CEO, Arthur Mensch, confirmed that a mysterious model called ‘Miqu’ that neared GPT-4 performance posted on HuggingFace was a leaked version of Mistral’s — with open source models rapidly catching up to industry leaders.
School bus platform Zum raised $140M at a $1.3B valuation for its AI-powered route optimization, EV fleet management, and parent communication tools used by thousands of US school districts.
Instacart has deleted AI-generated images used on the platform following a Business Insider article highlighting bizarre photos used on the company’s recipes section, which it confirmed were also generated by AI.
Volkswagen opened an "AI lab" to create prototypes and form tech partnerships on products leveraging AI, including predictive maintenance, voice recognition, and in-vehicle personalization.
The FCC proposed ruling AI-generated cloned voices in robocalls illegal, following the tech’s use in New Hampshire to create fake calls from Joe Biden urging people not to vote.
THAT’S A WRAP
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