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The G42 logo.
Hard Numbers: Microsoft’s big Gulf investment, Amazon’s ambitions, Mammogram-plus, Adobe pays up, Educating Don Beyer
1.5 billion: Microsoft has announced a deal to invest $1.5 billion in G42, an artificial intelligence firm based in the United Arab Emirates that recently cut ties with Chinese suppliers that had raised US security concerns. Washington and Abu Dhabi relations have been strained over the UAE’s ties to Chinese tech companies. But this deal – which grants Microsoft a minority stake in the company – could signal a new era of relations with the US.
33: Amazon is talking about artificial intelligence – like, a lot. In his recently published annual letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy mentioned AI 33 times. The company invested $4 billion in Anthropic, which makes the Claude chatbot, and will host Anthropic on Amazon Web Services. Jassy said the company wants to build AI models more so than applications (think GPT-4 instead of ChatGPT) and sell directly to enterprise clients.
40: Clinics are starting to offer an AI-assisted add-on to typical mammograms. Interested patients typically incur an out-of-pocket charge between $40 and $100 to have an AI model scan their breast screening for additional insights — even, possibly, early breast cancer detection.
3: Adobe is planning to compete with OpenAI’s Sora video model. To do so, it’s offering photographers and videographers $3 per minute to upload videos of people doing everyday activities like walking around or sitting down, or simple shots of hands, feet, or eyes to train their new generative AI model. It’s an expensive but cautious approach intended to build up a comprehensive database while staying on the right side of copyright law and avoiding potential imbroglios like the one OpenAI faces for using YouTube videos to train its models
73: Congressman Don Beyer, a Democrat from Virginia, decided he wanted to return to school to learn more about AI. So, that’s what he did. The 73-year-old car dealership mogul-turned-politician recently enrolled in a master’s degree program in machine learning at George Mason University. He’s even learning to code, which he says is helping him better think about all kinds of problems in Washington.Hard Numbers: NVIDIA rising, the magician’s assistant, indefensible budget lags, Make PDFs sexy again
3: NVIDIA is now the third-most valuable company in the U.S. after reporting rosy financial returns. The AI-focused chipmaker’s market capitalization is now $1.812 trillion, surpassing Google parent company Alphabet, and trailing only Microsoft and Apple. How things change: just one year ago, NVIDIA’s market cap was a paltry $580 billion.
1: A New Orleans magician says he was paid $150 by a Democratic operative supporting presidential longshot Dean Philipps to create the fake Joe Biden robocall sent to New Hampshire voters in January. Creating the fake audio took him 20 minutes and cost $1, the magician said. The incident sparked national outrage, including an investigation by the New Hampshire attorney general and the Federal Communications Commission banning unsolicited AI-generated robocalls.
1.8 billion: The U.S. Department of Defense is seeking $1.8 billion in the federal budget solely for AI. But with congressional budget talks still ongoing, Craig Martell, the Pentagon’s chief digital and AI officer, said his office needs to make tough decisions about what projects to prioritize. AI-related defense projects range from the simple—such as making administrative tasks more efficient—to the complex, like building new advanced weapons systems.
400 billion: Adobe has lots of cutting-edge products: Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects; but there’s nothing sexy about PDFs. On paid versions of Acrobat and Reader, which people use to view 400 billion PDFs each year, an AI chatbot will soon summarize and search your document. Adobe wants users to have a “conversation” with their PDFs—summaries sound nice, but does anyone want a full dialogue?