Read the first story, and think about your reaction.

Are you disgusted, or impressed?

🤖 Top Stories

🚀 Walmart is negotiating vendor deals with AI

Walmart, the kings of cost-cutting, are using AI to negotiate their deals.

Through a partnership with Pactum AI, they’ve automated the heck out of one specific thing. Almost all their vendor negotiation process. All Walmart does is tell the AI “here’s my budget and here’s what I need’. The AI does the rest.

This apparently cut negotiating time from months to days. They’ve used it to negotiate prices on store items like shopping carts - not stuff the Walmart shopper can buy.

Walmart points to cost savings and "improved supplier relationships” as some key wins.

Side note: if you found out you were negotiating with an AI, would you be happy?

They claim it allows them to move at the supplier’s pace.

And even if that experience sucks for the vendor, it doesn't matter. Companies like Walmart have all the power.

Their customers don’t have much of a choice.

😬 This isn’t clickbait, AI can read your thoughts

AI is on the way to reading minds. With a lot of setup and practice.

Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin showed AI translating private thoughts. It did this by “analyzing fMRI scans, which measure the flow of blood to different regions in the brain.”

A breakthrough. Through large language models, researchers took brain activity and mapped it to language.

Here’s an example. The original transcript is audio the participant heard.

100% accurate? No. Preserves the meaning? Yes.

Important caveats: Each model trains on one person. So, my brain activity won’t read the same as yours. Also, the participants could fend off the AI from their internal monologues.

So, we know what you’re thinking. Don’t panic just yet. 

🤓 Box AI combines the best AI tools into one

Another day, another enterprise SaaS startup announcing some killer AI features.

This time it’s Box, the more mature older brother of Dropbox. File storage, but collaborative, and for the enterprise. They've partnered with OpenAI.

Buuuut...Box pulled a Google and didn’t actually release the product. They’ve just announced some key features of Box AI.

• Generate content - Much like ChatGPT, ask it to generate a blog post, product spec, or anything text-related.

• Answer any question about your document - Box has access to all your documents. Now, you can query information from them using GPT.

All this runs a) on GPT-4 and b) with the best security they can buy. Because, you know, enterprise SaaS.

The bottom line? Be careful what SaaS AI app you build. There are tons of “GPT for your documents” tools that are now under threat.

😎 AI tools, tips, links

1. Debug your code with an AI assistant. Learn more

2. Dropbox lays off workers and pivots to AI. Learn more

3. When AI takes control over your physical mail. Learn more

4. A question about AI brings…predictable results. Learn more

5. Use GPT to write your test cases. Learn more

MORE ChatGPT plugins!

🤖 Got feedback for us?

Head over to our Twitter, @RobotRockDaily, and let us know what you’d like to see more or less of.