The Weekly

The Weekly #1

Welcome to the first weekly roundup.

Simon Cooper

Aug 23, 2024 — 2 min read

The Week

Plenty of interesting conversations this week with two core themes of data access and training coming through. A lot of talk in the AI world is naturally centred around the outcomes of AI projects, but the truth is these will never exist without the right data, and the right people having access to it. A vast amount of organisations are retiring legacy solutions and are selecting the likes of Snowflake or Databricks to store their data securely in the cloud, but that’s not a silver bullet and a full data strategy is still needed.

As for training, what is your organisation doing? Do you have a formal process around upskilling staff on AI solutions? Are your teams being educated on the benefits and challenges? And coupled to the first item, do you have any Data Literacy programs? With powerful AI solutions becoming easily accessible, it’s vital that companies are training their staff not only on the potential benefits, but also educating them on the potential pitfalls. You didn’t just paste all your clients’ commercial data into ChatGPT, did you?

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News Items That Caught My Eye

FTC Bans AI-Generated Reviews

User generated content has always been problematic, with suspicions of paid-for reviews, spam and many misleading comments since this feature has been offered. With Generative AI tools making this process even easier to ‘game’ it’s great to see regulation adapting to the latest issues. The new regulation will allow the FTC to seek civil penalties against violators, and deter AI-generated fake reviews.

OpenAI Agrees a Deal with Condé Nast

GPTs have been hooving up vast amounts of data from across the web, which has left many content owners unhappy that their work is being used to train LLM models. In a sign of a maturing market, OpenAI have just closed a deal with Condé Nast that allows to them to use their content for a financial deal.

I suspect we’ll see a lot more deals like this, but it does add furthers costs for OpenAI to cover and puts more pressure on the revenue it needs to generate.

Salesforce Report Suggests AI Adopters Believe an Open Ecosystem Will Be the Norm

A recent report from CRM giant Salesforce, indicates that senior leaders don’t want to be tied into a closed ecosystem. Rather tech leaders are 3x more likely to believe an open ecosystem is critical to implementing AI. Having optionality is always important. Some technologies and partners are better suited to certain tasks than others, and having the ability to select the right one at the right time will be key to success.

Let me know what’s been top of mind for you this week.