AAIA's AI Beat Newsletter: The week's news, new chapters

In today’s newsletter:

• Recent AI news stories that caught our (and Perplexity AI’s!) eye

• We're thrilled to announce our first AAIA Chapters!

• Become an AAIA member

AI in business and the enterprise news:

• TIME Magazine’s TIME100 Most Influential People in AI 2024. In the introduction to the article, TIME explained: “Ninety-one of the members of the 2024 list were not on last year’s, an indication of just how quickly this field is changing.”

• Here’s what Perplexity AI said were notable news stories over the last week

  • Microsoft introduces AI agents and updates to Copilot 365 apps as the war to make AI more useful intensifies

    • …”Microsoft announced significant updates to its AI offerings for businesses. The company introduced AI agents and new features for Microsoft 365 Copilot. These AI agents are designed to automate and execute business processes, potentially increasing productivity and efficiency in various enterprise applications.”

    • “[Jared Spataro, Microsoft corporate vice president for AI@Work] said that the most popular Copilot feature has been the ability of the AI software to automatically summarize Teams meetings. He said Microsoft realized it needed to find AI features that would produce a similar “spark” with customers across the other 365 apps—“that thing that, now you’ve seen this and worked with it, you don’t want to work without it,” he said. Spataro said Microsoft believed it had now found such “sparks” for Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook and was rolling those out in this latest Copilot update.

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

  • OpenAI Announces OpenAI o1 Model

    • “What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies.”

    • “OpenAI unveiled a preview of OpenAI o1, also known as “Strawberry.” The collection of models are available in ChatGPT and via OpenAI’s API: o1-preview and o1 mini. The company claims that o1 can more effectively reason through math and science and fact-check itself by spending more time considering all parts of a command or question.”

  • Apple Intelligence comes to iPhone, iPad, and Mac starting next month

    • …”Apple announced that Apple Intelligence, the personal intelligence system that combines the power of generative models with personal context to deliver intelligence that is incredibly useful and relevant, will start rolling out next month with iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, with more features launching in the coming months. In addition, Apple introduced the new iPhone 16 lineup, built from the ground up for Apple Intelligence…”

  • UVA Establishes Institute for Ethical Artificial Intelligence

    • “For the Darden School, Dean Scott Beardsley said the new Institute represents an opportunity to combine its core strengths including business ethics, stakeholder theory and technological innovation, and apply them in an enterprise-wide approach to the promise and challenges of artificial intelligence.”

  • AI Pioneers Call for International Oversight

    • “The group proposed that countries set up A.I. safety authorities to register the A.I. systems within their borders. Those authorities would then work together to agree on a set of red lines and warning signs, such as if an A.I. system could copy itself or intentionally deceive its creators. This would all be coordinated by an international body.”

    • “Technology is changing so quickly that is difficult for individual companies and governments to decide how to approach it, and collaboration is crucial, said Fu Hongyu, the director of A.I. governance at Alibaba’s research institute, AliResearch, who did not participate in the dialogue. “It’s not like regulating a mature technology,” Mr. Fu said. “Nobody knows what the future of A.I. looks like.””

• A video in our LinkedIn feed that we had to watch twice:

  • 1,000 AI agents were let loose in a virtual world - what happened next is incredible.

Our first AAIA Chapters: We’ll be sharing more information about these chapters in the upcoming weeks. Email us at [email protected] if you live in one of these cities/regions and would like to get involved!

• San Francisco

• Silicon Valley

• Los Angeles

• Seattle

• Charlotte

• Virginia

• Miami