Nothing is As It Seems

PLUS: Claude for Enterprise

Author

AI For All
September 06, 2024

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Hello readers,

Welcome to another edition of This Week in the Future! Things are never quite as they seem in the generative AI craze. We have a few stories to unpack and determine what they really mean for businesses trying to navigate the landscape. Let’s dive in!

Nothing is As It Seems

Image made with DALL·E 3

If ChatGPT is the popular kid, then Anthropic’s Claude is the cultured intellectual kid with superior prose. However, it’s still just a kid. Now, Claude takes a step towards adulthood with Claude for Enterprise. We’ve got single sign-on, role-based access, audit logs, and cross-domain identity management! Exciting. There’s also a native GitHub integration, so developers can sync repositories with Claude.

In other news, we have yet another stealth acquisition by a big tech company. Amazon has absorbed robotics startup Covariant, hiring its founders and licensing all of its tech. Relevant to this, the UK approved what it deemed a merger of Microsoft and Inflection AI. If you recall, something similar also happened with Google and Character AI. It seems a lot of AI startups can’t survive on their own.

There’s what something seems like on the surface and then there’s what it actually is that paints a more complicated picture. What seems like a boring acquisition is actually a cry for help (by both sides). Amazon needs the talent and tech and Covariant needs to survive, even if it’s as a shell of its former self.

Continuing this theme, Boston Consulting Group conducted a study that seems to indicate that generative AI can expand the capabilities of workers. However, the caveat is that these newfound capabilities do not imply any knowledge acquisition. “The work of nontechnical workers using GenAI is not interchangeable with that of data scientists.” It should also be noted that the experiment was performed exclusively with BCG consultants, BCG sells AI consulting services, and the study was co-run by OpenAI.

I have no doubt that gen AI can supply a productivity boost in certain tasks in the same way a calculator would for any tasks involving arithmetic, but when evaluating the labor market, businesses should be careful not to overestimate “AI skills” on a resume.

Lastly, Elon Musk apparently has activated his new AI supercomputer dubbed Colossus. It supposedly has 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs and was completed in only 122 days. It also might be suffocating Memphis with air pollutants. Some are skeptical of the claims made by Musk because a data center of this size should take a lot longer to build out. I, for one, think Musk is telling the truth. It’s just that his data center is probably a rat’s nest of GPUs on a bunch of racks from Goodwill. I’m sure everything was rushed.

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