Will AI agents lead us to an AI super app? Fortune profiles Satya Nadella's AI journey; Paris vies for Europe's AI crown; Microsoft goes all-in on AI at Build; OpenAI's very tough week
Inside Meta's open AI research strategy; FT goes deep on Builder.ai; Scale AI secures $1bn in funding; who will become China's OpenAI? Anthropic explores their LLMs inner workings.
I’m writing this week’s newsletter from Viva Technology in Paris where everyone is talking about H, a French startup that has raised $220 million in an initial round from a mix of tech billionaires and VCs on the promise of building AI agents that are capable of reasoning, planning and performing complex tasks. Thanks to Accel, I had a chance to attend a soiree on the rooftop of Publicis Groupe’s Champs-Élysées office where the H founding team talked about their vision of creating a large action model that can automate general tasks and has the ability to be deployed across many business and consumer verticals.
While most of the press coverage on AI agents has focused on business use cases, I wanted to spend some time this week looking at their potential impact on the consumer space in more detail. For many years, the technology industry has been talking about super apps, all-encompassing mobile applications that combine a wide range of services and functionality into a single platform. The term was popularized by the massive success of WeChat in China, which started as a messaging app but expanded to offer services like mobile payments, e-commerce, ride-hailing, food delivery and more.
Several companies have tried to replicate the WeChat model in Europe and North America, to mixed results: Facebook attempted to bundle e-commerce, gaming and entertainment alongside its social newsfeed but the app became too bloated and those efforts were largely abandoned. Uber and Revolut have done a better job, building other services connected to transportation and finance, respectively.
But if startups such as H are successful, I think we could finally see AI-powered super apps becoming a reality. These apps would essentially act as an all-powerful digital assistant but one with profoundly advanced capabilities far beyond current chatbots such as ChatGPT or Claude.
AI super apps could understand text, audio and video inputs and respond to natural language queries with unprecedented depth, nuance and context. These apps could in theory be deployed across smartphones, computers and and other devices to completely automate aspects of daily life.
For example, with access to someone’s emails, messages and calendar, the AI super app could automatically triage incoming requests, schedule appointments, submit expenses or pay bills on that person’s behalf - all based on understanding the full context and personal preferences.
The app's deep language abilities could make it an ideal personalized tutor or job training assistant, able to understand current knowledge levels and learning goals and then develop dynamic lesson plans or hands-on exercises to help build skills in everything from math to coding to public speaking.
Super AI apps could also address existing limitations in connected home devices; with enough third-party integrations, the app's ambient intelligence could make our living environments and day-to-day routines dramatically more efficient and seamless.
The core question is how to build aligned AI systems that can reliably understand what humans actually want, and carry out a wide variety of tasks in safe and trusted ways that respect human values.
Get that right, and you could radically improve human quality of life while creating amazing economic opportunity.
Get it wrong, and you could have glue on pizza for dinner.
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
Reuters: Paris vies for Europe's AI crown as key conference beckons
WSJ: I Tried Microsoft’s New AI-Focused PCs. Windows Is Exciting Again.
Bloomberg: Microsoft Unveils New AI Software, Devices as It Battles Apple, Google
Also, from Microsoft’s Build event on Tuesday:
VentureBeat: Microsoft introduces Phi-Silica, a 3.3B parameter model made for Copilot+ PC NPUs
VentureBeat: Microsoft makes Phi-3 generally available, previews its Phi-3-vision multimodal small language model
VentureBeat: Microsoft teams with Khan Academy to make its AI tutor free for K-12 educators and will develop a Phi-3 math model
VentureBeat: GitHub debuts Copilot Extensions, plugin support connecting third-party apps with Copilot Chat
VentureBeat: Microsoft’s AI chief: Why AI should be emotionally intelligent and how it’ll create the next 1,000 Einsteins
VentureBeat: Microsoft’s Team Copilot is a virtual team member that can run meetings and projects
VentureBeat: Microsoft Copilot Studio will let developers build AI bots that act like agents
The Verge: Microsoft Surface event: the 6 biggest announcements
VentureBeat: HP debuts Qualcomm-based laptops/PCs to usher in the personalized AI era
VentureBeat: Acer announces the Swift 14 AI laptop, its first Copilot+ PC
The Verge: Samsung’s first Copilot Plus PC comes with a free TV
WSJ: Facebook Parent’s Plan to Win AI Race: Give Its Tech Away Free
Washington Post: These ISIS news anchors are AI fakes. Their propaganda is real.
Wired: AI Is a Black Box. Anthropic Figured Out a Way to Look Inside
The Information: Tencent, Alibaba Place Bets on Startups Racing to Become China’s OpenAI
Wired: Google Taps AI to Show Shoppers How Clothes Fit Different Bodies
The Atlantic: OpenAI Just Gave Away the Entire Game
FT: Meta AI chief says large language models will not reach human intelligence
WSJ: From RAGs to Vectors: How Businesses Are Customizing AI Models
FT: Builder.ai: The wild ride of a Microsoft-backed tech unicorn
⚙️Computer does
AI in the wild: how artificial intelligence is used across industry, from the internet, social media, and retail to transportation, healthcare, banking, and more
9to5Google: Gemini finally lets you play YouTube Music with extension rollout
MIT Technology Review: Noise-canceling headphones use AI to let a single voice through
TechCrunch: Spotify experiments with an AI DJ that speaks Spanish
Business Insider: Cisco's AI-powered approach to hiring top talent is attracting 'quiet candidates' and making recruitment faster
TechCrunch: Truecaller partners with Microsoft to let its AI respond to calls in your own voice
The Verge: Recall is Microsoft’s key to unlocking the future of PCs
BBC: These elephants are dying on rail tracks - can AI save them?
Business Insider: The RealReal is using AI to find fakes
The Telegraph: Cancer-detecting AI to be offered to all hospitals in England within weeks
🧑🎓Computer learns
Interesting trends and developments from various AI fields, companies and people
Business Insider: Former Facebook engineer says coding with an AI copilot is like working with a 'demigod'
TechCrunch: Arc Search’s new Call Arc feature lets you ask questions by ‘making a phone call’
Bloomberg: Alphabet, Meta Offer Millions to Partner With Hollywood on AI
Bloomberg: A Tiny Mediterranean Island Wants a Piece of the Global AI Frenzy
Business Insider: The law firm Gowling WLG created an AI-powered tool to tackle brand infringement — it could be a game changer
VentureBeat: Ideogram Tile brings AI-generated patterns to the masses
VentureBeat: Cohere launches open weights AI model Aya 23 with support for nearly two dozen languages
VentureBeat: Inworld AI launches Inworld Voice to generate game character voices
Business Insider: Microsoft is planning AI computing resources for a LinkedIn 'Copilot,' internal document shows
BBC: Scarlett Johansson's AI row has echoes of Silicon Valley's bad old days
CNBC: Amazon plans to give Alexa an AI overhaul — and a monthly subscription price
TechCrunch: TikTok turns to generative AI to boost its ads business
Bloomberg: Meta’s Zuckerberg Creates Council to Advise on AI Products
Reuters: Sam Altman's OpenAI signs content agreement with News Corp
VentureBeat: Meta introduces Chameleon, a state-of-the-art multimodal model
TechCrunch: Granola debuts an AI notepad for meetings
TechCrunch: Stack AI wants to make it easier to build AI-fueled workflows
TechCrunch: WitnessAI is building guardrails for generative AI models
The Verge: Elon Musk’s xAI is working on making Grok multimodal
Bloomberg: Microsoft’s Satya Nadella Wants Us to Stop Treating AI Like Humans
TechCrunch: Adobe brings Firefly AI-powered Generative Remove to Lightroom
The Atlantic: The Big AI Risk Not Enough People Are Seeing
Reuters: IBM makes more AI models open source and lands Saudi Arabia deal
The Guardian: Productivity soars in sectors of global economy most exposed to AI, says report
Business Insider: OpenAI cofounder says artificial general intelligence is coming fast — and needs some 'reasonable limits'
Business Insider: Former Google employee says company's AI work is driven by 'a stone cold panic that they are getting left behind'
Reuters: Chinese tech giants slash prices of language models used to power AI chatbots
MIT Technology Review: AI models can outperform humans in tests to identify mental states
TechCrunch: Jolla debuts privacy-focused AI hardware
TechCrunch: ChatGPT’s mobile app revenue saw its biggest spike yet following GPT-4o launch
Bloomberg: JPMorgan Says Every New Hire Will Get Training for AI
VentureBeat: Kyndryl and Nvidia team to enable and accelerate enterprise generative AI adoption
TechCrunch: Hollywood agency CAA aims to help stars manage their own AI likenesses
FT: China’s ‘AI-in-a-box’ products threaten Big Tech’s cloud growth strategies
Bloomberg: TikTok-owner ByteDance takes the lead in the race to have China’s most popular ChatGPT-like app
Reuters: Dell deepens AI push with new PCs, Nvidia-powered servers
The Telegraph: How to survive in pop? Create a deepfake version of yourself
Business Insider: The AI revolution is here. What does it mean for the future of business?
Business Insider: OpenAI founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman go on the defensive after top safety researchers quit
FT: Artificial intelligence companies seek big profits from ‘small’ language models
Reuters: Microsoft offers cloud customers AMD alternative to Nvidia AI processors
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