Artificial Intelligence

Caitlin Kalinowski will lead robotics and consumer hardware at OpenAI, according to a post on LinkedIn. Kalinowski also worked at Apple as a hardware product design engineer.

Jony Ive — also, famously, formerly of Apple — recently confirmed that he’s working with on an AI hardware project with OpenAI.

Utility planning documents show rising costs for customers in some regions of the US as tech companies build out energy-hungry data centers, the Washington Post reports:

“A lot of governors and local political leaders who wanted economic growth and vitality from these data centers are now realizing it can come at a cost of increased consumer bills,” said Neil Chatterjee, former chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Meta wanted to build a nuclear-powered AI data center in the US — until a rare species of bee was found at the site, according to the Financial Times.

Tech giants have inked a string of nuclear energy deals lately to try to meet growing electricity demand for AI data centers.

Disney co-chairman Alan Bergman announced the Office of Technology Enablement in an email seen by Reuters:

The pace and scope of the advances in AI and XR (extended reality) are profound and will continue to impact consumer experiences, creative endeavors and our businesses for years to come - making it critical that Disney explore the exciting opportunities and navigate the potential risks.

Disney CTO Jamie Voris, who helped create the Disney Plus Vision Pro app, will reportedly helm the new division. The company eliminated its metaverse unit last year.

Google’s Gemini will be accessible from the side panel in Google Chat, meaning you can ask for things like summaries or generate action items. Could be a useful way to catch up on things, but you might not want to rely on it too much for important work.

The New York Times profiles AI visual effects company Metaphysic that creates digital masks for human faces like the ones found on Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, and Eminem — rendered in near real-time:

During the filming of “Here,” Metaphysic devised a setup that enabled Zemeckis and his crew to follow the shooting of scenes on two different monitors: one showing the raw feed from the camera of the actors as they appear in reality; and one filtered through its A.I. tools showing the actors at whatever age the scene required.

Jassy, from today’s Q3 2024 earnings call:

We continue to re-architect the brain of Alexa with a new set of foundation models that we’ll share with customers in the near future.

The supercharged Alexa was first announced in September 2023.

What did Ilya see? What is going on with OpenAI’s next big model? Are we getting autonomous agents soon?

All of those questions and more were answered (and artfully dodged) by OpenAI’s leadership on Thursday in a Reddit AMA. I threaded some of the highlights, which include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman alluding to AI as “the transcendent future.”

Researchers at Meta have revealed the Meta Digit 360, an artificial fingertip with “human-level” touch capabilities. Meta says it uses on-device AI to respond to different inputs, like the prick of a needle or the flex of a tennis ball.

I missed this last week, but it’s really interesting. Genmoji technically aren’t emoji, apparently:

Genmojis are not based on any standardized text-based encoding or font system. Instead, they are images with an emoji-like aesthetic generated based on users’ descriptions being fed into an AI art model managed by Apple. 

As such, they aren’t emojis but stickers - just like Apple’s previously released Animoji and Memoji features.

not in 2024 if you were holding out hope. The apparent delay of the AI-infused eXtended Reality (XR) headsets manufactured by Samsung comes courtesy of a slide from Sammy’s official earnings release. Qualcomm’s CEO is particularly excited by mixed reality smart glasses being developed by the partnership, and Google is getting the Play Store ready for whatever does arrive.

CEO Satya Nadella just shared that the company’s AI business is set to surpass an annual run rate of $10 billion this quarter (Q2). He also commented on the state of its relationship with OpenAI, which we reported is straining.