The AI Pulse

Issue #7 — 4th November 2024

Editor: Professor Alan Brown

Welcome to the latest edition of The AI Pulse for Digital Leaders. A curated collection of essential articles, commentaries, and news stories from reputable sources.

AI for Good

The Budget this week included £20.4 billion in investment for UK R&D to drive economic growth across a range of areas that are central to scaling AI.

A report from the World Economic Forum considers 5 ways that AI can benefit education .

With so many different perspectives, the Open Source Initiative has issued a definition of open source AI .

Bias and Ethics

What happens when LLMs learn to lie? A CACM article worries that LLMs can be manipulated by bad actors.

Cyber Security

An HBR article explores how AI is making phishing attacks more prevalent by enabling deepfakes.

Google is open-sourcing its GenAI image watermarking system.

A review from Microsoft considers the three AI risks that most affect individuals and organizations: overreliance, deepfakes, and manipulation.

Data & Decision Making

The UK Government is working on creating a National Data Library for public sector data. This is in the recent Budget document.

With AI driving demand for data, we need to understand our data use. This BBC report outlines the carbon footprint of an average day of emails, WhatsApps and more.

Increasing use of AI is raising questions about data ownership and privacy. MIT considers what new models and safeguards are needed to protect user data.

Innovation & Collaboration

Wired has provided a view of the future of robots including Physical Intelligence, a startup that has developed a robot capable of doing household chores.

McKinsey discusses how companies are turning to Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to process LLMs to make their outputs more relevant for end users.

With a lot of focus now on AI agents, Forbes provides an executive overview of AI agents and how they can be integrated into an organisation’s practices.

TechCrunch reports that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes that a lack of compute capacity is delaying the company’s products

Computerworld has declared that 2025 will be the year of the AI PC .

Productivity & Efficiency

A blog from Paul Maltby at faculty.ai considers why public sector procurement requires a serious rethink to deliver on the promise of AI

CIO Magazine reports that CIOs are struggling to implement GenAI .

McKinsey considers how GenAI can provide value for companies. It suggests we need to look beyond efficiency gains

An essay in The Conversation explores what the west can learn from China’s flexible approach to AI.

Regulation and Compliance

Microsoft and a16z, despite their differences, unite in opposition to AI regulation. TechCrunch is not convinced and sees this as an attempt to further their own aims.

The WEF’s AI Governance Alliance's report provides view on balancing innovation and governance in the age of AI.

A discussion published by the OECD reviews national AI policies from over seventy countries to compare their approaches and look for common themes

Sustainability

An article in IEEE Spectrum highlights that AI’s pressure for new data centers is requiring massive amounts of concrete.

A KPMG report looks at how AI is driving a global shift towards a circular economy and its impact in the consumer goods and retail industries.

User Experience

The Verge reports that more than a quarter of new code at Google is now AI generated.

Workforce & Skills

Sage reviews how AI is reshaping the future of Human Resources.

The World Bank considers whether AI will make good jobs harder to find.

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