INTERESTING ENGINEERING SHOP

This week’s AI Logs is coming to you direct from Viva Technology in Paris and AI is everywhere. From the big players such as Microsoft and Amazon through to small start-ups, everyone is incorporating AI in some form.

In previous AI Logs, we have raised concerns over AI’s energy use and the ethics and responsibility in the speed and scale of AI adoption. The promising signs from this event is these issues have definitely been identified by the major players such as IBM.

IBM presented their Ambition 2030, to divide energy cost linked to AI by 1,000. They see this being achievable through improved chipsets designed specifically for AI and through “recycling” AI models; this is a technique IBM developed with MIT in which smaller models “grow” instead of a larger model having to be trained from scratch.

We also heard from Michael Sellitto, Head of Global Affairs at Anthropic, Salesforce’s CEO of AI, Clara Shih and AWS’ VP of AI and Data, Swami Sivasubramanian on how to ensure the trustworthy design, development and deployment of advanced AI systems. It is good to see big tech taking the issue of governance seriously, but there is still some way to deliver on transparency and trust.

But enough of the serious stuff

Viva Tech is awash with start-ups demonstrating new products and applications for AI. Some of the more eye-catching include Yneuro, a neuro-technology and AI crossover, is developing an AI-powered solution that creates music tailored to users' tastes, which are measured through their brainwaves.

AI’s possibilities in healthcare have been shown through Primaa, a med-tech company using AI for automated cancer diagnosis by detecting biomarkers of major cancers and guiding personalized treatments.

Biped have developed NOA, an AI mobility harness for blind people. The harness detects obstacles, follows GPS instructions and explores the surrounding with AI.

AI also looks like it will become a central part of the shopping experience. SoundHound AI demonstrated their conversational voice AI for point-of-sale. Think a drive-through microphone but you are talking to AI.

Vtouch, a Korean natural user interface company, presented a number of new technologies, including their Whisp Ring, an AI assistant in a ring. They hope this will solve voice interface problems, allowing you to communicate with AI even at a whisper.

They also demonstrated their Spatial Touch technology that uses vision AI to detect 3D coordinates of the users eyes and hands, then creates a digital twin to calculate the 3D virtual space around them. This allows for gesture controls, understanding hand gestures without the need for physical contact. Applications they demonstrated included holographic buttons and point-of-sale displays, where a user swipes in the air to see new products or find more details.

And this was just day one. More to come in next week’s AI Logs, but head to interestingengineering.com for more coverage.

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LEXICON PODCAST

In last week’s AI logs we discussed AI’s energy usage and how it was becoming a bottleneck for growth. We got to explore this much more deeply in our latest Lexicon Podcast with Jay Jiang Yu and James Walker of Nano Nuclear Energy, covering the growth of energy demand and how nuclear could be the only viable answer.

AI PICTURE OF THE WEEK

ArtPoint asked three artists to create prompts that replicated their style, then let the public sketch on a tablet. The sketches then rendered in the style of the artist.

TUTORIAL

Discover AI-powered copy and paste

AI is coming to copy and paste through Microsoft’s new Advanced Paste tool in PowerToys. The new tool allows you to use AI to change workflows, for example: copy code in one language and paste it in another.

The new tool is available in PowerToys v0.81 and is activated by using Windows key + Shift + V. This gives the advanced paste conversation options and an OpenAI prompt field where you can request pasting with any features you are used to with ChatGPT, summaries, translation, markup etc.

The only downside is you will need an OpenAI API key and token credits. However, it is likely only a matter of time before this feature finds its way into Windows.