The week in AI: 1984 in 2024

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Welcome to The Dispatch! We are the newsletter that keeps you informed about AI. Each Thursday, we aggregate the major developments in artificial intelligence - we pass along the news, useful resources, tools and services; we highlight the top research in the field as well as exciting developments in open source. Even if you aren’t a machine learning engineer, we’ll keep you in touch with the most important developments in AI.

NEWS & OPINION

Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison, the world’s 3rd richest person, touts an omnipresent AI camera scenario to ensure good behavior

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Oracle co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison recently outlined his vision for an AI-powered surveillance future during Oracle’s 2024 Financial Analyst Meeting. Ellison described a world where AI-powered systems would constantly monitor citizens through an extensive network of cameras and drones. This system would analyze footage from various sources, including security cameras, police body cams, doorbell cameras, and vehicle dash cams. Ellison believes ubiquitous surveillance would lead to improved behavior among both citizens and law enforcement, with AI helpfully providing constant oversight and automated alerts for any issues.

Ellison's vision, perhaps obviously, bears a striking resemblance to the dystopian world portrayed in George Orwell's "1984," with AI systems serving as an ever-vigilant Big Brother. The concept is not merely theoretical at this point; similar automated surveillance systems have already been trialed in the London Underground and at the 2024 Olympics. China has also notoriously implemented AI-driven surveillance of its citizens for years.

Whether Ellison truly believes in the utopian potential of his envisioned surveillance state or is simply positioning Oracle to capitalize on a potentially emerging market is up for debate. In 2021, The Intercept reported on Oracle allegedly using a “reseller network” to funnel their technology to aid the Chinese police and military in surveillance. Oracle’s response, an official blog post, was defensive almost to the point of being eyebrow-raising - and even implied that if other tech companies are involved in similar activities, Oracle should not be singled out.

We’ll leave you with the top comment from Ars Technica’s coverage: “I've read this book before. No thanks.”

Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2: Pages, Python in Excel, and agents

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Microsoft has been busy beefing up its suite of AI-driven tools for business, powered by new features for Copilot (including a performance boost - up to twice as fast on average) while expanding its integration across Microsoft 365 apps. Here are the quick notes on the three major updates announced this week:

• Copilot Pages: ‘Pages’ is designed to be a canvas for multiplayer AI collaboration. Copilot Pages lets you use Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot and pull responses into a new page where they can be edited collaboratively with others. This builds on the work of Microsoft’s Loop, a Notion-like collaborative workspace with integration into Teams, Outlook, etc.

• Improvements to Copilot in 365 apps: Copilot in Excel is now generally available. That means you can look up spreadsheet formulas, add filters or split text, highlight required important information with formula based conditional formatting, and generally automate some of the more repetitive Excel-based tasks. Copilot can execute formulas and formatting - while providing steps and explanations for its thinking along the way.
  
  Microsoft also announced Copilot with Python in Excel (available now for public preview) - no coding required. This integration allows Excel users to leverage Python's advanced data analysis libraries and machine learning capabilities directly within spreadsheets. Users can now perform complex statistical analyses, create custom data visualizations, and implement predictive models using natural language prompts in Excel.
  
  There’s also enhanced direct Copilot integration into Teams, PowerPoint, Word, Outlook, and OneDrive - many features are generally available now, but some of the proposed features will continue to roll out through the end of 2024. It’s worth noting here that early adopters of the Copilot integration into these apps have given it a lukewarm reception. Hopefully this update and Microsoft’s continued development make them more useful and reliable.

• Agents in Copilot Studio: Agents are AI assistants designed to automate and execute business processes, working with/for humans. Copilot Studio now lets you create AI agents that integrate with Microsoft 365 Copilot. The new simplified experience in Copilot Studio allows users of any skill level to create Copilot agents from within SharePoint and BizChat. These agents can access organizational data, perform business tasks, and enhance Copilot's capabilities for business-specific needs. The platform also provides centralized controls for managing agents’ behavior. Over 50,000 organizations have used Copilot Studio to-date.

Runway’s generative AI goes to Hollywood

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Lionsgate, the film studio known for franchises like "The Hunger Games" and "John Wick," has announced a partnership with Runway, one of the leading AI video generation startups. The collaboration aims to develop a custom video generation model trained on Lionsgate's extensive proprietary content library. It will be designed to generate cinematic video content that can be further refined using Runway's suite of tools, potentially streamlining both pre-production and post-production processes for filmmakers and creative teams.

The partnership marks a significant, if controversial, step in the integration of AI technology within the film industry. Lionsgate views AI as a tool to augment and enhance its current operations, with several filmmakers already expressing interest in its potential applications. Meanwhile, Runway is considering ways to offer similar custom-trained models as templates for individual creators, potentially democratizing access to AI-powered filmmaking tools. As the first major collaboration between an AI startup and a Hollywood studio, the success or failure of this venture could set a precedent for the future of AI in film production, especially in light of ongoing discussions about AI's role in the creative industries.

In February, filmmaker Tyler Perry made headlines when he decided not to build his $800m studio expansion after seeing what OpenAI’s video generator, Sora, could do.

MORE IN AI THIS WEEK

• New York Times: AI pioneers call for protections against ‘catastrophic risks’

• Ban warnings fly as users dare to probe the “thoughts” of OpenAI’s latest model

• Slack is turning into an AI agent hub. Should it?

• Intel moves to spin out foundry business, inks AI chip deal with AWS

• The “Godmother of AI” wants everyone to be a 3D AI world builder - World Labs comes out of stealth with $230m in funding

• OpenAI's huge valuation hinges on upending corporate structure

• A large-language-model trial got conspiracy theorists to question their convictions, with effects lasting for months after brief interactions

• A radical idea to make the UAE an AI innovation hub (destroy copyright law in a ‘sandbox’, let AI companies located there infringe to their hearts’ content)

• California governor signs rules limiting AI actor clones; meanwhile - James Earl Jones' controversial AI decision will (might?) let Darth Vader live on

• Microsoft, BlackRock form group to raise $100 billion to invest in AI data centers and power

• OpenAI revamps safety team, gives independent committee power to block release of new models

• AI tool cuts unexpected deaths in hospital by 26%, Canadian study finds

• Cold war spy satellites and AI detect ancient underground aqueducts

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TECHNICAL NEWS, DEVELOPMENT, RESEARCH & OPEN SOURCE

• PaperQA2: a package for doing high-accuracy retrieval augmented generation (RAG) on PDFs or text files, with a focus on the scientific literature

• How Cognition’s “Devin” (world’s first AI coding engineer) got better with o1

• Mistral launches a free API for developers to test their models

• DSBench: how far are data science agents from becoming data science experts? (spoiler: far)

• g1: Using Llama-3.1 70b on Groq to create o1-like reasoning chains

• The Center for AI Safety (CAIS) and training data startup Scale want to create “Humanity’s Last Exam”, the hardest benchmark for AI models - ever

• SuperSplat: browser-based tool for editing 3D Gaussian splats, a technique used to create realistic 3D scenes

• AI startup Groq to build world’s largest AI inference center - in Saudi Arabia, funded by Aramco

That’s all for this week! We’ll see you next Thursday.