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| Welcome to the Inside AI newsletter! Here are today's highlights: - Salesforce leads ~$200M financing round in Hugging Face.
- UN study says AI will augment rather than replace jobs.
- Meta AI model can transcribe and translate nearly 100 languages.
If you find value in this newsletter, please share it with your friends and colleagues. Thank you! Beth
p/beth-duckett | |
| 1 | Salesforce is leading a multimillion-dollar funding round in AI startup Hugging Face, sources told The Information. The round, reportedly totaling around $200M, pushes the startup's valuation beyond $4B. More: - Hugging Face offers an AI software storage and utilization service akin to GitHub for code storage.
- According to The Information, the new funding values the ML repository platform at greater than 100 times its annualized revenue.
- Forbes first reported on the Series D funding round in July, listing Ashton Kutcher's venture capital firm Sound Ventures as the lead.
Zoom out: - Hugging Face secured $100M in a Series C funding round led by Lux Capital in spring 2022. That fundraising valued the firm at $2B, despite making less than $10M in revenue in 2021.
- Hugging Face's machine learning code is leveraged by over 10,000 organizations worldwide, including Google, Microsoft, Intel, and eBay.
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| 2 | | Generative AI is expected to automate portions of people's jobs without completely taking them over, according to a United Nations study released on Monday. The study suggests that clerical roles might face the biggest impact from genAI. 
The findings: The study by the U.N.'s International Labour Organization (ILO) suggests that generative AI is unlikely to completely replace most jobs and will instead augment roles and automate certain tasks, allowing workers to focus on other responsibilities. It compares worries about AI job displacement to historical instances, like the introduction of the moving assembly line and mainframe computers. What the numbers say: The study indicates that around 5.5% of jobs in high-income countries could be automated by genAI, while less than 0.5% of jobs in lower-income nations might be affected. Meanwhile, the occupation most vulnerable to genAI is clerical work, with about a quarter of its tasks highly susceptible to automation. This could disproportionately affect women, as they are more concentrated in the sector, particularly in wealthier nations. Overall, it predicts 3.7% of global female employment versus 1.4% of male employment could potentially be automated by genAI. The bigger picture: The outcomes of generative AI will hinge on its managed diffusion, the paper concludes. It stresses the importance of policies that ensure a fair transition, involving skills training and social protections. Otherwise, there's a risk that only a privileged few countries and market participants will gain from the technology, according to the ILO. | | | |
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| 3 | | Meta unveiled an AI speech-to-text model that can translate and transcribe almost 100 languages. Meta said its Seamless M4T, or Massively Multilingual and Multimodal Machine Translation, is a step toward a universal language translator, like the Babel Fish in "The Hitchhiker's' Guide to the Galaxy." More: - The model does full translations without intermediary text conversion and can handle "code-switching" or language shifts mid-sentence
- It supports speech recognition for nearly 100 languages, speech-to-text translation for ~100 languages, and speech-to-speech translation for 100 input languages and 35 output languages.
- It also handles text-to-text translation for nearly 100 languages and text-to-speech translation for ~100 input languages and 35 output languages.
- According to Meta, the system was built to identify sensitive and "toxic words" that can incite hate or violence.
Zoom out: - Meta is releasing Seamless M4TT under a Creative Commons license.
- It's also releasing SeamlessAlign, a new translation data set with over 270,000 hours of speech and text.
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| 4 | | IBM's CEO, Arvind Krishna, said AI could help address future productivity shortages caused by a shrinking working-age population. Krishna predicts that back-office, white-collar jobs will be the first to be impacted by AI. More: - Krishna said productivity needs to remain steady, or "quality of life is going to fall."
- AI, he said, "is the only answer we got."
- LLMs and other generative AI have the potential to "make every enterprise process more productive," he said.
- "It's absolutely not displacing — it's augmenting," Krishna said. "The more labor we got, especially if it's not human-based at all, we can create more GDP. We should all feel better about it."
- Previously, Krishna has said IBM will pause hiring for particular positions that could potentially be replaced by AI within the next few years, specifically focusing on back-office functions, such as certain HR roles.
Zoom out: - His comments come after a McKinsey Global Institute report found that greater adoption of AI could boost productivity by 0.1% to 0.6% over the next two decades. McKinsey estimates that generative AI could add $2.6T to $4.4T in value across multiple industries.
Q: Do you think AI will augment rather than replace most jobs? Let us know what you think here. 
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| 5 | | Zoom spotlighted its AI advancements during its Q2 FY '23 earnings call on Monday. CEO and founder Eric Yuan said Zoom's "aggressive roadmap" with AI aims to empower its "customers to work smarter and serve their customers better." More: - Yuan discussed ZoomIQ, the platform's AI smart companion. The assistant uses generative AI to automatically provide summaries of meetings, including sessions that a user missed, and can also post the meeting recaps on Zoom Team Chat.
- Its AI Chat compose can draft chat messages and generate responses to colleagues based on context and tone.
- Meanwhile, Zoom Scheduler uses AI and multiple cameras to optimize images and angles of participants during meetings from different locations.
- "All of those generative AI features can make the platform not only more sticky but also more valuable," Yuan said.
Zoom out: - Yuan also touched on a controversy involving the company's use of customer data to train AI.
- Zoom updated its terms of service this month to clarify that it won't use any customer data to train its own AI models or those of third parties.
- Previously, the company said it wouldn't do so without the consent of the customer.
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Term of the Day Total addressable market (TAM), serviceable addressable market (SAM), serviceable obtainable market (SOM): Total addressable market, serviceable addressable market (SAM), and serviceable obtainable market (SOM) are metrics used to gauge market size. Question of the Week Do you share details about your salary with your coworkers? Join the conversation |
INSIDE AI LEADERBOARD (7 DAYS) |
 | AI and technology writer | | Beth is the curator and writer of the AI and Tech newsletters at Inside. With a career in journalism and editing that began in 2007, she has written for publications including USA Today, The Arizona Republic, Arizona Business Gazette, and more. You can reach her at Beth.Duckett@yahoo.com. | | This newsletter was edited by Aaron Crutchfield | |
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