The Workforce & AI

The AI world is absolutely buzzing with excitement these days!

If you saw YC demo day, for example, half the pitches were AI related.

But, as we head into the late spring, the tech, VC, AI, and government spheres are increasingly colliding - it's like a wild playground where everyone keeps stepping on each other's toes.

A crossroads emerges - will this technology bring about a future of abundance, or one filled with regulated toil and displaced workers? It's a high-stakes showdown, my friends.

Now, let's dive in and explore the juiciest bits:

1/ Workforce Friction -

Employees love AI! "Hey, work 5 times as fast? Sign me up!" they cry.

But there's a catch - many of these AI tools haven't been approved by the IT departments. In fact, a recent survey found that 34% of employees are using AI tools without the approval of their organization. It's the age-old battle of "let the AI flow" vs. "bureaucracy reigns supreme."

Time will tell which side prevails.

2/ Cloudflare Flexes its AI Muscles -

You thought Cloudflare was just about DNS? Think again.

They've just released Workers AI, an AI platform aimed at making inference as reliable as possible. It's like they're saying, "Oh, you thought we were just the boring DNS folks? Well, joke's on you - we're bringing the AI heat!"

3/ Amazon Fresh - AI-Assisted Checkout? - 

Amazon claims their Amazon Fresh checkout is fully powered by AI, with computer vision, object recognition, and deep learning models doing all the heavy lifting. But wait, there's a twist… Turns out they've also got 1000 workers in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts.Looks like the humans are still an integral part of the AI loop.

Personally, this isn’t too surprising - having a human in the loop, and reinforcement learning from human feedback- is how a lot of AI companies help make their models better. Scale AI does this many humans in the loop, for example, to label prompts and outputs for AI models.

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And now, the product of the day: Venice, the music co-manager. It's like having a personal assistant for your musical career - helping artists with business related questions, manage your finances, etc. It's an interesting blend of AI and human touch.

Peace out.