EP 245: AI News That Matters - April 8th, 2024

This is the Everyday AI show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business and everyday life.

Is Google gonna start charging for AI search? What's going on with job loss due to AI? And is AI music actually good enough that musicians are worried about it? We're going to be talking about those things today and more on Everyday AI with our AI news that matters. What's going on, y'? All? My name is Jordan Wilson. I'm the host of Everyday AI and if you're new here, well, this is for you. Everyday AI is a daily live stream podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday people like you and me not just learn generative AI, but how we can all leverage it to grow our companies and grow our careers. And, and one of the most difficult things in my experience is to keep up with the AI news. There are so many things happening. You could spend literally hours a day and still get left behind. Or you could join us every, just about every Monday when we do this with our AI news that matters, where we recap not just what's going on, but what is going to be going on and how it's going to impact you. All right, so if that sounds good and if you're new, make sure to go to your everydayai.com and sign up for the free daily newsletter. Why, why haven't you signed up for the free daily newsletter yet? It's written by me, a human, and it's a great way to, to keep, keep up to date. All right. And also make sure on our website you can go back and read just about every single back issue live stream podcast we've ever done. All right, so for our live stream audience joining us, like big, big boogie face. All right, I like that. Colorado Lowe's joining us from YouTube and Brian and Tarot Rolando joining us from LinkedIn. Thank you. Let's, let's get this, let's get this thing started and go over all the news that matters for the week of April 8th. All right, big one here, which I've got some takes that I'll save for the end, but Google is considering charging for AI based search, a potential shift in its monetization strategy. All right, so Google is contemplating charging for its AI based search, a departure from its normal ad revenue model as reported by the Financial Times. So the AI native search is called Search Generative Experience SGE and it allows users to ask questions in plain language and receive direct answers from large language model, which is Gemini Google's so currently Google monetizes only about 30% of searches through ads related to products and services, which may not align well with conversational AI search results. So to explore alternative monetization avenues, Google is experimenting with ad formats like paid source citations and sponsored product images within the new AI search results. Industry analysts suggest that charging consumers for AI search could pose challenges, especially if perceived as an evolution of traditional search rather than a novel service. So failure to find innovative, innovative ad formats to monetize AI search might push Google towards collecting referral fees from brands for purchases resulting from AI generated search outcomes. So, long story short, y', all, I did not expect to see this news coming from Google, if I'm being honest. So if you haven't seen SGE search Generative Experience, it's essentially when you log on to Google and you search something and instead of getting the traditional, you know, 10 results on a page, you actually get a suggested kind of answer. So it's, it's similar if you've used Perplexity. It is kind of not saying, you know, it's Google's answer to perplexity, but it would be, it's kind of alternative to perplexity. Here's, here's a couple hot takes that I have. Google's SGE is actually one of its better AI products. If you're asking me, I've tried to use them all. One thing about Google's Gemini as an example, I've talked about this on the show before. Even our team has the enterprise account and even as of last week, I haven't checked this morning yet. But we still can't even connect our data. We still can't even as an example, connect to Google's own YouTube real time Google search. So I'd say Gemini has been a pretty poor, poor rollout. However, I am a fan of Google's search Generative experience. Sge. I, I do think that's the future of search, you know, and things like perplexity, you know, so being able to, you know, put in a query and instead of having to, you know, search or, or read or go on a rabbit hole down, you know, 10, 15 different web pages, instead you get a quick search summary of those different web pages and almost like a summary of the summary. So if you're new to generative AI using something like Google's sge, Perplexity, even, you know, Copilot from Microsoft is, is getting a little better at this as well. They, they have their new deep search option. It's, it's going to be one of the best ways to save time if I'm being honest. And it's just gonna be easier on your eyes, right? I, I, I talk about this on the show all the time but one of the things that I think right now is causing so much of us to, to lose time in this new age of AI is it's hard to read the Internet now, right? Big Internet publishers because of, you know, sge, because of perplexity, because of chat gbt, they're losing users and they're losing ad revenue on their site. So they're just putting more and more ads. So it does make it harder to go learn something. You know, if you're working on something for work you might again, you might have to read 5, 10, 15 different pages and those 5 to 10, 15 different pages are getting more difficult to read because there's more and more ads. So you know, interesting approach here from Google considering to charge for AI based search. I know it's not Tuesday so I'm not going to come with full hot takes, but I don't think that this, this approach will work. Well, I do think Google is seeing how the market might respond to this news, how their stock might, you know, go up or down and there hasn't been much movement since this was first reported I believe on Thursday. So I just don't see this working out if I'm being honest because there's other free alternatives that are offering this similar, similar or better technology. I would say if, if Google were to charge for essentially AI search for their sge even though it is a good product. What I see happening is investors pouring even more money into Perplexity, into Claude and those services, you know, taking even more of the market share from traditional Google search. All right, let's keep this AI news train rolling. So former Apple designer Johnny I've and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, their new AI device startup is apparently in funding talks. So formal former Apple designer Jony I've and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are in discussions to launch an AI powered personal device startup according to a new report from the Information. So Ivy and Altman are working on a reportedly groundbreaking new AI powered personal device. The device is expected to be unlike a typical smartphone and will use AI to perform an all encompassing user experience without the need for traditional apps or interfaces. So we've been talking about this on the show here at Everyday AI for months, you know, but the specifics of this device are not fully disclosed. But it is suggested that it could integrate AI into various aspects of daily life and potentially focusing on personal and home devices as well. So the new news here is that the startup is seeking funding and has engaged in talks with prominent D.C. firms, Emerson Collective and Thrive Capital. Thrive Capital as well, you may or may not know, is a major, invested, a major investor in OpenAI and could potentially collaborate on leveraging OpenAI's conversational AI for the devices features. Obviously we, you know, do assume that if a hardware device is ultimately what Ivy and Altman are working on, we do assume so much that it will be integrated with OpenAI's products, both, you know, chat GPT or the GPT model as well as their, their new voice engine that they've announced. You know, depending on what the device is, maybe it's integrated with Sora, Dolly, etc, but you do have to believe that whatever they're working on, it's going to be big. You know, this has been under wraps now for several months. This is kind of the first initial reporting with details aside from this, you know, reported partnership. But they are reportedly now, according to the information in talks with different VC firms. All right, let's talk more large language models. Yeah, and hey, I agree with what Ken's saying here on the, on, on the show live. So if you're joining us live, I'd love to hear your thoughts as we go along. Saying that's a lot of foolish VC money out there. Just saying, you know what, I'd say this Ken, I personally wouldn't bet against John Ivy and Sam Altman. That's just me. You know, John Ivey was obviously very instrumental in, you know, the iPhone, MacBook, iMac, a lot of Apple's kind of very prominent hardware and their kind of rise to world dominance in the, you know, smartphone and computer market. So personally I think it might be money well spent for those, you know, those, those capital firms looking at this. All right, so speaking of all these large language model companies, Anthropic in their Claude AI is launching a beta for tool use functionality in its Quad models. All right, so this is an interesting one here. Anthropic AI has introduced a beta version of its tool use feature for Anthropic Message API users, enhancing the functionality of Claude's suite of generative AI models. So users can now integrate external tools into Claude, enabling real time information retrieval and third party feature integration into Claude's workflow. So this integration allows for accurate data sourcing directly from the original provider, reducing the reliance on web lookup and potential inaccuracies in displayed information. So Claude's chain of thought reasoning model enables the processing of complex commands and multiple third party access integrations between facilitating simultaneous queries and step by step information integration. So all Claude AI models can handle various tool requests according to their release, with over 90% accuracy and choosing from a pool of 250 plus available tools. So this one is interesting in a couple of ways. Number one, when people ask me, you know, hey, should I be using Claude? I say absolutely not. If you're using it in the chat interface, I still wouldn't use it, right? Until we see some of these tools, until we see some, some real time Internet connectivity within the Claude chatbot. I would tell people do not use Claude in its own interface, right? I would say even though Gemini is, is very inaccurate, I would still say use Gemini, use Chat GPT and use Copilot because of their connectivity to the Internet out of the box, right? So when CLAUDE does integrate, you know, some of these, you know, this, this new tool use into its actual chat interface, I think this is probably going to change, you know, my opinion on that and I would assume it's going to change how the rest of the world is using their tool. So it is interesting that Claude has been very slow or maybe very methodic, methodical in their rolling out of third party integrations. But yeah, it's obviously with their new Claude 3 opus, it is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful tool, depending on which benchmark, you know, benchmark you're looking at. But yeah, their, their highest end, quad three opus model is outperforming GPT4, the original GPT4. So you have to take that with a grain of salt, not GPT4 Turbo, on a lot of these very important benchmarks. However, one of the biggest mistakes that people use or, sorry, one of the biggest mistakes that people make in using a large language model is not understanding how these models work. And one of the biggest downsides is a knowledge cutoff, right? So if you're working with data that is more than a year old, which is what most, most large language models are working with because it takes time to gather all this data, to train on it, to go through, you know, this, you know, reinforcement learning and you know, real human learning feedback, right? All these processes take time. But you know, Quad's data is pretty old, right? As is all of these models based training data. However, the rest of them have some sort of Internet connectivity baked into the chat interface which, hey, at least as of Friday when I last used Claude, it didn't have so should be interesting to see when and if Claude does bring this tool use feature into its actual chat interface and not just its API. Yeah, I'd love to hear what, what you all think too if you have you used Claude, you know, and if you're listening on the podcast we always put, you know, my LinkedIn and you know, email where you can reach out. You know, I'm curious what people's, you know, thoughts are since using Claude's new, you know, Claude 3. Their Opus model is their, you know, kind of strongest model. I did a show, you know, kind of going side by side with with Chat GBT, you know, with GPT4 Turbo and with Gemini. You know, hey, at least early on it doesn't matter how good of a response that a model gives you, but if you're using it in the chat interface and you cannot connect with real time data, you really increase the likelihood of hallucinations or of just actually having to spend more time on the back end. You know, something that I say a lot is what hasn't changed in a year, right? And whatever, you know, line of work that you're in, what hasn't changed in a year? But regardless, pretty big news from Claude and a step in the right direction integrating with all of these third party tools.

Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow.

Your business with AI?

Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on Genai. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative AI to get ahead. And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use Gen AI. So whether you're looking for ChatGPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI strategy, you, you can partner with us too.

Just like some of the biggest companies in the world do.

Go to your everydayai.com partner to get in contact with our team or you can just click on the partner section of our website. We'll help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on gen.

All right, next on our AI news that matters. So we have musicians and authors worldwide uniting against AI threats. So 200 musicians have signed an open letter urging tech companies to refrain from using AI music generation tools that could jeopardize human creativity. So the artists, including some really big names like Billie Eilish, like Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry, Imagine Dragons, etc. Highlight the risks AI poses to privacy, identity and livelihoods in the music industry. So AI models are generating obviously music, art and often writing, and it trains on existing works, reportedly without permission. Right. Which makes it challenging for artists to protect their creations. So there's companies like Adobe Stability, AI Suno, and they're developing AI music generators each even Google, you know, using reportedly. Right. Licensed music. But concerns remain about the impact on artists creating original content. So musicians have historically faced challenges, obviously with evolving technologies such as low streaming royalties, leading to skepticism toward AI advancements in the industry. Also, over 15,000 writers have kind of joined this movement, including some notable names like J. James, James Patterson and Suzanne Collins, also expressing concerns in this open letter. So let's go ahead and take a look at this open letter that they posted. I believe it is called the Artist Rights Alliance. And they just. This is kind of part of their open letter that they posted last week. And we posted this in our newsletter as well. But let me just read the, the top half of their letter and I'm gonna get, get into some of my thoughts on this here. So it says we, the undersized member, the undersigned members of the artists and songwriting communities, call on AI developers, technology companies, platforms and digital music services to cease the use of artificial intelligence to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists. Make no mistake, we believe that when used responsibly, AI has enormous potential to advance human creativity and in a manner that involves the development or enables the development and growth of new and exciting experiences for music fans everywhere. So here's a couple of things. It's kind of a confusing statement, right. So it's, it's their. I believe they shouldn't have even acknowledged. Yeah, like the promise of AI in the music industry. If you're going to call out and, you know, kind of put up a fight against AI music, you can't kind of also, you know, slap them in the face with the left hand, but shake their, their hand with the right hand. I mean, you have to put a fight up. There's some, some interesting, you know, thoughts here, you know, in the, in this letter. But a couple things that stood out to me is that they said that these kind of AI music generation tools could jeopardize human creativity. And I don't think that is necessarily the case. We do have to call out some of the great, you know, AI kind of music generators out there. But you know, also they don't talk a lot about how they train their models. Right. For the most part, you know, companies like, you know, stability, stability, AI just released their kind of 2.0 version of their song generator. Stability in the past has been very open saying yeah, we train on everything, right? We train our models on everything. Doesn't matter if it's copyrighted or not, right? So some, some companies are very, almost brash in saying, yeah, we train on everything, it doesn't matter. And you know, a lot of these companies, OpenAI as well, making the case that hey, you know, copyright doesn't mean what it used to mean, right? So I think all eyes, as we've talked about for a while, I think all eyes are still going to be on this, you know, OpenAI versus New York Times lawsuit from back in December. You know, presumably this will be settled, but who knows, maybe it will actually go to court. But I think, you know, that's going to be one of the first biggest rulings on an AI copywriting case. And can these large companies or do they have kind of enough money to settle these ongoing lawsuits? Right. I've been saying this now for a year. One of the best want to talk about job security. One of the best places to be right now is a lawyer who's working with copyright IP intellectual property, right? Because this space there are going to be so many, so many lawsuits. I think we're going to be hearing, you know, especially once one of the shoes drops in one of these big cases, we're going to be hearing about lawsuits non stop and you know, digging into where are these companies training from? Right? We, we assume it is the open Internet, which obviously includes copyrighted materials. You know, there's obviously the, the, the, the now infamous, you know, interview where the Open AI CTO when asked about, hey, where are you training? You know, Sora, right? OpenAI is very impressive new AI text to video platform and she kind of just froze right on, on a very basic question like are you, you know, training this, this model from YouTube? Are you training this from social media? And she kind of just, just froze up and gave a blanket answer that didn't really make a lot of sense. But you know, presumably all of these large companies are using copyrighted materials to train their models. Not all right, Some are taking a very methodical approach. Like as an example, I do think companies like Adobe are, are taking a little more cautious and slower approach in training a little bit more and making sure. That they have access to all of the information that they're training on, but a lot of the other companies aren't, they're just training on literally everything. So pretty, pretty interesting take here, but I don't think what the artists are saying that AI should kind of jeopardize their own human creativity because AI isn't stopping you from being creative. And people always say, oh, is AI more creative than the average human? Absolutely. People argue and say, oh, AI is not creative. It is absolutely creative. If you use it the correct way, AI is way more creative. Again, if you use it the right way, AI is way more creative than any single, the most creative single human being in the world. It is more creative than the most single human being in the world because different AI systems are an absolute expert in all these different fields. Right. So it should be interesting to see how this one pans out. All right, our next piece of AI news that matters. So major tech companies are joining forces to address AI job loss. Interesting take here. Right, so companies such as Google, IBM, indeed Eightfold, Accenture, Intel, Microsoft and SAP have formed the AI Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium led by Cisco. So this consortium aims to positively impact and reskill over 95 million individuals globally in the next 10 years by providing these upskilling and reskilling opportunities due to accelerated AI adoption. So this new group will assess 56 ICT job roles affected by by AI and formulate training recommendations to match the skills sought by these companies. So Cisco as an example aims to train 25 million people in cybersecurity and digital skills by 2032, while IBM plans to equip 30 million individuals with digital skills by 2030, including 2 million in AI. You know, so pretty interesting to see the companies involved here, right? Because as an example, right, IBM was one of the first companies last year where their CEO mentioned freezing hiring for 7,000 roles expected to be automated with AI and highlighting the potential impact on non customer facing roles. Right, so it's pretty interesting, I guess it's a good thing to see that a lot of these companies that in theory are developing this, this AI technologies, these different large language models, generative AI models that in theory are causing job loss, it is obviously good on them to be investing time, money and resources to deal with the implication of job loss. Right? It's something that we don't want to talk about. It's the elephant in the room. I've said all along, I'm not one of those people that say, oh, you know, AI won't take your job. Someone Using AI will. That's not a bunch of bs, y'. All. Like, AI is definitely going to take way more jobs than it creates. Yes, there will be millions, tens of millions of jobs in the future that did not exist before generative AI and before AI became more widely used by, you know, companies small and large. But I do think in the end it will be a net negative. Right? I'm not trying to be a negative person. You know, if, if you look at the math, if you look at the number, if you look at the science, if you look at, at the development, there's no getting around it. Right? So it is good to see these companies forming this consortium to address AI job loss. It's also important to note as well, because there's already been nearly 60,000 tech layoffs so far this year. Yeah, we're only three months into the year and there's already been 60,000 tech layoffs so far, including big names like Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco, Mozilla, Docusign, so many others. Right. So as an example, this, I mean, so far in 2024, the tech layoffs are outpacing, you know, previous years. If they continue at this pace, this will be the biggest year for tech layoffs ever. So why is this important and why is it tied to AI jobs? Well, a couple of reasons, right? If you have to think what companies understand the future impact on AI and job loss, it is the companies making the AI, right? It is the same companies forming this consortium, right? So, so your Google, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Accenture, right? It is these, these companies both building these generative AI solutions and some of the big consulting companies that are teaching the rest of the world how to use it. So that is really worth looking at, right? Where you have just, just like unprecedented tech layoffs so far in 2024. And a lot of it is because of AI. So you know what I would have liked to seen, hey, this is great. You know that we have this consortium led by Cisco with all these big name tech companies and you know, a lot of the companies building AI. But this should have been going a year ago, right? The writing, if you know, and if you fully understand the power of generative AI, the writing has been on the wall for substantial job loss, substantial economic impact, especially here in the US the writing has been on the wall now for, for more than 18 months. So it's great to see big initiatives like this. I would have liked to seen these a year ago because we are going to have a huge problem here, especially in the United States, with job loss so it is going to be extremely important for these reskilling and upskilling opportunities, especially from the private sector, because here's the other reason y', all, like the universe, like here in the US the public education, you know, public universities, they have completely dropped the ball on teaching the next generation of workers, artificial intelligence, large language models. They've still, still, you have some of the largest universities in the country here still banning generative AI use, which is wild, right? So it is good that we have the private sector coming in for these upskilling and reskilling opportunities, because our, for the most part, our higher education system here in the US has completely dropped the ball on teaching the next generation these essential skills. All right, last but not least, Jamie Demon. I think that's how you say it. Demand. So the. The CEO of JP Morgan Chase has emphasized the profound impact of artificial intelligence on society in his annual letter to shareholders, saying that AI will be as impactful on humanity as electricity, the printing press, computers, et cetera. Right. The one that obviously jumped out to me is electricity. So he does foresee AI as a potentially transformative technology, comparing its, its impact to major historical technology inventions, like we said, the printing press, the steam engine, the Internet, and even electricity. So JP Morgan Chase has over 2000 AI and machine learning employees and data scientists with plans for AI to augment various job roles within the bank's workforce. So DAMOND has acknowledged the potential of AI to both assist and replace certain job categories, emphasizing the need for adoption and evolution within the workplace. This one's pretty interesting because, you know, the rising prominence of AI highlighted by the viral success of ChatGPT in late 2022 has contributed to the growth of tech companies like chipmaker Nvidia and has reshaped the tech industry landscape. Landscape. And this one here is a pretty big shift in tone, I would say, coming from JPMorgan Chase, considering JP Morgan Chase was one of the first large companies to publicly ban chat GPT usage amongst its employees, you know, in 2022 and 2023. So pretty big shift in tone here right now, saying that, oh, you know, generative AI is, is going to be, you know, as important for humans as electricity, y'. All. This is what I've been saying. Companies that early on fought AI, fought generative AI, right? Maybe at the time it was a lack of understanding, you know, maybe they just wanted to be cautious when it comes to data, which I completely understand. Right. If there's something that you don't understand, you know, and we talked about this on the show last week in our hot Take Tuesday. Companies that ban AI are going to fail, right? So I get you know, temporary bans, temporary restrictions as you learn the technologies, as you prioritize data transparency, as you build guard rails and safeguards around generative AI usage. I get that if companies are still banning AI here in 2024, you are literally going to fail. There's no way around it, but it is exciting. I won't say it's exciting but it is refreshing to see some of these companies that were know, kind of big names early on, right? Because you had hundreds, probably thousands of companies following the leads of you know, JP Morgan Chase and other big companies that banned large language models. Right? It's, it's followed the leader. Right? So then you had you know, hundreds and thousands of companies in related field, in related sectors following the lead of these big companies that initially banned or completely restricted the use of generative AI technology. And we talked about last week in our show that that number is still roughly 27% of companies have still banned generative AI. So if, if your company is still part of that 27% follow the lead here of JP Morgan Chase. They have shifted their stance now understanding that generative AI will be as impactful to humankind as electricity itself and now integrating generative AI and large language models from top to bottom throughout their company. All right, that was a lot. Douglas, thanks, thanks for joining us. Said Said joined us on YouTube today instead of LinkedIn Colorado saying good luck to the artists on, on their kind of stance against you know, these, these AI, uh, music generators. I agree. So yeah there's a lot, uh, a lot of information today. And just to quickly recap the AI news that matters for this week. So we have Google considering charging for AI based search. We have former Apple designer Johnny I've and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. More information coming out about their joint partnership and apparently now reportedly talking to fundraisers looking to raise a billion dollars. Anthropic has released its tool use functionality for its Claude AI models to but right now only while using the API and not in its actual chat interface. Musicians and authors uniting against AI threats kind of releasing public statements saying hey AI, stop what you're doing. You're you know, ruining our creativity. Then you have the major tech companies joining forces to address AI job loss. The big names, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco etc. And then last but not least we have the CEO of J. JP Morgan Chase saying yeah, this generative AI thing is actually big. Maybe we shouldn't abandon it it's going to be as big to humankind as electricity itself. All right, I hope that was helpful. Your one show a week. We do this most every single Monday where you can join us for the AI news that matters. So there's going to be a lot more as always in our newsletter, so make sure you go to your everydayai.com Sign up for that free daily newsletter. We we we'll have not just this but also the daily AI news. We have fresh finds which is just exciting and interesting. Use cases and and tools of Generative AI from across the Internet and we'll be recapping kind of this top top news from today. Also, if this was helpful, please consider leaving us a rating and review on Spotify or Apple. If you're listening to us on the podcast or if this is helpful, share it with your network. Right. Keep all of your co workers, your friends and family in the know so they can keep up with what's going on in Generative AI to grow their companies and grow their careers. Hey, what Cecilia said. Happy Monday. Happy Eclipse Day. So we hope to see you back tomorrow and every day for more Everyday AI. Thanks y'.

All. And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going for a little more AI magic. Visit your everydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.