The AI Pulse

Issue #14 — 23rd December 2024

Editor: Alan Brown

Welcome to the latest edition of The AI Pulse for Digital Leaders. An expertly curated collection of essential articles, commentaries, and news stories from reputable sources. Do you know anyone who might be interested in AI Pulse. Have some news or looking to partner? Just get in touch at: [email protected]

Highlights in this edition include:

Does the new OpenAI o3 model take us close to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)?

The UK government seeks to balance copyright protection and AI development.

Can Small Language Models (SLMs) beat their bigger, resource-intensive cousins ?

AI for Good

IEEE Spectrum reviews how an Indian group has built tools to help with diagnosis and treatment of the world's largest Tuberculosis epidemic.

The Ada Lovelace Institute director reflects on their work in the last year and a looks ahead to 2025.

New Scientists asks, is AI finally ready to replace your doctor?

Bias and Ethics

WIRED is following every copyright battle involving the AI industry and has created really cool visualizations that will be updated as the cases progress.

UKAuthority report that DSIT has set out how government departments and agencies let the public know how they are making use of AI.

ComputerWorld reports on the “hidden underbelly of AI” and the lawsuit accusing Scale AI of exploiting the workers to whom it outsources processing of AI training data.

Cyber Security

The Center for AI Safety (CAIS) discuss their most important projects from the year.

The Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) has published a comprehensive report exploring organisations’ emerging practices and challenges assessing AI risks.

What are the risks and benefits of ‘AI agents’? The World Economic Forum provides some opinions.

Data & Decision Making

CIO Magazine contrasts the views of business leaders who believe their data is primed for AI, and IT practitioners who spend hours every day beating data into shape, only to miss out on automation opportunities.

SingularityHub explores how AI is disrupting’ book publishing and looks at Microsoft’s new book publishing imprint, 8080 books .

Innovation & Collaboration

OpenAI announced its new o3 models. OpenAI makes the remarkable claim that o3, at least in certain conditions, approaches AGI — with significant caveats.

Ethan Mollick describes why he thinks the wave of current AI announcements are genuine breakthroughs that will reshape AI's (and maybe our) future.

TechRepublic reports that the EU has selected sites for 7 “AI factories” — specialised research and development centres using the region’s most powerful supercomputers. The factories will be based in Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Spain, and Sweden.

According to VentureBeat, Google’s AI focus for 2025 will be AI agents, multimodal AI, and enterprise search.

Productivity & Efficiency

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has released a detailed report on the Uses, Opportunities, and Risks of AI in Financial Services.

MIT Initiative in the Digital Economy (IDE) explores how AI-empowered ‘Citizen Developers’ are helping to drive digital transformation in a new book.

The US bipartisan House of Representatives Task Force on AI has released a 273 page AI report offering a wide variety of recommendations. But, CIO Magazine asks whether they are too broad and diffuse to be helpful to enterprises.

Regulation and Compliance

As reported in ComputerWorld, the UK government launched a consultation on AI copyright, proposing to reform UK copyright law to give copyright holders' more control of their content from AI training while also supporting UK AI developers to have lawful access to high-quality data.

An IBM article discusses how to enhance regulatory compliance in the AI age by grounding documents with GenAI.

TechRepublic reports that the EU has now provided guidance on how AI developers can obey privacy laws.

If your AI-generated code becomes faulty, who faces the most liability exposure? ZDNET considers the issues.

Sustainability

MIT Technology Review believes that AI’s search for more energy is growing more urgent as AI demands even larger amounts of energy.

Sustainability Magazine talks to Kendra DeKeyrel, Vice President in IBM’s Sustainability Software division, who gives her predictions on AI’s use for sustainability in the year ahead .

The World Economic Forum considers how AI is driving the circular transformation of industries to unlock economic value.

Is the use of Large Language Models (LLMS) overkill? TechRepublic considers how Small Language Models (SLMs) can beat their bigger, resource-intensive cousins.

User Experience

Wired believes that GenAI still needs to prove its usefulness as more people ask what GenAI is really good for. So far, no one has a decent answer.

McKinsey considers the case for improving human-centered AI.

O’Reilly is experimenting with audio book summaries and has taken five books, generated short podcasts summarizing each with both NotebookLM and its new toolchain, and posted both sets on oreilly.com.

Workforce & Skills

CDDO announced that over 70 new AI e-learning courses have been released on the Civil Service Learning platform in response to departments’ increasing use of AI and the pace of change in AI technology.

Microsoft’s new Future of Work Report 2024 emphasises lessons learned from real-world use of AI and offers insight into how AI tools are shaping work in practice.

Wired sees AI evolving into an organisational strategy with teams combining both human and artificial intelligence to succeed.

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