Restaurants and grocery stores are now using AI to analyze discarded food and cut down on waste. Startups like Winnow mount cameras over trash bins to track what gets tossed, while Afresh optimizes grocery inventory. Why it matters: The system has helped commercial kitchens slash food purchasing costs by up to 8% by shrinking portion sizes or dropping unpopular items.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau just announced a $2.4 billion funding package to cement Canada's position in global AI. The bulk of the funds—$2 billion—will go toward expanding computing infrastructure and launching a sovereign compute strategy, alongside $50 million to create a new Canadian AI Safety Institute. Why it matters: As the race for AI compute tightens worldwide, Canada is doubling down on public hardware investment to keep local talent and startups from heading abroad.
OpenAI reportedly transcribed over a million hours of YouTube videos using Whisper to train GPT-4 after burning through high-quality text data. The New York Times reports leadership knew it was legally risky but bet on fair use, while Google and Meta are similarly scrambling in legal gray zones.
Cisco, Google, Microsoft, and IBM just launched the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium to tackle AI-driven job disruption. Led by Cisco, the group plans to evaluate AI's impact on 56 tech roles and suggest actionable training programs. Why it matters: With tech layoffs continuing and companies openly planning to replace workers with automation, the industry is trying to prove it can reskill the workforce it's disrupting.
Netflix just revealed the cast for Season 6 of its reality competition The Circle, featuring an AI bot disguised as a human player named "Max." The bot will chat, strategize, and flirt alongside human contestants competing for the $100,000 grand prize. It turns the show into a mainstream Turing test to see if humans can catch the bot before getting outplayed.
The estate of late comedian George Carlin just settled its lawsuit against the creators of the Dudesy podcast, who used AI to mimic his voice in an unauthorized comedy special. The podcasters agreed to permanently scrub the hourlong video and stop using Carlin’s likeness or voice entirely. The swift resolution dodges a major legal test around fair use and parody, but sends an early warning against unauthorized AI resurrections.
Amazon just got caught putting a human backbone into its flagship AI checkout tech. A report reveals its Just Walk Out system relied on roughly 1,000 workers in India reviewing about 700 of every 1,000 transactions in 2022. Amazon says the team mostly trains models, but it is already ditching the tech at Fresh stores for smart carts.
Over 200 prominent musicians, including Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, and Katy Perry, just signed an open letter demanding tech developers stop using their work without permission to train AI music models. The coalition warned that unchecked generative AI threatens artist likenesses and risks devastating the livelihoods of working songwriters.
Yahoo just acquired the underlying technology behind Artifact, the AI news app built by Instagram’s co-founders. While the standalone app is shutting down, its personalization and recommendation engine will power Yahoo News and its 185 million monthly readers. Co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger will stay on as special advisors.
Jon Stewart just took aim at Silicon Valley's overblown AI promises on The Daily Show, revealing that Apple previously forbade him from discussing AI or interviewing FTC Chair Lina Khan on his Apple TV+ show. Khan noted that such corporate sensitivity illustrates the danger of concentrating unchecked power inside a handful of tech giants.
Microsoft and OpenAI are reportedly plotting a massive data-center project featuring an AI supercomputer dubbed "Stargate," which could cost up to $100 billion. The system would pack millions of chips, demand gigawatts of power, and potentially launch as early as 2028. It highlights their massive bet on compute, though Microsoft's ultimate green light reportedly hinges on OpenAI actually delivering major model breakthroughs.
NYC Mayor Eric Adams just announced a 90-day pilot to test AI-powered gun detection scanners at subway turnstiles, partnering with security firm Evolv. The move is raising eyebrows: Evolv is under federal investigation by the FTC and SEC after reports revealed its scanners repeatedly mistook umbrellas and lunchboxes for weapons while missing real knives.
Microsoft is preparing to run parts of its Copilot AI locally on PCs to cut latency and boost privacy, according to Intel. The catch? Next-gen AI PCs will reportedly require NPUs pushing over 40 TOPS, a bar no consumer chip on the market currently clears.
The White House just issued new OMB guidance requiring every US federal agency to appoint a Chief AI Officer and set up an internal governance board. Agencies must now submit annual inventories of deployed AI models, conduct safety reviews, and pull the plug on any systems that fail to meet anti-discrimination safeguards.
Amazon just completed its $4B commitment to Anthropic by injecting another $2.75B into the Claude maker. The deal requires Anthropic to rely on AWS and Amazon's custom chips, tightening the cloud giant's grip in the generative AI race against Microsoft and OpenAI.
ElevenLabs just announced a partnership with rabbit to bring its low-latency, emotionally rich voice models to the pocket-sized r1 companion. Users can simply press a button and speak to execute multi-level tasks like hailing rides and ordering food through rabbit OS. Why it matters: natural-sounding voice is the missing piece in making standalone AI hardware feel like a real assistant rather than a robotic gimmick.
Nvidia just swept all seven categories in the latest MLPerf inference benchmarks, showcasing its new H200 chip and TensorRT-LLM software optimizations. Inference now drives roughly 40% of Nvidia's data center revenue. Intel submitted results for Gaudi2 and 5th Gen Xeon, but AMD once again chose not to submit its MI300.
Apple just announced that WWDC 2024 will run from June 10 to June 14. The main event will be iOS 18, expected to mark Apple's official push into generative AI with a smarter Siri, automated summarization, and AI code generation inside Xcode. Why it matters: Cupertino is finally ready to show its AI hand.
Meta is going to extreme lengths to win the AI talent war, with Mark Zuckerberg personally emailing Google DeepMind researchers to lure them away. The company is even skipping interviews to hand out direct offers and scrapping its old rule against counteroffers. Why it matters: High-level AI talent has quickly become the most fiercely contested commodity in tech.
Google's new Search Generative Experience is recommending scam sites within its AI answers, redirecting users to fake giveaways and tech support scams. The issue stems from an SEO poisoning campaign slipping into Google's index, making malicious links look trustworthy in conversational results.
OpenAI is meeting with Hollywood film studios, media executives, and talent agencies to encourage creators to incorporate its Sora video generator into their workflows. COO Brad Lightcap has already hosted initial demo meetings, and select directors and actors have been granted early access. It is an aggressive outreach effort targeting an industry still on edge over AI disruption.
Emad Mostaque just resigned as CEO and board member of Stability AI to pursue decentralized AI. The startup named COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte as interim co-CEOs while hunting for a permanent leader. Why it matters: A sudden leadership shakeup leaves the marquee open-source AI lab looking for direction and stability.
Tennessee just became the first U.S. state to sign off on legislation protecting musicians from unauthorized AI impersonation. The newly signed ELVIS Act explicitly bans mimicking an artist's voice with AI without permission, taking effect on July 1.
Stability AI just lost the core research team behind Stable Diffusion, including lead researcher Robin Rombach and two key co-authors. The high-profile departures follow a string of executive exits, mounting compute and payroll debts, and stalled fundraising efforts, putting the open-source darling under immense survival pressure.
Microsoft just hired DeepMind and Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman as EVP and CEO of a newly created unit, Microsoft AI. He brings along Inflection co-founder Karén Simonyan and core team members to oversee Copilot, Bing, and Edge. The talent raid shows Microsoft is eager to build its own consumer AI muscle rather than rely entirely on OpenAI.
