Microsoft and LinkedIn report highlights a rise in "Bring Your Own AI" at work; deepfakes at the Met Gala; CoreWeaver's role in the AI boom; the era of AI music has arrived

The Atlantic profiles ElevenLabs; trouble in the AI hacker house; Runway's AI film festival; the news and entertainment industry meets AI

In December 2023, I decided to join Synthesia, a SaaS company building the world’s largest video communications platform powered by AI avatars. What attracted me to the company was the strong community of early adopters of its technology. In fact, when Synthesia originally launched its video editor and AI avatars four years ago, product growth was largely driven by word-of-mouth among people who were excited to try out generative AI for the first time.

This week, Microsoft and LinkedIn released the 2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report. The biggest takeaway for me is that there’s a fast-growing, grassroots movement for generative AI in the workplace. While many companies are still struggling with how to roll out tools like ChatGPT across their organizations, employees aren't waiting for official corporate policies or guidance on how to use the technology; they are adopting it on their own and experimenting with generative AI to boost productivity, creativity, and efficiency in their daily work.

This bottom-up adoption is driven by several factors, some of which Synthesia also experienced firsthand. First, the user-friendly interfaces of tools like ChatGPT have made powerful AI remarkably accessible to anyone. With just a prompt typed into a chat window, people can instantly draft emails, analyze data, explain complex topics, provide feedback on writing, and tackle countless other tasks.

Second, there's a race to capitalize on the potential advantages AI can provide. Employees recognize that augmenting their skills with AI could make them far more productive and valuable. They don't want to be left behind as early AI adopters start realizing meaningful productivity gains. Or, as the Harvard Business Review put it, AI won’t replace humans—but humans with AI will replace humans without AI.

Third, there's pent-up demand and curiosity about AI that companies may be struggling to keep up. ChatGPT web traffic averaged above 1.5 billion monthly views worldwide, according to SimilarWeb. While some of that traffic comes from people using it casually, it is also a clear signal that workers are eager to start leveraging these tools themselves rather than waiting for corporate rollouts.

Of course, CIOs will immediately think about the real risks with ungoverned adoption of generative AI in the workplace, from potential for AI hallucinations or toxic outputs being deployed, to concerns around data privacy when employees feed company data into third-party AI systems. But for now, a grassroots AI revolution is already happening under the radar. Employees aren't being passive consumers of new workplace technology, they're self-designating as early AI adopters.

If you are in a position of management, I’d encourage you to have honest conversations with your teams and departments about their stealth AI use: it’s likely you will discover dozens of innovative examples. Create a safe space to explore further and then build a business case to operationalize these experiments into day-to-day workflows, from the bottom up.

And now, here are this week’s news:

❤️Computer loves

Our top news picks for the week - your essential reading from the world of AI

• The Guardian: Danger and opportunity for news industry as AI woos it for vital human-written copy

• The Atlantic: ElevenLabs Is Building an Army of Voice Clones

• WSJ: OpenAI Brings Custom Tech to This Year’s Met Gala Exhibition

• Axios: Employees are bringing their own AI to work

• Wired: How a Scrappy Cryptominer Transformed Into the Multibillion-Dollar Backbone of the AI Boom

• WSJ: How AI Has Already Begun to Change These Workers’ Jobs

• The Verge: Better Siri is coming: what Apple’s research says about its AI plans

• Forbes: The Techbro Turf War Over AI’s Most Hardcore Hacker House

• BBC: Will AI dream up the hit TV shows of the future?

• Bloomberg: The AI Music Era Is Here. Not Everyone Is a Fan

• TechCrunch: This year’s Met Gala theme is AI deepfakes

• VentureBeat: Runway's LA film festival marked an inflection point for AI movies

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AI in the wild: how artificial intelligence is used across industry, from the internet, social media, and retail to transportation, healthcare, banking, and more

• AP: California to tap generative AI tools to increase services access, reduce traffic jams

• Business Insider: Shopify says AI has helped keep its head count flat

• Reuters: US explores AI to train immigration officers on talking to refugees

• BBC: AI can help people keep physical jobs for longer

• Axios: Autodesk's AI turns text or still images into 3D models

• The Economist: New crop-spraying technologies are more efficient than ever

• Business Insider: AI-powered fighter jet kept up with a human pilot during the Air Force's historic experimental dogfight

• Bloomberg: Meta Will Let Advertisers Create Campaigns Using New Generative AI Tools

• WSJ: 7 Everyday Work Problems AI Helps Me Solve

• CNBC: Generative AI will be designing new drugs all on its own in the near future

• The Guardian: Experts hope AI tool can cut use of restraints and seclusion on NDIS participants

• 9to5Google: YouTube Premium members can now test AI-powered ‘Jump ahead’

• Business Insider: I'm using AI to 'read' my paintings and help me compose music. Here's how I do it.

• AP: With help from AI, Randy Travis got his voice back. Here’s how his first song post-stroke came to be

• VentureBeat: How VISA is using generative AI to battle account fraud attacks

• Reuters: Holocaust researchers use AI to search for unnamed victims

🧑‍🎓Computer learns

Interesting trends and developments from various AI fields, companies and people

• The Atlantic: The End of the ‘Photoshop Fail’

• VentureBeat: Stability AI sows gen AI discord with Stable Artisan

• Business Insider: AI is shaking up OnlyFans and adult content, but some creators worry it could alienate audiences

• Semafor: Researchers warned against using AI to peer review academic papers

• New York Times: Meet My A.I. Friends

• VentureBeat: ElevenLabs previews music-generating AI model

• Bloomberg: OpenAI Rival Anthropic Defends Partnerships With Amazon, Google

• Bloomberg: Apple to Power AI Tools With In-House Server Chips This Year

• WSJ: Duolingo to Bet on Generative AI Subscription Plan

• Adweek: Leaked Deck Reveals How OpenAI Is Pitching Publisher Partnerships

• Axios: `Don't fear AI-driven "biosurveillance," experts say

• Bloomberg: UAE’s AI Ambitions Include Making Advanced Semiconductors

• WSJ: Where Is the AI Boom Taking Us? Business Leaders Disagree on Outlook

• Reuters: Law firm Sullivan & Cromwell joins AI gold rush with new practice

• TechCrunch: Amazon’s CTO built a meeting-summarizing app for some reason

• Business Insider: JP Morgan's Mary Callahan Erdoes says 'curiosity' will be the most important human trait in the age of AI

• Business Insider: 'Griefbots' could use AI to haunt relatives from beyond the grave, ethicists warn

• TechCrunch: Fairgen ‘boosts’ survey results using synthetic data and AI-generated responses

• MIT Technology Review: Google DeepMind’s new AlphaFold can model a much larger slice of biological life

• Bloomberg: OpenAI Is Readying a Search Product to Rival Google, Perplexity

• Business Insider: Sam Altman doesn't think we are worried enough about how AI will impact the economy

• The Verge: Stack Overflow is feeding programmers’ answers to AI, whether they like it or not

• Wired: OpenAI Is ‘Exploring’ How to Responsibly Generate AI Porn

• Forbes: AI-Generated Employee Handbooks Are Causing Mayhem At The Companies That Use Them

• The Verge: Microsoft is ‘turning everyone into a prompt engineer’ with new Copilot AI features

• Business Insider: Why Vista Equity Partners, one of Wall Street's most prominent tech investors, doesn't want its analysts using AI for due diligence

• FT: Informa strikes AI deal with Microsoft

• IEEE Spectrum: AI Copilots Are Changing How Coding Is Taught

• The Information: Google Beefs Up AI Sales Effort to Persuade Businesses to Start Buying

• Bloomberg: OpenAI Inks Licensing Deal With People Magazine Publisher

• WSJ: Apple Is Developing AI Chips for Data Centers, Seeking Edge in Arms Race

• Axios: Adobe alum takes AI-enabled marketing beyond the prompt

• TechCrunch: Bedrock Studio is Amazon’s attempt to simplify generative AI app development

• TechCrunch: OpenAI says it’s building a tool to let content creators ‘opt out’ of AI training

• Washington Post: Defense think tank MITRE to build AI supercomputer with Nvidia

• VentureBeat: New AI search engine Upend emerges from stealth, powered by 100 LLMs

• VentureBeat: Sprinklr launches ‘Digital Twins,’ AI versions of brands to provide better customer experiences

• Business Insider: Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI was 'basically a bet,' says CTO Kevin Scott

• FT: Apple unveils ‘outrageously powerful chip for AI’ in latest iPads

• Bloomberg: Microsoft reveals AI that lives away from the internet for spies and top-secret info: ‘It is now deployed, it’s live, it’s answering questions, it will write code’

• Business Insider: OpenAI exec says today's ChatGPT will be 'laughably bad' in 12 months

• Reuters: AI lacks judgement to set interest rates, Singapore central bank head says

• Business Insider: Microsoft's in-house AI model, reportedly called MAI-1, is a chance for CEO Satya Nadella to prove he doesn't need OpenAI

• Axios: How Big Tech labels AI

• Business Insider: OpenAI's Sora is inspiring human creators, who say they are optimistic it is a long way from replacing them

• The Verge: The teens making friends with AI chatbots

• Business Insider: Sam Altman wants to make AI like a 'super-competent colleague that knows absolutely everything' about your life

• The Economist: Big tech’s great AI power grab

• VentureBeat: Nvidia’s DrEureka outperforms humans in training robotics systems

• The Verge: Microsoft needs some time to ‘refine’ updates for Copilot AI in Windows

• VentureBeat: OpenAI partners with Stack Overflow to make models better at coding

• WSJ: Rocket Cos. Taps Former Thomson Reuters Exec to Lead Companywide AI Efforts

• VentureBeat: Meta’s new multi-token prediction makes AI models up to 3X faster

• TechCrunch: X launches Stories, delivering news summarized by Grok AI

• TechCrunch: Why RAG won’t solve generative AI’s hallucination problem

• VentureBeat: Puzzle leverages AI and machine learning to automate accounting for startups

• VentureBeat: Hugging Face launches LeRobot open source robotics code library

• WSJ: For AI, a Few Seconds of Power Becomes a Booming Business