Need to Know News - April 24th, 2024
In this week's Need to Know News edition...the NHL team embracing AI in their marketing...Meta is turning their Ray-Ban smart glasses into a virtual assistant...Microsoft and Coca-Cola announce a major $1.1 billion AI partnership.
Plus, a whole lot more!
AI In Action
The Corporate Conversation Around AI is Changing
“2023 was spent asking questions about AI; 2024 is about finding answers.”
That was from Brent Thill of Jefferies in a note to investors last month. If AI had its "hype year" in 2003, he told Yahoo Finance in an interview,“2024 will be the start of the implementation, and 2025 will really be the revenue year.”
We’ve heard versions of this outline from many strategists: We are now in the “show me” phase of AI. Thill was mostly talking about the tech companies, like Alphabet and Amazon, that he covers. While the AI-led boost to demand for Nvidia and Big Tech seems clear — or, at least, clearer — the broader knock-on effects are only beginning to be understood and quantified.
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How the Dallas Stars are Using AI to Brainstorm Marketing Assets
The Dallas Stars are using artificial intelligence-based tools across multiple facets of their business, driving incremental revenue in ticket sales. They use Kaiber and Runway for text to photo/video purposes and Eleven Labs for voiceovers.
A more technical use case related to game presentation emerged with the upgrade of the American Airlines Center’s center LED videoboard ahead of the 2023-24 season, a reported $10M project. On the previous board, in-game video content was displayed in 1080p, while the new board required 4K resolution. The Stars used Topaz Labs’ Topaz Video AI to upscale its existing video content for LED ribbons (rather than recreating it), boiling down to a 15-to-20-minute process per 90-second asset.
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Meta Releases Llama 3, Claims It’s Among the Best Open Model Available
Meta describes the new models — Llama 3 8B, which contains 8 billion parameters, and Llama 3 70B, which contains 70 billion parameters — as a “major leap” compared to the previous-gen Llama models.
Meta says that users of the new Llama models should expect more “steerability,” a lower likelihood to refuse to answer questions, and higher accuracy on trivia questions, questions pertaining to history and STEM fields such as engineering and science and general coding recommendations. That’s in part thanks to a much larger dataset: a collection of 15 trillion tokens.
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Meta's AI Powered Ray-Bans Get An Upgrade
Meta is upgrading the AI inside its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. Users can now share their view hands-free on WhatsApp and Messenger video calls using the glasses' camera.
Users can ask questions about objects, scenes or text in their environment, and the AI will respond with relevant data like translations or identification. Meta aims to make the smart glasses more capable and intuitive with this visual AI assistant uprade.
Elon Musk Says Tesla Is An AI Company
At the Frontier of AI
Perplexity Valued at $1 Billion as It Challenges Google Search
The new funding round values the AI startup at $1 billion, marking a two-fold jump in valuation so far this year. As the report notes, the not yet 2-year-old company offers an AI chatbot that summarizes search results, offers citations for its answers and helps users hone their queries for the best responses.
Fans include Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has said he uses the product “almost every day,” with Perplexity processing more user queries in the US so far this year — nearly 75 million — than it did in all of last year.
Microsoft and Coca-Cola Announced a Major $1.1 Billion AI Partnership
Coca-Cola will align its tech strategy with Microsoft, adopting Azure and generative AI like Azure OpenAI Service as its preferred cloud and AI platforms. The companies will jointly develop innovative AI use cases across Coca-Cola's business functions, testing AI copilots for improving productivity.
The deal expands Coca-Cola's existing digital transformation on Microsoft solutions. Coca-Cola has migrated to Azure and innovated with generative AI for a year. The $1.1 billion provides broader access to Microsoft's cloud, AI and productivity platforms
Consumers Know More About AI Than Business Leaders Think
AI is rapidly gaining widespread public interest and adoption, particularly with the rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT. A recent BCG survey of 21,000 global consumers found surprisingly high levels of awareness and usage of AI across countries, especially in emerging markets.
While many consumers are excited about AI's potential benefits in areas like health, personalization and convenience, a significant portion also have concerns around responsible implementation of the technology.
SoftBank To Invest Nearly $1 Billion In AI Push
Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank is looking to develop a “world-class” Japanese-language-specific generative artificial intelligence model, and plans to invest $960 million in the next two years to bolster its computing facilities.
Training of large language models (LLM), such as OpenAI’s Chat GPT, requires advanced graphics processing units, which SoftBank plans to purchase from U.S. chip giant Nvidia, the Nikkei reported Monday, citing anonymous sources.
Microsoft Announces Phi-3, Its Smallest AI Model Yet
Microsoft launched the next version of its lightweight AI model Phi-3 Mini, the first of three small models the company plans to release.
Phi-3 Mini measures 3.8 billion parameters and is trained on a data set that is smaller relative to large language models like GPT-4. Compared to their larger counterparts, small AI models are often cheaper to run and perform better on personal devices like phones and laptops.
Thanks for reading.
Until next time!
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