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  • 🤖 Apple's secret AI summit - what did they discuss?

🤖 Apple's secret AI summit - what did they discuss?

PLUS: Spotify in hot water over AI training data

Author

Jameson Zaballos
February 20, 2023

It’s Monday.

Let’s start the week off fresh with some AI news.

Agreed?

🤖 Top Stories

👀 Apple holds secret invite-only AI event

So secret internal AI summits are a thing Apple always did? Why did no one tell me this?

But there's still some interesting tidbits we can pull out of this..

Apple held its annual AI summit for employees recently.

There were no new product announcements, so you can breathe now.

Waiting on that Sr Prompt Engineer job posting.

What’s juicy?

Apple did not buy into the generative chat hype.

So far.

Apple’s AI chief told employees that “machine learning is moving faster than ever” and that the talent Apple has is “truly at the forefront.”

Mark Gurman

So they did express confidence in their employees.

This makes sense as they pay a ton of money to ML engineers to make sure Siri doesn't improve.

What could Apple's public AI ambitions be?

Their car project, if it’s even still happening, is quite secret. And contrary to what everyone wants them to do, they’re not creating a search engine to compete with Google. The biggest rumored device - their AR headset - doesn't hinge on AI.

So, for now, this is a big nothingburger - the same event they have every year.

😬 Spotify and Apple in hot water for unauthorized AI training on audiobook data

Whoops. Apple and Spotify are in hot water.

Why? A bunch of audiobook narrators aren’t too happy their voices are being used to train AI models.

Audiobook narrators. Affected by AI too!

A company Spotify acquired shared voice data with Apple for training purposes. The original people who recorded the audiobooks are not happy for two reasons. One, because they felt they were not informed this would happen. And two, because they worry this could put them out of business.

For now, Apple and Spotify agreed to stop sharing the data. This feels like kicking the can down the road, though. If Spotfiy won’t, someone else will.

🤔 CEO at risk of job being replaced says AI will replace many jobs

The IBM CEO thinks that customer service, HR, finance, and healthcare will all be the biggest hit by the AI boom.

He couldn’t comment on how not making any meaningful money in decades was affecting IBM.

bro LOOK AT IT

Anyways.

Is your job safe?

Here's what's at-risk.

1. Customer service

2. HR

3. Regulatory work within healthcare and finance

These range from obvious to optimistic at best.

Obvious: Of course, everyone agrees AI will change customer service. I don’t see how you could make a cohesive argument otherwise. There’s such massive overhead involved in maintaining 24/7 customer service. Modern chatbots suck. Training an AI on a knowledge base and then letting it answer questions in a natural way is a no-brainer.

Maybe: I could see internal audits and processes automated using AI, but I fail to see how AI replaces HR. Is getting information together 90% of their job?

I’m not convinced: Healthcare and finance is a pipe dream to me. I’ve yet to see a convincing case beyond “law is a set of rules that AI can follow!” but I also don’t know much about the more minute details about these areas. People have been trying to crack healthcare with technology for decades now. The experience hasn’t changed much.

😎 Cool AI links

  1. A very normal horse (via Reddit)

  1. Users are still trying to get to Bing. (via Reddit)

  1. Scale AI building a smart port