Why Is This C.E.O. Bragging About Replacing Humans With A.I.?
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According to Klarna, the company has saved the equivalent of $10 million annually using A.I. for its marketing needs, partly by reducing its reliance on human artists to generate images for advertising. The company said that using A.I. tools had cut back on the time that its in-house lawyers spend generating standard contracts — to about 10 minutes from an hour — and that its communications staff uses the technology to classify press coverage as positive or negative. Klarna has said that the company’s chatbot does the work of 700 customer service agents and that the bot resolves cases an average of nine minutes faster than humans (under two minutes versus 11).
Mr. Siemiatkowski and his team went so far as to rig up an A.I. version of him to announce the company’s third-quarter results last year — to show that even the C.E.O.’s job isn’t safe from automation.
In interviews, Mr. Siemiatkowski has made clear he doesn’t believe the technology will simply free up workers to focus on more interesting tasks. “People say, ‘Oh, don’t worry, there’s going to be new jobs,’” he said on a podcast last summer, before citing the thousands of professional translators whom A.I. is rapidly making superfluous. “I don’t think it’s easy to say to a 55-year-old translator, ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to become a YouTube influencer.’” ...
See the full, lengthy story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/business/klarna-ceo-ai.html
The Rise of Digital Icons: Are We Witnessing the Future of Influence?
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Market Insights and Trends
Virtual influencers are at the forefront of several key trends in digital marketing:
1. Personalized Storytelling: These digital beings are becoming vehicles for complex narratives, allowing brands to craft stories that can deeply resonate with specific audience segments.
2. Cross-Platform Engagement: Virtual influencers are not limited to a single platform. Their presence spans social media, gaming, and even virtual reality environments, offering brands multiple touchpoints for engagement.
3. Hybrid Influencers: Some brands are experimenting with hybrid models that blend human and virtual elements to create influencers that offer the authenticity of real people with the control of digital avatars.
4. Sustainability and Ethics: As digital entities, virtual influencers have a reduced environmental impact compared to traditional influencer campaigns, aligning with growing consumer concerns about sustainability.
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Security Aspects
With the rise of virtual influencers, security remains a critical consideration. Protecting the digital assets and intellectual property of virtual personas is essential to prevent unauthorized use or data breaches.
See the full story here: https://be3.sk/uncategorized-en/the-rise-of-digital-icons-are-we-witnessing-the-future-of-influence/64624/
What Makes Or Breaks A Blockchain: Gavin Wood’s 5 Criteria
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Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, the visionary who coined the very term "Web3" and later built Polkadot, lays out his five key criteria for evaluating a blockchain. ...
Gavin Wood’s 5 Blockchain Criteria
There are hundreds of blockchains in existence, each with its own (more or less) unique technology, use cases, and adoption levels. To cut through the noise, Gavin Wood outlines five fundamental criteria for evaluating a blockchain’s potential:
- Resilience. The backbone of Web3, resilience combines cryptography, decentralization, and game theory to safeguard a blockchain against attacks and ensure long-term stability.
- Performance. More than just scalability, performance measures how efficiently a network processes and finalizes tasks.
- Generality. A blockchain’s capacity to support diverse applications and programmability.
- Accessibility. The ease with which users, developers, applications, and bots can interact with the network.
- Coherence. A system’s ability to maintain fast and consistent communication across its network.
See the full article here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2025/01/31/what-makes-or-breaks-a-blockchain-gavin-woods-5-criteria/
Apple Scraps Work on Mac-Connected Augmented Reality Glasses
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The now-canceled product would have looked like normal glasses but include built-in displays and require a connection to a Mac, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the work wasn’t public. An Apple representative declined to comment.
The project had been seen as a potential way forward after the weak introduction of the Apple Vision Pro, a $3,499 model that was too cumbersome and pricey to catch on with consumers. ...
The company had initially wanted the glasses to pair with an iPhone, but it ran into problems over how much processing power the handset could provide. It also affected the iPhone’s battery life. So the company shifted to an approach that required linking up with a Mac computer, which has faster processors and bigger batteries.
But the Mac-connected product performed poorly during reviews with executives, and the desired features continued to change. ...
See the full story here: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-scraps-mac-connected-augmented-192513263.html
HAI at Davos: Key Insights on AI From the World Economic Forum
... James Landay: Professor of Computer Science and the Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan Professor in the School of Engineering; Co-Director, Stanford HAI
...the need for large foundation models that reflect global cultural diversity. Currently, AI models are predominantly built by U.S. companies with an emphasis on English and Western content. That creates cultural biases and even mistranslations. We need culturally and linguistically diverse training data in AI development. ...
DeepSeek was getting in people’s heads during Davos, but really, the company just used several known (and developed some new) clever optimizations for both training time and inference time compute. Now there’s a lot of skepticism over exactly how much money and how many GPUs were required, but it’s clear that they were able to train really great models much more efficiently. And now these are techniques that everyone else can use because it’s open source and in published technical reports. So that, again, leads to way more efficiency. ...
Alex (Sandy) Pentland: Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences; Professor of Information Technology; Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program Director, MIT Management Sloan School; Center Fellow, Stanford HAI; Faculty Lead of Digital Platforms and Society at the Digital Economy Lab
... People seemed to be girding themselves for challenges — geopolitical tensions, tariff wars, real wars, climate disasters — by a change in focus from idealistic goals and dreams to making social systems work and social contracts sustainable. ...
A major theme I think is emerging is what you might call the third way: not the US-EU, not China, but the way of India, Eastern Africa, the Middle East and Indopacific. These are middle income countries, no longer poor, and with sophisticated technical populations, and they are busy deploying digital technologies everywhere, including all but the most cutting-edge AI. ...
Erik Brynjolfsson: Director, Stanford Digital Economy Lab; Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow, Stanford HAI; Ralph Landau Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
... I think it's a healthy pivot to start focusing more on identifying the specific tasks where AI can be helpful. Ultimately that will lead not only to more business value, but also to more productivity, better healthcare, a cleaner environment, and a more prosperous society.
See the full post here: https://hai.stanford.edu/news/hai-davos-key-insights-ai-world-economic-forum
The irony — using generative AI in a case about the dangers of generative AI
... The underlying lawsuit challenged the constitutionality of a Minnesota state statute aimed at curbing the use of deepfakes to influence elections by creating criminal penalties for the dissemination of AI-generated content 90 days before an election. ...
The Court excluded the declaration after finding that the expert's unchecked use of generative AI to create the declaration "shatters [the expert's] credibility" and rendered the declaration unreliable. The Court noted that "signing a declaration under penalty of perjury is not a mere formality" and that it could not "accept false statements — innocent or not — in an expert's declaration submitted under penalty of perjury." ...
See the full story here: https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/irony-using-generative-ai-case-about-dangers-generative-ai-2025-01-30/
What DeepSeek’s breakthrough says (and doesn’t say) about the ‘AI race’ with China
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Such arguments emphasize the need for the United States to outpace China in scaling up the compute capabilities necessary to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) at all costs, before China “catches up.” This has led some AI companies to convincingly argue, for example, that the negative externalities of speed-building massive data centers at scale are worth the longer-term benefit of developing AGI. Such an argument has significant business upside for AI companies, as they amass greater numbers of chips to gain a competitive advantage. What the DeepSeek example illustrates is that this overwhelming focus on national security—and on compute—limits the space for a real discussion on the tradeoffs of certain governance strategies and the impacts these have in spaces beyond national security.
To plug this gap, the United States needs a better articulation at the policy level of what good governance looks like. This should include a proactive vision for how AI is designed, funded, and governed at home, alongside more government transparency around the national security risks of adversary access to certain technologies. It also requires the US government to be clear about what capabilities, technologies, and applications related to AI it is specifically aiming to regulate. ...
See the full story here: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/what-deepseeks-breakthrough-says-and-doesnt-say-about-the-ai-race-with-china/
New Vatican document examines potential and risks of AI
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On privacy and control, the Note points out that some types of data can go so far as to touch “upon the individual’s interiority, perhaps even their conscience” [90], with the danger of everything becoming “a kind of spectacle to be examined and inspected” [92]. Digital surveillance “can also be misused to exert control over the lives of believers and how they express their faith” [90]. ...
See the full PR here: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2025-01/new-vatican-document-examines-potential-and-risks-of-ai.html
Augmented Reality and Projection Mapping Technologies
One significant area of research is the development of dynamic projection mapping techniques that can adapt to changing scenes and surfaces. For instance, a study introduced a method for dynamic multi-projection mapping that utilizes real-time pixel-parallel calculations to control projector intensity with low latency, achieving impressive performance at 360 frames per second (fps) with minimal delay[1]. This advancement allows for seamless integration of projections onto moving or changing surfaces, enhancing the overall user experience. ...
See the full story here: https://www.nature.com/research-intelligence/augmented-reality-and-projection-mapping-technologies
Vuzix introduces new AR platforms and ultra-thin waveguide technology
... Another innovation is an ultra-thin full-color waveguide with a thickness of just 1.0 millimeter. This uses the company's proprietary Incognito technology to optimize AR display performance. Vuzix also presented new display technologies. These included MicroLEDs and ultra-compact full-color LCoS projectors designed for use in next-generation AI-powered devices.
About a year ago, the company also launched the developer edition of its Z100 smart glasses. Weighing just 36 grams, they are among the lightest smart glasses with a display. Designed for industrial environments, the headset has a monocular display with a 30-degree field of view and a battery life of up to two days. ...
See the full story here: https://mixed-news.com/en/vuzix-introduces-new-ar-platforms-and-ultra-thin-waveguide-technology/
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