Welcome to the AI Ecosystem Report, featuring practitioner analyst and entrepreneur Toni Witt. This series is intended to deliver the timely intelligence about artificial intelligence (AI) you need to get up to speed for an upcoming client engagement or board meeting.
Highlights
Innovation (00:38)
A consortium of companies has joined forces to understand how AI is impacting their workforce and the larger labor market. The World Economic Forum predicts that 83 million workers are going to be displaced by overall digitization, but 69 million jobs will be created that require new AI-related skills. In the face of this, many companies are taking action to rescale their own workforces and support the overall labor market.
Some of the companies that are part of the consortium include Cisco, Accenture, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, SAP, Indeed, and Eightfold. They are evaluating around 60 of the most common roles within IT and providing detailed training recommendations on how those jobs can be upgraded in the world of AI.
Funding (03:14)
The Saudi Soverign Wealth Fund, known as the Public Investment Fund (PIF), is looking to allocate $40 billion into the AI sector starting in the second half of 2024. PIF is one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds. Leaders at the Andreessen Horowitz VC firm have noted that Saudi Arabia’s funding environment and rising talent pool is something that tech startups can tap into.
With AI reinventing many industries, this decision is a market-driven, capital-driven decision. But to some extent, it’s a political decision as well; having $40 billion invested in the world’s biggest AI companies is powerful.
Solution of the Week (06:10)
A research team at Google announced a new diffusion model that can generate 3D videos of people with just a still image. The model is called VLOGGER. In contrast to other image to video models, VLOGGER does not require training for each person or identitiy time. The researchers have accumulated a large training dataset called MENTOR, comprised of over 800,000 diverse identities.
VLOGGER’s performance can still be recognized as AI, but it is fairly good compared to other models. The pace of progress in this research area has been proving promising. There will need to be regulations put in place as this technology advances, and it becomes impossible to tell the difference between a real human talking and an AI-generated one.
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