One of the founders of OpenAI has started a new company dedicated to solving problems that don't exist and probably never will: Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence is focused on creating AI that won't try to destroy humanity if it gains sentience.
I have yet to see a coherent explanation for why a system whose “primary goal, if there is one, is to produce human-like text” poses an existential threat to humanity.
Even if that were the case, I think it would be hard to top climate change on the “Humanity-Ending 500.” But what do I know? I'm just a journalist. So I asked expert Chris Penn, co-founder and chief data scientist at TrustInsights.ai, what he thought about the idea of AI wiping out humanity.
“Let me be clear: that's bullshit,” he said.
Penn believes that people making noise about this threat are doing so to distract from the real problems that AI is already creating.
“Now, the reason some people are sounding these alarm bells — and this is tinfoil hat territory — is to distract from the real harms and risks that generative AI poses,” he said. “Specifically, bias and the reinforcement of inequalities that already exist. This is going to create significant structural unemployment and make income inequality much worse.”
Penn said those making the noise have a vested interest they're trying to protect: money.
“The people doing the Skynet apocalypse stuff also happen to be the people who will benefit most economically from AI siphoning off profits and not having to pay wages,” he says, “and so they will be the first to be pushed against the wall and shot when the proletariat decides it's had enough.”
Hopefully Penn's comments are as unlikely as an AI getting into a cage fight with humanity, but I don't think Safe Superintelligence would have any trouble raising funding.
Now, here are this week's AI-powered marketing technology solutions, enhancements, and releases.
- Three Kit Visual Discovery AI capabilities aid in product catalog exploration by providing technical product shoppers with visual prompts they can type in without needing industry jargon, offering products in bundles and appearances that encourage cart creation and multi-buy behavior, and making products “more meaningful” by interpreting personalized text and prompts to make connections based on user intent.
- Ninja Cats The AI Insights Generator is a new feature in our Data and Analytics Platform. The Insights Generator automates the creation of narrative-based summaries, transforming raw data into easy-to-understand stories.
- consumer.ai AdGenius AI is a proprietary, fine-tuned, large-scale language model designed for the AdTech sector. Trained on a comprehensive dataset of high-performing ads from major platforms, the model can be further refined using clients' ad performance data.
- Infobip RCS Google Vertex AI allows users to create RCS chatbots to automate processes and provide personalized support and customized interactions.
- Infosys Infosys Aster is a set of AI-powered marketing services, solutions and platforms that combines modern AI-driven content and creative services, intelligent recommendations from the marketing technology stack and marketing insights to deliver cost-effective campaigns.
- Blockboard BlockAI’s latest version verifies and validates every campaign view counted, reducing wasted ad spend and fraud.
- Stagwell They have added capabilities to their digital marketing applications built using Google Cloud infrastructure and AI services, including Propellers to help in-house creative teams improve the process from ideation to execution, CUE to help marketers combine numerous data sets to better understand companies' customers, Prophet to provide content generation, trending topic tracking and sentiment analysis, and SmartAssets to provide creative asset management, optimization and analytics.
- Earthquake Aura Copilot is a generative AI assistant that can automate content creation, build lessons, and answer sellers' questions. It speeds up and simplifies lesson and playbook creation, tags content and generates explanations at scale, and answers questions like how many sellers completed a lesson or how many sellers viewed a page.
- GrowthLoop Calculated attributes are designed to make it faster and less costly to execute personalized campaigns. Features include: Simplified campaign activation allows marketers to define prompts that represent the relevant data required for campaign activation, such as the total number of purchases made by customers, the total amount spent by each customer, or subscriptions and subscription ID numbers that are about to expire. And Journey Orchestration Enablement allows users to extract only the relevant personalization information they need, send it to all the channels required, and activate it into an integrated cross-channel customer experience.
