Paul Roetzer’s Post

Huh? LinkedIn Games? This is a thing now?

One clear winner so far in the Generative AI Age is the AI consultancy. While some high-profile VC-funded AI startups struggle to find markets and revenue (e.g. Inflection, Stability, Adept), IBM, Accenture, BCG, McKinsey, and KPMG are making bank advising on AI strategies and integration solutions. In Episode 104 of The Artificial Intelligence Show, we explore what’s driving AI consulting growth, why enterprises are turning to outside advisors for help, and what we’re learning about AI adoption across industries. Plus, we consider a rather bizarre future of work laid out by Zoom CEO Eric Yuan on the Decoder podcast with Nilay Patel. Yuan envisions our digital twins / AI avatars attending meetings, and making decisions, on our behalf in the coming years. Now he doesn’t have a clear plan for how it will happen, but he is definitely steering Zoom in that direction. I had a lot of thoughts about this one . . . Timestamps 00:03:31 — AI Consultants Success from the AI Boom 00:16:04 — AI Needs to Make Money 00:30:47 — Zoom’s CEO on the Future of Work 00:41:00 — Google’s Gemma 2 00:46:12 — OpenAI’s 2023 Security Breach Raises Concerns 00:49:50 — Apple’s OpenAI Board Seat 00:52:28 — AI and The Olympics 00:56:47 — Nintendo’s Future Plans with GenAI 01:00:00 — Finding GPT-4’s Mistakes with CriticGPT 01:03:41 — Scale AI’s Business Model 01:09:41 — AI Tech Updates: Runway 01:11:57 — AI Tech Updates: Hebia 01:14:01 — AI Tech Updates: Perplexity 01:16:00 — AI Tech Updates: ElevenLabs https://lnkd.in/gBTNn_na

In summer 2014, I published my second book, The Marketing Performance Blueprint, and shared publicly for the first time my early thoughts on artificial intelligence. I had spent nearly three years at that point working on a vision—and potential product—I was calling a “marketing intelligence engine.” When writing the manuscript I decided to open up my ideas to accelerate AI understanding and innovation. AI was a very small part of the book, but it was the start of all my work today. From Ch. 6: “Algorithms are getting smarter and infinitely more powerful, while automating cognitive tasks in ways never thought possible before. Massive transformation is on the horizon. Jobs, companies, and entire industries will be reimagined.” “Marketing automation platforms save time, improve efficiency, increase productivity, and help manage big data. They give companies unprecedented abilities to understand buyers, identify opportunities, track campaign performance, and link marketing activities to business outcomes. “But they do not provide insight into the billions of bits of data being created as consumers move from screen to screen and interact online and offline with brands. “According to IBM, 90 percent of all data in the world is less than two years old. Humans are not programmed to keep up. And yet, turning data into intelligence, intelligence into strategy, and strategy into action remains largely human powered. “What inevitably comes next are marketing intelligence engines that process data and recommend actions to improve performance based on probabilities of success. Think about it. Are we really that far off from an automated marketing strategy in which the marketer's primary role is to curate and enhance algorithm-based recommendations rather than to devise them? “Humans are limited by their biases, beliefs, education, experiences, knowledge, and brainpower. All of these things contribute to our finite ability to process information, build strategies, and achieve performance potential. “Algorithms, in contrast, have an almost infinite ability to process information. They possess the power to understand natural language queries, identify patterns and anomalies, and parse massive data sets to deliver recommendations better, faster, and cheaper than people can. “Imagine an algorithm-based recommendation engine for all major marketing activities and strategies. The engine will use a potent mix of historical performance data, industry and company benchmarks, real-time analytics, and subjective human inputs, layered against business and campaign goals, to recommend actions with the greatest probabilities of success.” It’s crazy to look back on this 10 years later. So much has changed, and yet, much of marketing and business strategy is still largely human powered. The marketing intelligence engine still doesn’t exist (at least not that I’ve seen), but AI model advancements are bringing us closer than ever before to making it possible.

The Artificial Intelligence Show is back after a two-week break, and it’s a big one! Episode 103 clocks in at just under two hours with tons of updates from Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity, the Pope (seriously), NVIDIA, Toys R’ Us, McDonald’s, Microsoft, DeepMind, WPP and more. Timestamps are below in case you want to bounce around. Otherwise, go to 1.5x speed and let’s get caught up on all the AI news from the last two weeks. 00:09:12 — Claude 3.5 Impresses 00:17:28 — Record Labels Sue Suno and Udio 00:24:08 — OpenAI Updates and Revenue 00:29:08 — OpenAI Buys Rockset 00:30:59 — OpenAI Acquires Collaboration Startup Multi 00:32.40 — OpenAI appoints Retired U.S. Army General to Board of Directors 00:37:37 — OpenAI Voice Mode Update 00:40:29 — Elon Musk Drops Suit Accusing OpenAI of Breaching Founding Mission 00:43:00 — Ilya’s New Venture 00:46:45 — Perplexity Updates 00:56:04 — Should Frontier AI Companies Fund Journalism? 01:01:45 — The AP Fund for Journalism launches 01:05:50 — Pope Francis addresses the G7 Summit 01:08:17 — Political deepfakes top list of malicious AI use, DeepMind finds 01:11:04 — NVIDIA Releases Open Synthetic Data Gen Pipeline for Training LLMs 01:13:33 — Toys R’ Us Branded Sora Video 01:19:43 — WPP unveils AI-powered Production Studio 01:22:19 — Does EU AI Act Require AI Literacy? 01:26:40 — McDonald's to end AI drive-thru test with IBM 01:29:37 — Funding, starting with Mistral 01:31:40 — HeyGen Series A 01:34:29 — Stability AI Secures Significant New Investment and Appoints CEO 01:36:30 — EvolutionaryScale raises $142M for protein-generating AI 01:38:37 — Product Updates starting with Adept 01:42:39 — ElevenLabs Text Reader 01:44:50 — Runway Gen-3 Alpha 01:47:46 — Microsoft Delays Recall Feature 01:49:28 — Microsoft GPT Builder Retired https://lnkd.in/gqJYVFqM

I just got access to Gen-3 Alpha, Runway’s new video generation model that has been getting a lot of buzz on Twitter from early users. Runway states, “It is a major improvement in fidelity, consistency, and motion over Gen-2, and a step towards building General World Models.” A few more notes about Gen-3 Alpha from the Runway site: *  Trained jointly on videos and images, Gen-3 Alpha will power Runway's Text to Video, Image to Video and Text to Image tools. * Gen-3 Alpha has been trained with highly descriptive, temporally dense captions, enabling imaginative transitions and precise key-framing of elements in the scene. * Gen-3 Alpha excels at generating expressive human characters with a wide range of actions, gestures, and emotions, unlocking new storytelling opportunities. You can see my initial Gen-3 Alpha video below. A few notes: * I had ChatGPT generate the prompt, since I’m not very good at text-to-video prompt writing. * It costs 10 credits per second to generate video, and you can generate up to 10 seconds of video. You can buy 1,000 credits for $10, so one credit is equivalent to $.01 USD. Long story short, it costs $1 to generate 10 seconds of video. * Once I entered my prompt (note, I already had a Runway account), my video sat in the queue for ~4 minutes, then it took ~2 minutes to generate the video. * I need to test further with a variety of prompts in order to more deeply compare Gen-3 to Gen-2, which I had previously used. I’ll share more on next week’s podcast episode. Based on this initial output, the improvement wasn't obvious. My Prompt to ChatGPT: i got access to Gen-3 from Runway. create a text-to-video prompt that I can use to test the new model's capabilities. You can learn more about Gen-3 here https://lnkd.in/gkD5T9Pk. Try one of Venice, Italy. ChatGPT Prompt I Used in Runway: “A serene gondola ride through the narrow canals of Venice at sunrise. The camera glides along the water, passing under ancient stone bridges and beside historic buildings adorned with colorful facades and blooming flower boxes. The journey continues through the bustling Piazza San Marco, capturing the grandeur of St. Mark's Basilica and the iconic Campanile. The scene ends with a panoramic view of the Grand Canal, with boats and gondolas gracefully moving under the golden morning light.”

The Artificial Intelligence Show podcast is back next week after a 2-week summer hiatus! It’s looking like a mega episode with more than 50 AI news items currently in the queue to discuss. - Claude 3.5 Sonnet (very impressive) - Record labels suing Udio and Suno - Lots of OpenAI updates - Ilya is back - Perplexity takes some PR hits - McDonald’s ending AI drive through pilot - Toys R’ Us out of nowhere with a Sora-generated ad - Funding news for Mistral, HeyGen, Stability, and more - and lots more Thinking Mike Kaput and I may need 2 hours to get through it all…

Launch days are always energizing. Double-launch days are even better! Today we are introducing two AI initiatives we’ve been working on for years that are both designed to accelerate AI literacy and transformation. 1) Scaling AI Course Series Scaling AI is a 10-course, on-demand series for business leaders. The idea behind the series is to empower internal leaders with the knowledge and resources they need to drive responsible AI transformation. Here’s the Scaling AI course syllabus: - Course 1: Welcome to the Series - Course 2: State of AI for Business - Course 3: The AI-Forward Organization - Course 4: The AI Council - Course 5: The AI Academy - Course 6: Generative AI Policies - Course 7: Responsible AI Principles - Course 8: AI Impact Assessments - Course 9: The AI Roadmap - Course 10: What’s Next? Agents, AGI, and Beyond The courses are now live. You can learn more at www.ScalingAI.com.  2) SmarterX SmarterX is an AI research and consulting firm built to educate and empower leaders to reimagine business models, reinvent industries, and rethink what's possible. * We believe AI will rapidly transform businesses, industries, jobs, the economy, educational systems, and society. The vast majority of professionals and leaders are not prepared for that change. * We believe you can build a smarter version of any business through a responsible, human-centered approach to AI. * We believe the future of all business is AI native, AI emergent, or obsolete.   * We believe AI education and training will be the foundation for success in every organization. * Our goal is to “Accelerate AI Literacy for All.” I originally introduced SmarterX in 2022 as the consulting arm of Marketing AI Institute, and it’s now being spun out into its own company to explore the story of AI beyond marketing: * Where is AI going? * What happens next?  * What does it mean to business, the economy, educational systems, society, democracy, and humanity? * What does it mean to your industry? Your career? * What does it mean to me? My family? My friends? * What can accelerate AI? * What can slow it down? * And, most importantly, what can we do about it? Marketing AI Institute isn’t changing. The company and its team will continue to cater to marketing practitioners and leaders through content, courses and events, including the Marketing AI Conference (MAICON), our flagship annual event. You can learn more about SmarterX at www.SmarterX.ai.

I’ve spent the last few months building Scaling AI, a 10-course, on-demand series for business leaders. The idea behind the series was to empower internal leaders with the knowledge and resources they need to drive responsible AI transformation, rather than hiring us or other consultants to build and iterate their AI roadmaps. This is the type of consulting work leading firms will be charging millions of dollars to do, but we wanted to make it accessible to enterprises and SMBs in order to accelerate AI literacy and action. I've put everything I think is needed to scale AI into these courses. It's been ~300 hours of my time—plus 13 years of AI research prior to that—to bring them to life. The series is packed with a ton of original content, frameworks, and templates—well beyond anything I was planning to create when I started out. As I got deeper into producing the courses, I kept uncovering new ideas and processes that I decided to build into the series. The courses were finalized and recorded in early June, and are designed to give you everything you need to reimagine your career, your business and your industry. The total series length is ~6 hours and includes a professional certificate upon completion. Join us June 27 for the launch webinar—5 Essential Steps to Scaling AI. I’ll share the five steps that are the foundation for the Scaling AI courses. I’ll also introduce a new AI venture I’m launching to expand on our work at Marketing AI Institute. 👀 Here’s the Scaling AI course syllabus: - Course 1: Welcome to the Series - Course 2: State of AI for Business - Course 3: The AI-Forward Organization - Course 4: The AI Council - Course 5: The AI Academy - Course 6: Generative AI Policies - Course 7: Responsible AI Principles - Course 8: AI Impact Assessments - Course 9: The AI Roadmap - Course 10: What’s Next? Agents, AGI, and Beyond Hope to see you June 27 at 12 pm ET! https://lnkd.in/gQZ8KbuJ

In traveling internationally recently, I found myself constantly thinking about Project Astra from Google DeepMind (an expert AI assistant in the demo phase that can see and understand the world through video on a phone camera or glasses). Yes, I know thinking about future AI capabilities on vacation is weird, but hear me out. In a matter of days, I used Google Translate, Google Gemini, and ChatGPT dozens of times to translate signs, inscriptions and menus; assist with conversations in foreign languages; tell me the history of buildings, statues and paintings; and give me background on cities we were visiting. In the not-to-distant future I will just pull up the Gemini app (or talk to Siri or ChatGPT), turn the camera on, and have a conversation about the world around me. Or, if you choose glasses from Meta (or maybe Apple or Google…), you’ll just look and talk. The AI will see, hear, and speak, while understanding the context of time and place, plus all your personal information to enrich the experience. In a weird way, having to upload an image to ChatGPT or Gemini for analysis (as amazing as that is) already feels archaic knowing what will soon be possible. Universal AI agents via an app on your phone (or glasses) with the ability see, hear and understand the world as you view it will have a profound impact on our personal and professional lives in the very near future. We haven’t even begun to comprehend what that will mean to businesses and society. https://lnkd.in/gw4x3Hq8