Lifeboat Foundation

Buckle up folks, the AI wars have arrived.

Hot on the heels of Microsoft announcing its $10bn investment into ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI, Google has entered the fray with news of its own experimental AI. Bard, powered by the search engine stalwart’s LaMDA technology, has now launched to ‘trusted external testers’ and is expected to go live within weeks.

The move comes as the war to dominate the new technological frontier intensifies. The two Tig Tech giants are already rushing to beat one another to the top of the AI mountain, with no signs of slowing. Here’s what’s gone down this week.

With Bard, its newly launched “experimental conversational AI service,” Google is scrambling to ship AI products. But past scandals, botched launches and a talent drain have put it in a surprise position: playing catch-up in a field it helped create.

In 2016, a few months after becoming CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai made a sweeping proclamation: Google, whose name had become synonymous with search, would now be an “AI-first” company. Announced at Google’s massive I/O developer conference, it was his first major order of business after taking the company reins.

What AI-first meant, exactly, was murky, but the stakes were not.

Just when we are getting accustomed to artificial intelligence in our daily lives, get ready for a new disruptor: synthetic biology, or syn-bio, the design and engineering of biological systems to create and improve processes and products. It promises to become a manufacturing paradigm of the future.

Recent advances in molecular, cell, and systems biology have enabled scientists to shift their focus from research of syn-bio to design and engineering, creating some truly mind blowing applications. By using microorganisms, for example, companies can now manufacture an infinite number of things, cell by cell, from scratch. This offers new ways of producing almost everything that humans consume, from flavors and fabrics to foods and fuels.

By the end of the decade, syn-bio may be used extensively in manufacturing industries that account for more than a third of global output, according to BCG Henderson Institute, Boston Consulting Group’s strategy think tank. Various sources estimate that the syn-bio market today is about $10 billion and is expected to reach $30 billion in the next five years.

Amid other A.I.-focused announcements, Google today shared that its newer “multisearch” feature would now be available to global users on mobile devices, anywhere that Google Lens is already available. The search feature, which allows users to search using both text and images at the same time, was first introduced last April as a way to modernize Google search to take better advantage of the smartphone’s capabilities. A variation on this, “multisearch near me,” which targets searches to local businesses, will also become globally available over the next few months, as will multisearch for the web and a new Lens feature for Android users.

As Google previously explained, multisearch is powered by A.I. technology called Multitask Unified Model, or MUM, which can understand information across a variety of formats, including text, photos, and videos, and then draw insights and connections between topics, concepts, and ideas. Google put MUM to work within its Google Lens visual search features, where it would allow users to add text to a visual search query.

“We redefined what we mean to search by introducing Lens. We’ve since brought Lens directly to the search bar and we continue to bring new capabilities like shopping and step-by-step homework help,” Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s SVP in charge Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce and Payments products, said at a press event in Paris.

For artificial intelligence, 2022 was a year of breakthroughs. Image generation models such as DALL-E, MidJourney and StableDiffusion came in early in the year, garnering much attention, and ChatGPT went viral near the end.

Riding on the euphoria generated by these technological developments, about $49 billion in venture capital was invested in AI in 2022 — 40% more than a year earlier, per CB Insights.

Yet, there has been little conversation about how AI will play a growing role in real estate, a more than $50 trillion asset class, and one of the key drivers of the global economy. We believe this represents a significant opportunity for real estate tech entrepreneurs.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted Wednesday that he will present the long-awaited and often teased Master Plan 3 during the company’s investor day March 1.

Tesla’s investor day will be held at the company’s Gigafactory Texas located near Austin. The event will be live streamed. Some of the company’s institutional and retail investors will be invited to attend in person, according to the company. Investors will be able to see its production line and discuss topics like the company’s long-term expansion plans, generation 3 platform and capital allocation with its leadership team, according to the company.

Musk first hinted about the Master Plan 3 last March with vague goals to scale operations at Tesla to “extreme size.” He also leaned into themes like AI and noted that this next stage in the plan would include his other companies SpaceX and The Boring Company. Later in the year, Musk revealed more details about his Master Plan part three. Per a companywide meeting, the plan’s raison d’etre is: “How do you get to enough scale to actually shift the entire energy infrastructure of earth?”

A few weeks.

Discussions about diversity are more important than ever as AI enters a new golden era. Every new technology that appears seems to be accompanied by some harrowing consequence.

A few weeks ago, a founder told me it took three hours of endless clicking to find an AI-generated portrait of a Black woman. It reminded me, in some ways, of a speech I saw three years ago when Yasmin Green, the then-director of research and development for Jigsaw, spoke about how human bias seeps into the programming of AI. Her talk and this founder, miles away and years apart, are two pieces of the same puzzle.

‘One’s pigeon’ means an area of special concern, expertise or responsibility.

And for pigeons, their area of expertise is sorting.

Just as AI systems are trained from large data sets, the birds can use ‘brute force’, or repetitive trial and error – to identify and sort patterns and objects, quickly becoming highly proficient at their task.

Samsung has been on a hiring spree of top executives from reputed companies in the last few months. About a week ago, we reported that Samsung had hired two former Ericsson executives to its Samsung Networks team. Last December, Samsung roped in an ex-Mercedes designer, Hubert H. Lee, to lead its smartphone design team. Now, Samsung has now hired former Qualcomm Vice President Benny Katibian.

Benny previously worked for Qualcomm as the Vice President of the company’s engineering division. After joining Samsung, Benny will serve as the head of the Samsung Austin Research Center (SARC) and the Advanced Computing Lab (ACL), which are the core R&D centers of Samsung Electronics USA, as per Business Korea.

According to reports, Benny Katibian is an expert in semiconductors and was in charge of self-driving systems, including ADAS (Advanced Driving Assistance Systems) at Qualcomm. Later, he also served as the COO of the North American Cooperation in Xiaopeng, a Chinese electric car company. He also worked as the head of the development of self-driving chips.