AI-podden

This week, guest host (Sifted's) Mimi Billing and Ather discuss November's AI news updates. Topics include; OpenAI’s Slush presentation, which revealed both innovation and cultural challenges, and the diminishing returns of AI scaling laws. They explore the rise of specialized models, new players like Gemesis and Mistral, and OpenAI's ChatGPT search feature. The episode also examines AI’s growing role in medicine, highlighting its diagnostic potential alongside concerns about biases and reliability, while reflecting on the balance between rapid progress and persistent challenges in AI development.

Christian Guttmann, Executive Director of the Nordic AI Institute, discusses AI as both a philosophical aspiration and a practical tool. He highlights applications like personalized banking recommendations and data querying with large language models but notes their limitations in reasoning and understanding. Advocating for hybrid AI models and richer data, he emphasizes the need for multimodal approaches that integrate various forms of input, such as speech and gestures, to advance AI capabilities. He also warns that Europe risks falling behind in AI development without greater investment and bold innovation.

This week we welcome back; Reggie Townsend, Vice President of Data Ethics at SAS Institute and member of President Biden's National AI Advisory Council. We discussed AI development and regulation in the US. He stressed balancing innovation incentives with government restraint and cited the CHIPS Act as key for AI infrastructure, though most investments are private. He highlighted that AI trustworthiness varies, suggesting risk-based assessments. Townsend underscored the importance of AI education and common standards. On regulation, he noted a risk-focused, citizen-protective approach with inevitable dissent. Lastly, he urged AI to remain a bipartisan issue, avoiding politicization similar to electricity, with current bipartisan support.

This episode, recorded live, at the third installment of AI-Podden live at Epicenter, features Ingrid af Sandeberg, Strategic Advisor at Epicenter and Chairman of the board at Stockholm AI. She joins Ather & Mimi on the stage to discuss AI trends and tools, including Notebook LM, highlighting the shift toward smaller, specialized models like those on Hugging Face. She emphasizes the challenges of regulating AI in rapidly evolving fields and advocates for outcome-based regulations. Despite Sweden's strong AI expertise, she notes a slow adoption rate and calls for better collaboration between AI experts, domain professionals, and regulators.

This episode, recorded live, is the third installment of Ather and Mimi's special news updates at Epicenter Stockholm. They discuss Elon Musk's We, Robot controversy, OpenAI's $6.6 billion funding round, and AI limitations like pattern matching. They also highlighted neurosymbolic AI’s potential, Nobel winners in machine learning, and the rapid adoption of generative AI tools, and noted the unreliability of current AI agents and the promise of Google’s Notebook LM.

Ted Schönbeck, Nordic CTO, Google Cloud discusses the current and future landscape of AI, emphasizing its ability to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, with machine learning allowing systems to learn independently. Google, an "AI-first" company since 2016, has integrated AI into products like Maps and Search. Schönbeck highlights recent advancements in large language models and generative AI, particularly the use of large token windows for analyzing extensive datasets and the rise of multimodal AI, which processes diverse data types like text, images, and audio. He also addresses the challenges businesses face in scaling AI, recommending fine-tuned, specialized models over generalized large ones.

This episode features special guest, Tom Sodestrom, AWS Enterprise Strategist, speaking on the latest trends in AI and edge computing. Tom shares his insights on the upcoming trends in the next 5-10 years, including the rise of generative AI, increased data volume and importance, productive edge computing, and digital twins and simulation at scale.

This episode, recorded live, is the second installment of Ather and Mimi's special news updates at Epicenter Stockholm. They discuss OpenAI and concerns about its shift from research to product development, as well as AI advancements in math reasoning by DeepMind and OpenAI’s new "Strawberry" model. The hosts also touch on Sam Altman's Worldcoin project and the intersection of blockchain, crypto, and AI. Autonomous vehicle progress is covered, particularly Uber's partnership with Wave, while an AI safety issue at Sakana AI raises concerns about system control. Lastly, they explore NVIDIA's growth and share a fun AI project predicting pole vaulter Armand Duplantis’ potential record-breaking jumps.

This week, guest host (Sifted's) Mimi Billing and Ather discuss June's AI news updates. Topics include Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI over a nonprofit agreement, Anthropic’s Cloud 3 outperforming ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, and major investments in Anthropic by Google and Amazon. They also cover the EU AI Act's approval, marking the first regulatory framework for AI in Europe, and the UN's resolution on ethical AI development. The resignation of Stability AI’s CEO, Emad Mostaque, is discussed in light of the company's financial struggles. The episode highlights the crowded AI startup landscape and the need for innovation. A quick reminder to everyone of our next live recording at Epicenter Stockholm on September 3rd. Sign up at: https://ai-podden-live-at-epicenter.confetti.events/ invite=896d06ea9ecd5f2d0ac122d4cefa8d50c469  Hope to see you all there!

In this episode, Ather interviews Tom Soderstrom, AWS Enterprise Strategist, on his career and insights into innovation and generative AI. Tom shares his journey from Sweden to the US, becoming NASA’s first CTO for IT at JPL, and introducing cloud computing. He emphasises innovation through small, low-risk experiments, or “two-way door decisions,” and the formula of Return on Attention plus Return on Interest leading to Return on Investment. The discussion focuses on the potential of generative AI and the gap between excitement and practical applications. Tom encourages leaders to experiment and continuously learn, likening this to being "technology teenagers", and highlights AI's democratisation and the need for a culture of experimentation to solve real business problems.