Lifeboat Foundation

AI agents are part of the industry’s broader effort to turn the excitement ChatGPT sparked into recurring revenue for a slew of companies that sell such technology.

As many businesses remain cautious about spending on conversational artificial intelligence, AI providers such as Microsoft, OpenAI and Google are racing to make the technology more of a must-have—by introducing new features that can handle complex tasks with little guidance from the customer.

Microsoft, for instance, is making software to automate multiple actions such as creating, sending and tracking a client invoice based on their order history or rewriting an application’s code in a different language and verifying that it works as intended, according to current employees. The new software, which OpenAI’s technology will power, would improve upon Microsoft’s current suite of Copilots, which summarize meetings or draft emails. Microsoft is planning to announce some of these capabilities at its annual Build developer conference next month, two of the employees said.

Continue reading “To Unlock AI Spending, Microsoft, OpenAI and Google Prep ‘Agents’” »

Goldman Sachs said in a report late Thursday that Indian food delivery giant Zomato’s quick commerce arm Blinkit is now more valuable than its core food delivery business, as per the bank’s sum-of-the-parts analysis.

The investment bank estimates Blinkit’s implied value at 119 Indian rupees per share ($1.43) or about $13 billion, while Zomato’s food delivery business is valued at Rs 98 per share. Goldman previously pegged Blinkit’s valuation at $2 billion in March 2023.

Blinkit’s valuation surge is driven by its strong growth potential in India’s fast-growing quick commerce market. Goldman Sachs forecasts Blinkit’s gross order value (GOV) to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 53% between the financial years 2024 and 2027, outpacing the overall online grocery market’s projected CAGR of 38% during the same period.

Cyber attackers are experimenting with their latest ransomware on businesses in Africa, Asia, and South America before targeting richer countries that have more sophisticated security methods.

Hackers have adopted a “strategy” of infiltrating systems in the developing world before moving to higher-value targets such as in North America and Europe, according to a report published on Wednesday by cyber security firm Performanta.

“Adversaries are using developing countries as a platform where they can test their malicious programs before the more resourceful countries are targeted,” the company told Banking Risk and Regulation, a service from FT Specialist.

Humanoid robots have been in development for many years by Japan’s Honda and Hyundai Motor’s Boston Dynamics. Earlier this year, Microsoft and Nvidia-backed startup Figure said it had signed a partnership with German automaker BMW to deploy humanoid robots in the car maker’s facility in the US.

Elon Musk said before that robot sales could become a larger part of the Tesla business. He said, “I think Tesla is best positioned of any humanoid robot maker to be able to reach volume production with efficient inference on the robot itself.”

Successful implementation of GenAI hinges on three main factors: financial value to the organization, availability of key data and impact on the workforce.

Armed with more than $750 million in funding, Brett Adcock vows that Figure will become one of the most important businesses in the world. First, he has a lot of work to do.

The LASSIE project is preparing for a time when people and robots explore space together.

Learn more about how the #space economy can improve life on #Earth from our new insight report, ‘Space: The $1.8 Trillion Opportunity for Global Economic Growth’:

Space is approaching a new frontier. The space economy is expected to be worth $1.8 trillion by 2035 as satellite and rocket-enabled technologies become increasingly prevalent, according to a new report.

Continue reading “Space is booming. Here’s how to embrace the $1.8 trillion opportunity” »

Everyone is in a big hurry to get the latest and greatest GPU accelerators to build generative AI platforms. Those who can’t get GPUs, or have custom devices that are better suited to their workloads than GPUs, deploy other kinds of accelerators.

The companies designing these AI compute engines have two things in common. First, they are all using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co as their chip etching foundry, and many are using TSMC as their socket packager. And second, they have not lost their minds. With the devices launched so far this year, AI compute engine designers are hanging back a bit rather than try to be on the bleeding edge of process and packaging technology so they can make a little money on products and processes that were very expensive to develop.

Nothing shows this better than the fact that the future “Blackwell” B100 and B200 GPU accelerators from Nvidia, which are not even going to start shipping until later this year, are based on the N4P process at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. This is a refined variant of the N4 process that the prior generation of “Hopper” H100 and H200 GPUs used, also a 4 nanometer product.

As many CEOs gloat over the idea of replacing their human workers with AI, some of them are now starting to fear that they, too, may be on the chopping block.

Per a new report from the IT consulting firm AND Digital which surveyed hundreds of business leaders in the US, the UK, and the Netherlands, 43 percent of respondents said they believed AI could take their job as CEO.

Denizens of the C-suite aren’t making a strong case for keeping their positions, either. Embarrassingly, nearly that exact same proportion — 45 percent — admitted to secretly making major business decisions “based on data and information obtained using ChatGPT.” Strong evidence, perhaps, that maybe replacing CEOs with AI isn’t such a bad idea after all.