• Writing Inc
  • Posts
  • 🤖 Why this key AI partnership will save Amazon

🤖 Why this key AI partnership will save Amazon

PLUS: Why AI forced a publication to shut down

Author

Jameson Zaballos
February 23, 2023

Good morning.

You’re informed on AI today.

Good on you.

Shall we?

🤖 Top Stories

👀 AWS jumps into AI wars

Poor little Amazon felt left out of the AI arms race.

So much so that they teamed up with Hugging Face, a potential ChatGPT competitor, to feel better.

The collab no one was waiting for.

You might not know Hugging Face. To the AI community, it’s a household name.

Hugging Face is THE place to share open source code and models for AI.

All the flashy announcements recently are consumer facing.

AWS wants to try and capture the developer market that’s likely scaling more. They want to be the preferred cloud provider for devs working on hugging face models.

Hugging Face also committed to developing the next generation of their Large Language Model on AWS.

While this deal isn’t exclusive, it shows how much this arms race is heating up.

🤓 AI comes for consultants

Remember how we always say the real AI money is in the boring stuff?

Well, consulting, the most boring profession on the planet, wants in.

Specifically Bain and Co. partnering with OpenAI.

They entered a strategic partnership of sorts. Specifically within Bain’s Advanced Analytics division.

That sounds like the division of consulting that decides it’s cheaper to not feed kids at school lunch.

Bill, listen. I really think you could use AI to shift paradigms, and pick some low hanging fruit with seamless integration.

What this means is two things.

1. Bain has been working with OpenAI services for the past year.

2. Bain will recommend OpenAI services to companies that Bain consults with.

This is big news for stodgy senior vice presidents across the globe.

This strategic posturing should win over executives considering different consulting firms. Nothing more. OpenAI gets a check from Bain, Bain gets a check from other companies.

Coca Cola was a named case study, although they didn’t say exactly what for.

Still, Bain is probably talking OpenAI up a lot.

Given how long it takes big corporations to adapt new tech, they’ll get a lot of billable hours.

😱 AI forces sci-fi publication to shut down

Well, that didn’t take too long.

I recommend reading this entire thread.

Here’s the TL;DR though.

Neil Clarke, editor of Clarkesworld, shut down new submissions for the Sci-Fi magazine.

Low-effort AI-generated pieces are swamping the publication.

These AI submissions are dominated by people outside the sci-fi community. Those people are influenced by side hustle gurus claiming this is an easy way to make some cash.

Clarke drew the correlation by seeing hockey-stick growth of submissions. At the exact same time, he saw the rise of ChatGPT.

We don't have a solution for the problem. We have some ideas for minimizing it, but the problem isn't going away. Detectors are unreliable. Pay-to-submit sacrifices too many legit authors. Print submissions are not viable for us.

Neil Clarke

He’s right, and I don’t envy his position.

How do you verify that a human wrote a submission? Does editing count? What about original idea?

This is the first domino to fall.

It will only get worse for content affected by generative AI.

Are newsletters next?

😎 Cool links

  1. Elon Musk isn’t thrilled with OpenAI’s direction.

  1. Copilot takes off.

  1. AI DJ for Spotify.

  1. AI news feed Artifact is available for everyone.

  1. Notion AI is finally out.

Happy Thursday!