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- #36 Secret Bilderberg Meeting with AI focus
#36 Secret Bilderberg Meeting with AI focus
AND: Meta changes the game with their new AI chips
The AI Plug
May 19, 2023
From secret meetings in Portugal to OpenAI’s new iOS app - this issue’s stacked.
We hope you’ve got a banger of a weekend lined up, whether that’s a relaxed slow one, or a wild one.
For now, let’s dive into what’s happening in AI. There’s lots.
In today’s newsletter:
Top News: Meta’s AI chips, Bilderberg meeting, and tens of thousands of workers losing their jobs to AI
TL;DR Rundown: Climate-change AI gets funding, France makes an Olympic AI announcement, and people can make their own narratives now
Tool of the day: 30-second website builder
What do you think? Should governments train us about AI or not?
Monthly flavor: Or probably not
Top News 🔝
Three biggest stories if you’re in a rush
Computer chips are the work-horses driving the current AI storm, and until now, everyone, bar no one, wanted Nvidia’s products. They were the only chips capable of powering the LLM models behind generative AI tools like Midjourney and GPT. That’s all set to change. In a recent announcement, one that has investors all ears, Meta is talking publically about their latest development:
“Custom computing chips to help with AI and video-processing tasks..products better than anything commercially available at the moment.”
Meta says that in the spirit of their “year of efficiency,” which is seeing at least 21,000 layoffs and significant cost-cutting, they’re focusing on more energy-efficient techniques. One of the newly-announced chips, the Meta Scalable Video Processor chip (MSVP), processes and transmits 4 billion videos to users per day, while cutting down energy requirements - another chip, the Meta Training and Inference Accelerator, (MTIA), helps an already-trained AI model make predictions or take actions.
As VP of infrastructure, Alexis Bjornlin told CNBC:
“If you look at what we’re sharing - our first two chips that we develop - it’s definitely giving a little bit of a view into what we’re doing internally. We don’t need to advertise this, but the world is interested.”
If these chips are as good as Meta is touting, it’ll be yet another multi-billion dollar revenue stream for the company. Never count Meta out. Never.
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Held behind closed doors and under “Chatham House rules,” (meaning information disclosed during the meeting can be reported by those present, but the source can’t be identified), the 69th annual Bilderberg Meeting in Lisbon, Portugal, is to see 130 participants from 23 countries attend the 3-day meeting this weekend which aims to “foster dialogue” between Europe and North America.
Joining former Secretary of US State Henry Kissinger, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, and other politicians and CEOs will be OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, and key leaders from other giant tech companies, including Microsoft and Google. AI is set to be a key topic for discussion at the meeting, amongst other topics, such as banking systems, China, energy transitions, Ukraine, and US leadership. We can only speculate as to the nature of discussions, however AI alignment will likely be high on the list.
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“AI won’t replace our jobs,” they said.
Seems not so. British Telecom, the UK’s largest broadband and mobile provider, currently employs around 130,000 workers - nearly half of whom will lose their jobs over the next five years:
“Whenever you get new technologies, you can get big changes…AI will make services faster, better, more seamless, and by the end of the 2020s, BT will have a much smaller workforce,” said CEO Philip Jansen.
Vodafone, another mobile provider in the UK, has also announced a tenth of its staff, around 11,000 people, will lose their jobs in the next three years. And this is just the beginning.
TL;DR Rundown 🐂
Summary of note-worthy trending articles
UK-based audio journalism app Curio has announced the launch of ‘Curio AI,’ which will let users create personalized audio episodes based on their own prompts. Talk about living in a world of our own😬 (link)
Climate risk startup Mitiga gets $14.4M to help businesses face an uncertain future. (link)
Beijing calls on cloud providers to support AI firms. (link)
French court’s approval of the Olympics AI surveillance plan fuels privacy concerns. (link)
Schumer meets with bipartisan group of senators to build a coalition for AI law. (link)
“The Creator” has John David Washington battling rogue AI. (link)
Webex meetings will use AI tools to help speech-impaired users communicate. (link)
Google, Meta, and Amazon’s next frontier is AI-generated advertisements. (link)
Stability AI open sources its AI-powered design studio. (link)
Grammarly wants to expand its AI from the classroom to the office. (link)
Staffing startup Instawork raises $60M to expand AI tech. (link)
AI is great at one thing: driving the next wave of layoffs. (link)
Yellow AI launches YellowG, a generative AI platform for automation workflows. (link)
Meta built a code-generating AI model similar to Copilot. (link)
Meta and Google news adds fuel to the open-source AI fire. (link)
Tool of the Day ⚒️
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If you’ve got an idea and want to get it off the ground, I can’t recommend this tool highly enough. A serious game-changer and motivator.
What Do You Think?
With AI Taking Jobs, Italy is Looking to Help Retrain Workers
Italy was the first country to announce a ban of ChatGPT. In a recent announcement, the Fondo per la Repubblica Digitale (FRD), has pledged $33M to help improve the skills of unemployed people to help them get a better basic digital understanding.
It’s again one of the first governmental moves we’re hearing of where establishments are seemingly trying to shield their citizens from the looming AI job crisis. It’s better than nothing but seems somewhat redundant.
What are your thoughts? Are governments responsible for re-training citizens in the face of the AI takeover? Or does it fall to our own initiative to educate ourselves?
We’ve Seen That Look Before
Hardly the ‘flavor of the month,’ it seems AI is here to stay
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