2024 UPDATE!! Altman: prepare for AI to be "uncomfortable" 33% US jobs gone..SKYNET, AI medical advances? BASIC INCOME? 1st AI MOVIE! AI MAYOR!!

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More like this:

• The jobs AI won't take yet
• AI-powered digital colleagues are here
• The human touch AI can't replace
  

Schnickel says John Deere has had many AI tools available to farmers for decades, such as its Autotrac tools, which allow for hands-free combine steering. They're only advancing as technology gets more sophisticated. In 2018, the company introduced See & Spray tech, which "adds AI to the machines" and helps farmers find and remove weeds within crops, and apply herbicides only where needed at an incredibly granular level. That tech has enabled farmers to reduce herbicide use by as much as 66%, says Schnickel, reaping considerable savings. "There's a clear ROI for a lot of this stuff," she adds.

John Deere also unveiled fully autonomous tractors within the past couple years, too. Those tractors, says Schnickel, are the next big step toward a larger vision for farm autonomy, which should accelerate in the next several years. "We have goals by 2030 to bring autonomy to all production steps," she says.

Reaping the AI harvest​

Lowering costs and increasing yields are of obvious importance to American farms and agricultural companies, but the benefits reach far further and could reverberate across the world.

"Improved productivity in the fields means more profit for farmers, a more robust supply chain and lower prices for consumers," says Steven Thomson, the national programme leader of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, Institute of Food Production and Sustainability, USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).

Getty Images

At CES 2024 in Las Vegas, John Deere showed off a wide range of AI-powered agriculture tech, including its See & Spray software (Credit: Getty Images)

"More sustainable practices mean less degradation of natural resources and prevention of ecological damage to our planet," he says. That may include using AI to optimise crop and animal management, which can help weed out diseased animals or plants, increase profits and protect the environment.

The US government also sees the potential of artificial intelligence in farming: they've implemented a number of grants and made investments into AI research institutes focused on agriculture. Thomson says the primary goal of these initiatives is to develop "easy-to-use, AI-aided decision support tools to help land stewards identify win-win choices across environment, economy and society".

Many new tools are incredibly sophisticated, focusing precision delivery of resources, soil surveillance, pathogen contact tracing to improve food safety and robotics that can help with harvesting. Yet investments are driving simpler innovations, too.

Ganapathysubramanian says researchers at Iowa State have leveraged AI to develop technologies such as that pest-identifying smartphone app, which can save them hours of manual labour. The tools in development may also help farmers lower expenditures – a crucial part of making agriculture financially sustainable, especially as the industry already has slim margins.

"AI provides a very natural and profitable tool for farmers to make more profound, localised decisions, hedge their bets and evaluate risks better," says Schnable. Those tools could be deployed at scale and internationally, with relative ease – which makes for a potential exponential increase in crop yields in parts of the world that need it the most, like Southeast Asia. "The marginal cost to deliver [an AI tool] in India is next to zero," he adds. "Once the tools are built, there's essentially no cost to deliver them."

Experts are cautiously optimistic about how these tools, in the hands of farmers on a large scale, will help the agricultural industry fend off evolving threats from the climate, the precarious labour market and more. There's big potential – and the need has never been so urgent.

 

[GnauzBookOfRhymes]

Leaked email shows Amazon is laying off more employees in its advertising business

Amazon extends job cuts in its advertising unit, according to an internal email obtained by Business Insider.

www.businessinsider.com

Marketing/advertising going to get WRECKEDDDD

 

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Leaked email shows Amazon is laying off more employees in its advertising business

Amazon extends job cuts in its advertising unit, according to an internal email obtained by Business Insider.

www.businessinsider.com

Marketing/advertising going to get WRECKEDDDD

amazon invested billions into anthropic of Claude AI and it's just been rated better than GPT-4, it's definitely going to be implemented as a sales and advertising AI cause it's writing ability it's very convincing and not bot-like at all.

Spoiler: thread continued

Spoiler: full text

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Claude 3 model family is designed with specific use cases in mind :

Haiku: Think of live customer chats and auto-completions.

Sonnet: Great for knowledge retrieval and sales automation.

Opus: Outperforms others in reasoning, mathematics and complex content creation.

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no, it's from announcement page: Introducing the next generation of Claude

Spoiler: larger images

 

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‘It’s very easy to steal someone’s voice’: how AI is affecting video game actors

The increased use of AI to replicate the voice and movements of actors has benefits but some are concerned over how and when it might be used and who might be left short-changed

www.theguardian.com

‘A lot of people can’t even envision the extent of disruption there will be in the near future.’ Photograph: Dino Fracchia/Alamy

Artificial intelligence (AI)

‘It’s very easy to steal someone’s voice’: how AI is affecting video game actors​

The increased use of AI to replicate the voice and movements of actors has benefits but some are concerned over how and when it might be used and who might be left short-changed

David Smith in Washington

Fri 29 Mar 2024 06.02 EDT

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When she discovered her voice had been uploaded to multiple websites without her consent, the actor Cissy Jones told them to take it down immediately. Some complied. “Others who have more money in their banks basically sent me the email equivalent of a digital middle finger and said: don’t care,” Jones recalls by phone.

“That was the genesis for me to start talking to friends of mine about: listen, how do we do this the right way? How do we understand that the genie is out of the bottle and find a way to be a part of the conversation or we will get systematically annihilated? I know that sounds dramatic but, given how easy it is to steal a person’s voice, it’s not far off the mark.”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/mar/23/game-developer-conference-layoffs-ai-support

Jones, 45, a voice artist with credits including Starfield and Baldur’s Gate III, was wrestling with the march of artificial intelligence (AI) into video games, increasingly recognised as less a niche pursuit for bedroom-dwelling teenagers than a storytelling platform with almost unlimited potential. Hollywood actors such as Jodie Comer, Idris Elba, Megan Fox, David Harbour and Keri Russell are contributing their likenesses and voices to the multibillion-dollar industry.

Just as in film and TV, only more so, AI represents a gathering storm for video game actors. Some studios are experimenting with tools that can clone voices, alter voices and generate audio from text. In interactive, multi-choice games, this can generate a potentially endless number of characters and conversations – and is far more efficient than asking performers to record huge quantities of dialogue.

The response from professional actors has been mixed. Some fear that games companies – sensing opportunity to cut costs and accelerate development – would use AI to reproduce their voices without permission or payment, pushing down the value of their work. Others have been willing to give it a try if they are fairly compensated and their voices are not misused.

Jones, for her part, had a brainstorming session with colleagues for a few months and came up with a structure for an AI company that could coexist with actors. She is now co-founder and vice-president of strategic partnerships at Morpheme, a startup aiming to harness AI to reshape how vocal performances are used in everything from animated series to video games.

Morpheme’s AI software records audio from actors and then creates a model of their voice that can be used to alter, expand and enliven future productions. It has been demonstrating the technology to several top gaming companies.

Gamers play video games during the Gamescom LAN event. Photograph: Ina Fassbender/AFP/Getty Images

“We’ve been going full steam ahead, creating contracts that work for actors, making sure that actors understand if they want to record with us, if they want to have a digital double, number one, we get their consent. You want to have a digital version of your voice? Fantastic. We pay them and then any time the voice is generated they also receive payment. In addition, if at any point they no longer feel comfortable having their voice be a part of our offering, we will delete it.”

Unlike their counterparts in film or TV, voice actors for video games do not receive residual payments after their recording sessions. Some gaming actors are looking at the emerging AI technology as an opportunity to potentially collect extra payments down the road on top of a base minimum. Under Morpheme’s contract, actors who are unavailable or unable to work on a new project can put their “digital twin” to work, and, in exchange, receive additional money.

But not everyone is ready and willing to play by the same rules. Jones was recently offered a job for a one-off fee but then found, buried in an 11-page contract, an option for the employer to create a digital version of her voice for use in perpetuity without any additional payment. Unauthorised uses of AI technology are already proliferating, as illustrated by a recent hoax Joe Biden robocall and deepfake recordings of the actor Emma Watson reading Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Jones, who is based in Los Angeles and has worked on about 300 games, notes: “It is very easy to steal a person’s voice. At the beginning of 2022 it took six hours. At the beginning of 2023 it took three hours. Do you want to guess what it takes right now? Three seconds. Anything you have on Instagram, TikTok, any YouTube videos, anybody can create a digital version of your voice from just that. Is it perfect? No but the technology is not getting worse.”

She adds: “The danger is that people can take all of these billions of voices that are available online, scrape the internet for them, mush them together and create a new voice that does not ‘belong’ to anybody, thereby creating a ‘new’ voice. However, they are still profiting off of my voice.

“We’re working on active fingerprinting technology that could parse that out but, as quickly as we’re working on developing that companies are working to erase that. It’s the old network security versus hacker problem. As soon as network security figures out a lock, hackers figure out a way through it.”

Jones also sits on the board of the National Association of Voice Actors (Nava), a non-profit which has a mantra of “consent, compensation and control” around the use of AI and has been in talks with with members of Congress on upcoming AI legislation. “We’ve been working with the Office of Copyright because right now you can copyright your name, image and likeness – you cannot copyright your voice.”

There are concerns that AI voices could replace all but the most famous human actors and eliminate entire job categories, such as quality-assurance testers or the entry-level positions that allow young performers to get a foot in the door. Some actors worry that they might already have signed their voice away years ago and have no way of claiming it back.

Tim Friedlander, an award-winning voice actor who is founder and president of Nava, says: “There is fear. There is uncertainty. There is kind of a helplessness: how do we, as independent voice actors who are in the union or not in the union, push back against multibillion-dollar companies who have the ability to outspend us and out-lawyer us and potentially – through predatory behaviour or predatory contracts – take advantage of voice actors?

“If you’re under a union contract, you still have to read your contracts, make sure that there’s no addendum or added language that is in there. As voice actors we’re not lawyers, we’re not contract specialists. It is potentially the fear of many people that they’ve given away their voices years ago through contracts, that the damage has been done already and we’re just now going to start to see the results of those predatory contracts from years ago.”

 

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The rise of AI seems ominous to Jared Butler, who specialises in imitating celebrity voices and is an “audio double” for Johnny Depp, having vocally portrayed Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Pirates of the Caribbean Online and other media. He says: “I’m kind of the canary in the coalmine for this and this canary is smelling a gas leak.

“There’s no version of this that doesn’t affect how much work I get in my future career. Voice actors are rightly concerned about this technology and how it’s going to impact them. There’s no version this where it doesn’t impact us in some way, and mostly negatively.”

Butler adds: “I don’t do just voice matching but, as one of the people where that’s my speciality, this affects me directly. The technology has gotten so good so fast that they can and have already replaced a lot of what voice actors do, especially when it comes to imitating the voice. They can just feed the algorithm a bunch of recordings of any voice and imitate it fairly well.

“People think that it all sounds like these bad customer service robots. It’s not like that: I’ve heard the good stuff. As someone who has a critical ear, I’ve spent a career listening to voices intently and trying to match every nuance, and I gotta tell you this technology is scary how accurate it is.”

But for some actors, AI has represented opportunity. Andy Magee grew up in Northern Ireland and has previously worked as a craft brewery manager, delivery driver and farmer. He started his voiceover career with AI characters, recording about 7,000 words in distinct emotions to generate an audio dataset. The voice is cloned and can be made to say pretty much anything – within set guidelines.

The 38-year-old says from Vancouver, Canada: “All the work that I’ve done, my contracts were always very specific and I felt very safe and protected with the usage it’s going to have. But I also see that there are some concerns about consent in the industry and there’s a lack of rules in place because it is such a fresh technology. They’re still trying to catch up with the rules and the dos and don’ts.”

Magee tries to retain a balanced view. “I don’t preach AI voices as the new thing that we should all be excited about. Nor do I say it’s the worst thing to happen in the industry because I know personally I’ve seen benefits for new games developers, for example. It’s a source for them to actually be more creative and have more freedom to work. Like most topics, there are two sides to it.”

Some of Magee’s work has been for Replica Studios, an AI voice technology company which in January struck a deal with the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (Sag-Aftra). The agreement – which the Sag-Aftra president, Fran Drescher, described as “a great example of AI being done right” — enables major studios to work with unionised actors to create and license a digital replica of their voice. It sets terms that also allow performers to opt out of having their voices used in perpetuity.

Sag-Aftra represents about 2,600 video games performers – people whose voices, facial expressions, physical movement or stunt abilities require union protection. The last contract expired in November 2022 and is still under negotiation; last year members of Sag-Aftra voted overwhelmingly to authorise a strike against 10 of the biggest video game studios including Activision Productions, Disney Character Voices and Electronic Arts Productions.



The union could call a strike in the coming weeks but, for now, talks are ongoing. Chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland says: “Our core concerns are that any performer who’s going to have their performance, their image, their voice, their body replicated through AI technology has a right of informed consent over any of that type of application and that there would be provisions for fair compensation when that’s done.

“Then with respect to generative AI, so with AI tools that can actually create performances by people who don’t really exist, that there be appropriate guardrails around that to ensure that it does not result in the wholesale elimination of human participation in the creative process.”

Last year the union tackled AI concerns with Hollywood studios and streamers during a 118-day strike and, just a month and a half ago, negotiated similar provisions in a TV animation agreement without the need to strike. Crabtree-Ireland adds: “I feel like the industries that we work in have gotten comfortable with the idea that there do need to be AI guardrails and, as more and more of those deals get worked out, the video game companies become more and more of an outlier in that regard.”

Voice work is not the stumbling block with video games companies. “The area where there’s been disagreement thus far is on camera performances and stunts and performance capture work, which in a way is ironic because you would think that would be the easier piece to nail down in the negotiations. But for whatever reasons, these companies have been unwilling to extend the same protections to those performers that they do to voice performers.

“We should not have to go on strike in this contract. There is absolutely a deal to be made. The question is, will the companies be able to get there?”

The current AI craze also brings perils for video game developers who embrace too much too soon and could face backlash from fans. Mihaela Mihailova, an assistant professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University, predicts that the immediate impact of AI will have on the video game industry is likely to be negative. “Most of this tech is still not nearly as artistically capable or error-free as its coverage would have us believe, so we are about to see some truly bizarre/blatantly inferior creations,” she writes over email.

“The rush to use AI and capitalise on its novelty and hype means that both quality control and creative thinking will be sacrificed by studios attempting to look cutting-edge while simultaneously cutting costs. The misguided belief that AI tools, in their current form, are already capable of fully replacing and/or automating skilled human labor is emboldening studios to okay mass layoffs. This is already catastrophic for the video game workforce, but it will soon prove catastrophic for the quality of video games produced in this climate.”

Olcun Tan, a German-born visual effects supervisor who works with AI, adds by phone from Los Angeles: “Voiceover actors now say, oh my God, I’m going to lose my job because of AI, which they have a right to be fearful about. But then who says that the game company will not go out of business because an AI will create games with input from you as a user who says, hey, can you create me a game about this and this and this and with this game topic?

“It’s not going to happen today, but it might happen and then the person who’s saying, oh my God, I’m to lose my voiceover job, it’s now the company who would hire that person wouldn’t even exist. It’s a multi-dimensional problem. It’s not just affecting the visual worker. It’s affecting everything.”

Tan concludes: “A lot of people can’t even envision the extent of disruption there will be in the near future. It’s scary but at the same time you can look at it differently and you say hey, I’m not going to swim against the stream like in a river where I’ll drown; I’m going to swim with it and try to make sure that I understand how this technology can be useful for me.”

 

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[bnew]

Tennessee Makes A.I. an Outlaw to Protect Its Country Music and More

Gov. Bill Lee on Thursday signed a first-in-the-nation bill to prevent the use of artificial intelligence to copy a performer’s “voice.”

www.nytimes.com

Tennessee Makes A.I. an Outlaw to Protect Its Country Music and More​

Gov. Bill Lee on Thursday signed a first-in-the-nation bill to prevent the use of artificial intelligence to copy a performer’s “voice.”

Gov. Bill Lee took the stage at Robert’s Western World in Nashville to sign legislation offering new protections from A.I.Credit...Jason Kempin/Getty Images For Human Artistry


By Emily Cochrane

Reporting from a Nashville honky-tonk

March 21, 2024, 7:12 p.m. ET

The floor in front of the stage at Robert’s Western World, a beloved lower Broadway honky-tonk in Nashville, was packed on Thursday afternoon.

But even with the country music superstar Luke Bryan and multiple other musicians on hand, the center of attention was Gov. Bill Lee and his Elvis Act.

And Mr. Lee did not disappoint, signing into law the Ensuring Likeness, Voice and Image Security Act, a first-in-the-nation bill that aims to protect musicians from artificial intelligence by adding penalties for copying a performer’s “voice” without permission.

“There are certainly many things that are positive about what A.I. does,” Mr. Lee told the crowd. But, he added, “when fallen into the hands of bad actors, it can destroy this industry.”

Image

Luke Bryan snapped a selfie with State Representative William Lamberth and Governor Lee.Credit...Jason Kempin/Getty Images For Human Artistry

The use of A.I. technology — and its rapid fire improvement in mimicking public figures — has led several legislatures to move to tighten regulations over A.I., particularly when it comes to election ads. The White House late last year imposed a sweeping executive order to push for more guardrails as Congress wrestles with federal regulations.

But since this is Tennessee, the focus was unsurprisingly on the toll it could take on musicians in Nashville, Memphis and beyond. Mr. Lee’s office said that the music industry generates billions of dollars for the state and supports more than 61,000 jobs and upward of 4,500 venues.

Several leading musicians, recording industry groups and artists alliances rallied around the bill this year, warning about the dire consequences of A.I.

“I’ve just gotten to where stuff comes in of my voice, on my phone, and I can’t tell it’s not me,” Mr. Bryan said on Thursday, adding that “hopefully this will curb it, slow it down.”

Chris Janson, a country singer and songwriter who recounted the time he spent working gigs on lower Broadway, the area downtown where many of the city’s honky-tonks are concentrated, told lawmakers and supporters that “we are grateful for you guys protecting, and you ladies protecting, our community, our artist community.”

Tennessee first intervened to protect an artist’s name, image and likeness with a 1984 law, which came as the Presley estate was battling in court to control how the musical legend’s name and likeness could be used commercially after his death. The version signed into law Thursday adds to that measure and will take effect July 1.

The new law passed through the legislature unanimously, a remarkable feat for a rancorous body that has spent weeks fighting — at one point, almost literally — over the smallest of slights and policy changes.

The decision to hold a bill signing at a honky-tonk was a first for many there, and it was an unusual scene for Mr. Lee, a more reserved public figure whose suited security detail visibly startled a couple of tourists outside the venue.

Inside, fried bologna sandwiches — the cornerstone of the Robert’s $6 recession special — sizzled on the stovetop as Mr. Lee spoke. Republicans and Democrats alike sported “ELVIS Act” pins and applauded when Mr. Lee and top Republicans received framed platinum records recognizing the act’s signing.

State Senator Jack Johnson, the majority leader, reminisced about celebrating his bachelor party at Robert’s, while Mr. Lee described a fondness for incognito date nights with his wife to listen to some music. And State Representative Justin Jones, a top Democratic foe of the Republican supermajority, later posted photos of the event on Instagram with the note that it feels good to have a bill “that’s not complete trash.”

The legislation’s broad definitions, however, have given some lawyers pause about whether it could inadvertently limit certain performances, including when an actor is playing a well-known artist. The law also makes a person liable for civil action if an audio recording or a reproduction of a person’s likeness was knowingly published without authorization.

Voice, under the law, is defined as a sound in a recording or other medium that is “readily identifiable and attributable to a particular individual,” whether the record contains a person’s voice or a simulation.

Those concerns led to some changes in the bill to create an exemption for such audiovisual representations unless they give “the false impression that the work is an authentic recording.”

And given the broad definition of voice, one legal expert wondered, what would this mean for tribute bands, or the men who have perfected an Elvis impersonation?

“It’s not what the bill is intended to do, but when a law is drafted in a way that allows people to make mischief with it, mischief tends to follow,” said Joseph Fishman, a professor of law at Vanderbilt University.

But Mr. Fishman emphasized that even if the measure requires some further tailoring in the coming years, it remained “a well intentioned bill that does do a lot of good.”

Ben Sisario contributed reporting.

 

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Spoiler: full text

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There are people paid $140k as junior analysts to literally do this all day

Spoiler: larger images

Spoiler: thread continued

Spoiler: full text

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Uh, so Claude AI is pretty good.

Step 1. Upload PDF of finance paper to Claude AI (https://sciencedirect.com/science/a...EP_U9V5G0w7pAzgpd1Ib0wIpRd7hFkLaTU7IE-rxJ9swA)

Step 2: Ask Claude to make a bar graph from Table 7 for one column and first five rows

Step 3: Profit

2/2
Yeah, I've found Claude much better so far, although the code UI is worse on Claude

Spoiler: larger images

 

[bnew]

Spoiler: thread continued

Spoiler: full text

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Can AI ace law exams?

Last year, OpenAI announced GPT-4 got 90th percentile on the bar.

Here we (a) refute 90th percentile claim; (b) replicate/extend recent work on GPT capabilities; (c) discuss implications for law profession.

Now open, AI&Law: Re-evaluating GPT-4’s bar exam performance - Artificial Intelligence and Law
1/

2/6
In March 2023, OpenAI released GPT-4. Among its most widely touted capabilities was its ability to score in the top 10% of human test-takers on the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE)—the official licensing exam to become an attorney in most US states. 2/

3/6
Aside from the sheer difficulty of the exam, the reported score was striking and puzzling for several reasons. First, the leap in performance from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4 on the bar exam was far higher than that for any other exam. 3/

4/6
Second, ½ of the bar exam is essays. GPT-4’s performance on other essay exams was not nearly as strong. And in many cases, GPT-4 failed to score higher than GPT-3.5. (e.g. GRE writing: 54th percentile; AP English: below 22nd percentile). 4/

5/6
Third, unlike other exams, the National Conference of Bar Examiners does not release percentiles. So any percentile estimates would have to be indirectly inferred through other means. 5/

6/6
Documentation for the percentile claim is not provided on OpenAI’s website, nor in the official GPT-4 technical report. The latter provides documentation for other test percentiles (e.g. SAT, GRE, LSAT), but not the bar exam. 6/

Spoiler: links

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10506-024-09396-9…

Re-evaluating GPT-4’s bar exam performance

Spoiler: larger images

 

[GnauzBookOfRhymes]

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/social-order-could-collapse-in-ai-era-two-top-japan-companies-say-1a71cc1d

 

[bnew]

Texas is replacing thousands of human exam graders with AI

The TEA is adamant that the system doesn’t count as AI, though.

www.theverge.com

Texas is replacing thousands of human exam graders with AI​

Don’t call the ‘automated scoring engine’ AI, though. They don’t like that.​

By Jess Weatherbed, a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews.

Apr 10, 2024, 11:47 AM EDT

17 Comments

The TEA expects to save between $15 and $20 million per year by using its new “automated scoring engine.” Image: The Verge

Students in Texas taking their state-mandated exams this week are being used as guinea pigs for a new artificial intelligence-powered scoring system set to replace a majority of human graders in the region.

The Texas Tribune reports an “automated scoring engine” that utilizes natural language processing — the technology that enables chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to understand and communicate with users — is being rolled out by the Texas Education Agency (TEA) to grade open-ended questions on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) exams. The agency is expecting the system to save $15–20 million per year by reducing the need for temporary human scorers, with plans to hire under 2,000 graders this year compared to the 6,000 required in 2023.

“We wanted to keep as many constructed open-ended responses as we can, but they take an incredible amount of time to score.”

The STAAR exams, which test students between the third and eighth grades on their understanding of the core curriculum, were redesigned last year to include fewer multiple-choice questions. It now contains up to seven times more open-ended questions, with TEA director of student assessment Jose Rios saying the agency “wanted to keep as many constructed open-ended responses as we can, but they take an incredible amount of time to score.”

According to a slideshow hosted on TEA’s website, the new scoring system was trained using 3,000 exam responses that had already received two rounds of human grading. Some safety nets have also been implemented — a quarter of all the computer-graded results will be rescored by humans, for example, as will answers that confuse the AI system (including the use of slang or non-English responses).

While TEA is optimistic that AI will enable it to save buckets of cash, some educators aren’t so keen to see it implemented. Lewisville Independent School District superintendent Lori Rapp said her district saw a “drastic increase” in constructed responses receiving a zero score when the automated grading system was used on a limited basis in December 2023. “At this time, we are unable to determine if there is something wrong with the test question or if it is the new automated scoring system,” Rapp said.

AI essay-scoring engines are nothing new. A 2019 report from Motherboard found that they were being used in at least 21 states to varying degrees of success, though TEA seems determined to avoid the same reputation. Small print on TEA’s slideshow also stresses that its new scoring engine is a closed system that’s inherently different from AI, in that “AI is a computer using progressive learning algorithms to adapt, allowing the data to do the programming and essentially teaching itself.”

The attempt to draw a line between them isn’t surprising — there’s no shortage of teachers despairing online about how generative AI services are being used to cheat on assignments and homework. The students being graded by this new scoring system may have a hard time accepting how they believe “rules for thee and not for me” are being applied here.

 

[Makavalli]

This is nuts. AI is like rolling a boulder down a hill and by the time we try to stop it thats when its momentum will crush us

 

[bnew]

The Worst Part of a Wall Street Career May Be Coming to an End

Artificial intelligence tools can replace much of Wall Street’s entry-level white-collar work, raising tough questions about the future of finance.

www.nytimes.com

The Worst Part of a Wall Street Career May Be Coming to an End​

Artificial intelligence tools can replace much of Wall Street’s entry-level white-collar work, raising tough questions about the future of finance.

Credit...Calum Heath




By Rob Copeland

Rob Copeland spoke to executives at major banks and consultancies across Wall Street for this article.

Published April 10, 2024Updated April 11, 2024

Pulling all-nighters to assemble PowerPoint presentations. Punching numbers into Excel spreadsheets. Finessing the language on esoteric financial documents that may never be read by another soul.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary​

Listen 10:09

Open this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.

Such grunt work has long been a rite of passage in investment banking, an industry at the top of the corporate pyramid that lures thousands of young people every year with the promise of prestige and pay.

Until now. Generative artificial intelligence — the technology upending many industries with its ability to produce and crunch new data — has landed on Wall Street. And investment banks, long inured to cultural change, are rapidly turning into Exhibit A on how the new technology could not only supplement but supplant entire ranks of workers.

The jobs most immediately at risk are those performed by analysts at the bottom rung of the investment banking business, who put in endless hours to learn the building blocks of corporate finance, including the intricacies of mergers, public offerings and bond deals. Now, A.I. can do much of that work speedily and with considerably less whining.

“The structure of these jobs has remained largely unchanged at least for a decade,” said Julia Dhar, head of BCG’s Behavioral Science Lab and a consultant to major banks experimenting with A.I. The inevitable question, as she put it, is “do you need fewer analysts?”

The inevitable question, according to Julia Dhar, head of BCG’s Behavioral Science Lab, is “do you need fewer analysts?”Credit...John Lamparski/Getty Images for Concordia Summit

Some of Wall Street’s major banks are asking the same question, as they test A.I. tools that can largely replace their armies of analysts by performing in seconds the work that now takes hours, or a whole weekend. The software, being deployed inside banks under code names such as “Socrates,” is likely not only to change the arc of a Wall Street career, but also to essentially nullify the need to hire thousands of new college graduates.

Top executives at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other banks are debating how deep they can cut their incoming analyst classes, according to several people involved in the ongoing discussions. Some inside those banks and others have suggested they could cut back on their hiring of junior investment banking analysts by as much as two-thirds, and slash the pay of those they do hire, on the grounds that the jobs won’t be as taxing as before.

“The easy idea,” said Christoph Rabenseifner, Deutsche Bank’s chief strategy officer for technology, data and innovation, “is you just replace juniors with an A.I. tool,” although he added that human involvement will remain necessary.

Representatives for Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and others said it was too early to comment on specific job changes. But the consulting giant Accenture estimated that A.I. could replace or supplement nearly three-quarters of bank employees’ working hours across the industry.

Goldman is “experimenting with the technology,” said Nick Carcaterra, a bank spokesman. “In the near term, we anticipate no changes to our incoming analyst classes.”

This week, JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, wrote in his annual shareholder letter that A.I. “may reduce certain job categories or roles,” and labeled the technology top among the most important issues facing the nation’s largest bank. Mr. Dimon compared the consequences to those of “the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, computing and the internet, among others.”

Investment banking is a hierarchical industry, and banks typically hire young talent through two-year analyst contracts. Tens of thousands of 20-somethings (both from undergraduate and M.B.A. programs) apply for some 200 spots in each major bank’s program. Pay starts at more than $100,000, not including year-end bonuses.

If they persevere, they move up the ranks to associate, then director and managing director; a handful end up running divisions. Although grueling, the life of a senior banker can be glamorous, involving traveling around the globe to pitch clients and working on big-money corporate merger deals. Many who get through the two-year analyst program have gone on to become business titans — the billionaires Michael Bloomberg and Stephen Schwarzman began their careers in investment banking — but a majority will leave before or after their two years are up, bank representatives said.

There are jokes among junior bankers that the most common tasks of the job involve dragging icons from one side of a document to another, only to be asked to replace the icon over and again.

“One hundred percent drudgery and boring,” said Gabriel Stengel, a former banking analyst who left the industry two years ago. Val Srinivas, a senior researcher for banking at Deloitte, said a lot of the work involved “gathering material, poring through it and putting it through a different format.”

Gregory Larkin, another former banking analyst, said the new technology would start “a civil war” inside Wall Street’s biggest firms by tilting the balance of power to technologists who program A.I. tools, as opposed to the bankers who use them — to say nothing of technology giants like Microsoft and Google, which license much of the A.I. technology to banks for hefty fees.

“A.I. will enable us to do tasks that take 10 hours in 10 seconds,” said Jay Horine, co-head of investment banking at JPMorgan, describing analyst jobs. “My hope and belief is it will allow the job to be more interesting.”

A.I.’s impact on finance is simply one facet of how the technology will reshape the workplace for all. Artificial intelligence systems, which include large language models and question-and-answer bots like ChatGPT, can quickly synthesize information and automate tasks. Virtually all industries are beginning to grapple with it to some degree.

Deutsche Bank is uploading reams of financial data into proprietary A.I. tools that can instantaneously answer questions about publicly traded companies and create summary documents on complementary financial moves that might benefit a client — and earn the bank a profit.

Mr. Horine said he could use A.I. to identify clients that might be ripe for a bond offering, the sort of bread-and-butter transaction for which investment bankers charge clients millions of dollars.

Goldman Sachs has assigned 1,000 developers to test A.I., including software that can turn what it terms “corpus” information — or enormous amounts of text and data collected from thousands of sources — into page presentations that mimic the bank’s typeface, logo, styles and charts. One firm executive privately called it a “Kitty Hawk moment,” or one that would change the course of the firm’s future.

That isn’t limited to investment banking; BNY Mellon’s chief executive said on a recent earnings call that his research analysts could now wake up two hours later than usual, because A.I. can read overnight economic data and create a written draft of analysis to work from.

Morgan Stanley’s head of technology, Michael Pizzi, told employees in a January private meeting, a video of which was viewed by The New York Times, that he would “get A.I. into every area of what we do,” including wealth management, where the bank employs thousands of people to determine the proper mix of investments for well-off savers.

Many of those tools are still in the testing phase, and will need to be run past regulators before they can be deployed at scale on live work. Bank of America’s chief executive said last year that the technology was already enabling the firm to hire less.

Among Goldman Sachs’s sprawling A.I. efforts is a tool under development that can transfigure a lengthy PowerPoint document into a formal “S-1,” the legalese-packed document for initial public offerings required for all listed companies.

The software takes less than a second to complete the job.

 

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https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/amazon-ceo-says-generative-ai-could-be-largest-technological-transformation-since-the-internet-da57c68f

Amazon CEO Touts AI Revolution While Committing to Cost Cuts​

In his letter to shareholders, Andy Jassy says generative AI could usher in the largest tech transformation since the Internet​

By Steven Russolillo and Sebastian Herrera

Updated April 11, 2024 10:08 am ET

Andy Jassy says generative AI could be a critical building block for Amazon’s next pillar of growth following Marketplace, Prime and Amazon Web Services. PHOTO: DAVID RYDER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Amazon AMZN -1.95%decrease; red down pointing triangle

CEO Andy Jassy said generative artificial intelligence could be one of the largest technological transformations in decades.

In his annual letter to shareholders, Jassy laid out a vision for how generative AI could be a critical building block in establishing the company’s next pillar of growth following its online retail Marketplace, Amazon Prime and its cloud-computing unit Amazon Web Services.

“Generative AI may be the largest technology transformation since the cloud (which itself, is still in the early stages), and perhaps since the Internet,” Jassy wrote in his letter Thursday. “This GenAI revolution will be built from the start on top of the cloud. The amount of societal and business benefit from the solutions that will be possible will astound us all.”

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS​

What’s your biggest takeaway from Andy Jassy’s letter to shareholders? Join the conversation below.

Jassy’s annual shareholder letter, his third since he took over as CEO, follows a longstanding tradition set by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who as CEO of Amazon for 27 years released annual letters that were studied across the tech industry and beyond. Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021, typically used the letters to speak about Amazon’s accomplishments and ambitions and wrote them with storytelling flair.

Amazon has been in search of its next pillar of success, but that search has been elusive as the company has struggled some to build out businesses such as its physical stores and healthcare. Jassy said the company thinks of its successes as businesses that can spur other successful projects. He listed AWS and the company’s logistics operations as two previous initiatives that accomplished that and said that beyond AI, it sees promise in units such as grocery and Prime Video.

Jassy also said Amazon remains committed to cost-cutting.

“We’ve challenged every closely held belief in our fulfillment network, and reevaluated every part of it, and found several areas where we believe we can lower costs even further while also delivering faster for customers,” Jassy said in his letter. The company overhauled its delivery systems in the past year to place items it sells in warehouses closer to customers, which it says saves costs. Amazon has hundreds of warehouses throughout the U.S.

Amazon shares are up 22% this year through Wednesday’s close, with a market cap approaching $2 trillion. The stock has outperformed the S&P 500 by more than double amid investor excitement over AI.

Amazon fell behind its tech rivals in the AI race, though it has been trying to boost its standing with new offerings at AWS and its retail operations. Jassy, who has spoken about AI as a long-term bet, again used Thursday’s letter to lay out that Amazon believes it will take time to build out the technology.

The company has invested $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic, which is among a group of notable tech companies building large language models and other cutting edge technologies. As part of its deal with Amazon, Anthropic is using Amazon’s custom chips to build and deploy its AI software.

Amazon disclosed Thursday it added Dr. Andrew Ng, a computer scientist, entrepreneur and AI expert, to its board. A former Google and

Baidu

executive, Ng has specialized in developing machine learning and deep learning algorithms. He is an adjunct professor at Stanford University.

On its e-commerce side, Amazon in February announced a new AI-powered shopping assistant for its mobile app named Rufus that executives said is designed to improve the shopping experience and enhance its product search bar.

Amazon shares are up 22% this year, more than double the S&P 500. PHOTO: MARK LENNIHAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Late last year, it also introduced a chatbot for workplaces. It also started a program to train millions of workers in artificial-intelligence skills as it competes with Google, Microsoft and others for AI talent.

Despite Amazon’s recent investments on AI, the company has also continued to lay off teams of employees throughout its businesses, continuing a cost-cutting effort that began in 2022. Amazon this month slashed hundreds of jobs from across AWS, a move that came after it said it would remove its “just walk out” cashierless technology from its Amazon Fresh grocery stores in the U.S. The company in recent months has eliminated hundreds of positions across divisions such as entertainment and its Alexa division.

Jassy has spoken about a three-pronged approach to AI innovation. He said Amazon is focusing on the AI models, followed by the applications built on top of the models, like ChatGPT, and the third are chips that power the technology.

“We’re optimistic that much of this world-changing AI will be built on top of AWS,” Jassy said in his letter.

Jassy has said he expects AI to drive tens of billions of dollars of revenue over the next several years for the company, yet Amazon has also tamped down expectations by repeatedly saying that it is the “early days” of AI.

Jassy also expressed optimism about the company’s Prime Video streaming service, citing its library of exclusive content including Thursday Night Football and “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” as well as advertising. Amazon has added ads to its streaming offering as it looks to further build its ad business and generate more revenue from entertainment.

He also touted Amazon’s space endeavors. Jassy said its satellite internet business, dubbed Project Kuiper, hit “a major milestone” in October when it launched two prototype satellites into space. The goal is to provide broadband in remote areas, a business currently dominated by Elon Musk’s Starlink.

Jassy said he expects Amazon to launch its first production satellites this year.

“We’ve still got a long way to go, but are encouraged by our progress,” Jassy said.

Write to Steven Russolillo at Steven.Russolillo@wsj.com and Sebastian Herrera at sebastian.herrera@wsj.com

 

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1/7
Tried to see what I could get Udio to generate beyond music.

It can do comedy, speeches, npc dialogue, sports analysis, commercials, radio broadcasts, asmr, nature sounds, etc.

It’s basically an AI audio engine.

Pretty wild.

Watch for examples of each.

2/7
Here’s the published playlist for each example so you can get a sense for prompts you can play with:

Playlist: https://udio.com/playlists/deGuVDLYd9MrXtxnxfX7z1 Worth noting that custom lyrics are a MASSIVE part of the promoting process.

It’ll be interesting to see what people can get it to do.

3/7
It was also funny to see things like this as I played around with it

4/7
My suspicion is they didn’t even know how broad its capabilities are

5/7
Quality being the big one. You can hear all sorts of errors. But for not being trained on those use cases not bad!

6/7
Haven’t been able to nail that one yet.

It takes a ton of effort to get it to NOT generate any music.

Take the NPC example. Based on the game I described it would always generate background music for the game.

People who are better at prompting than me I’m sure will crack it.

7/7
Saw people posting comedy stuff and wondered what else it could do.

Turns out a whole lot!


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1/1
ai will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there will be great stand-up comedy


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