How Amazon blew its chance to win AI

Multiple ex-Amazonians have spilled the tea on how the retail and cloud service giant managed to blow its early lead in voice-activated assistants (Alexa has 500 million subscribers) and miss the pivot to AI. After losing $40 billion on developing Alexa over a decade, Amazon was caught flat-footed by the release of ChatGPT in November of 2022, and it has never recovered. Yes, Amazon has done a good job of incorporating support for AI into its industry-leading cloud services, but everything Apple showed Siri doing at the recent WWDC conference could and should have been done by Alexa a year earlier. Why the delay? TL;DR - Internal politics and a lack of vision. It’s not too late for Amazon to play in the AI assistant arena, but the chance to dominate the space is almost surely gone.

How Amazon blew its chance to dominate AI

Apple cuts EU out of AI rollout over regulations

Many AI skeptics rejoiced when the EU passed the world’s first AI regulatory law. But be careful what you wish for. Apple, already bloodied in a fight with the EU over how it runs its App Store, has pushed the pause button on rolling out to the EU all those futuristic AI iPhone features shown at the annual WWDC conference. Since Apple is positioned as the most likely near-term source of genuinely useful AI assistants, the EU faces the possibility of becoming an AI “have not” region, along with Chad and Sierra Leone. As in most such catfights, it is likely that cooler heads will prevail sooner or later, on both sides.

Apple cuts EU out of AI rollout due to regulations

Big record labels sue text-to-music AI apps over copyright

Big record labels, notorious for exploiting small artists early in their career and opening their wallets only when a star is big enough not to need them (see Swift, Taylor), now are weeping crocodile tears and crying foul as AI companies release text-to-music apps that could put the labels out of business. Similar to the lawsuit that the New York Times filed against OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the labels wrap themselves in the flag, apple pie, and motherhood, while in reality the lawsuit is just a negotiating tactic to try to get the AI companies to pay more for permission to access the copyrighted works. Expect this suit to be settled out of court - eventually.

Big record labels sue Suno and Udio over copyright

Make a song with Suno (free)

Make a song with Udio (free)

Google adds Gemini AI sidebar to Gmail

Google invented modern AI in 2017, but has been slow to react to OpenAI’s ChatGPT juggernaut. Now Google, like Microsoft last year, is putting AI into all of its productivity apps. Gmail is the world’s most popular email, with 1.8 billion users, so any changes to Gmail will be visible to a quarter of the world’s population (take that, ChatGPT, with your paltry 100 million users.) Early uses of the Gmail AI will focus on tasks such as summarizing long emails, drafting replies, and sorting the inbox.

Google adds Gemini AI sidebar to Gmail

Zombied Toys “R” Us releases first AI text-to-video commercial

Toys “R” Us went bankrupt and liquidated in 2017, in a sordid tale of private equity greed destroying a beloved brand. But brands are assets, even without stores, and somebody bought the name (the “IP”, or intellectual property) and is trying to ride nostalgia to a payday. And what better tool to tell a half-baked sanitized potted history of the company than Generative AI, which notoriously will tell you to eat rocks or slather paste on pizza if you push it hard enough? So the new owners decided to make a splash before the upcoming Christmas season, signaling “We’re baaack!” with - give them credit here - a genuinely ground-breaking AI-generated commercial video. 

Zombied Toys “R” Us releases first AI text-to-video commercial

Best AI-assisted nature apps for consumers

AI is coming to a smartphone near you, and will help make your nature walks much more informative. Whether it’s by identifying birds by picture or song (Merlin Bird ID), orienting you to the constellations and planets in the night sky (Night Sky, natch), identifying the plants and mushrooms in your urban back yard (Seek), or keeping you on the trail on your hike (All Trails, or OnX Back Country), these apps will keep you safer, more in tune with your surroundings,, and enjoyably entertained as you learn.

Best AI-assisted nature apps

Google releases free AI for high school teachers and students

As noted above in the Gmail article, Google is desperately seeking to get traction in the AI marketplace, and one strategy is to give it away for free. An interesting example of this tactic is Google’s latest foray into education, its Workspace for Education. This puts a full suite of AI tools to help teachers develop lesson plans and track student progress, as well as help high school students (who can better tolerate the occasional hallucination than the wee ones, I suppose) study and learn. The idea is welcome, and it should help teachers and students develop ways to make AI useful (and safe) in the educational process.

Google releases free AI for high school teachers and students

Wharton AI expert: “Now everyone is in R&D”

UPenn Wharton Business School professor Ethan Mollick is an AI visionary and thought leader, who authored what is currently the best-selling book on AI in business. Here he makes the point that nobody really knows how to make AI useful for everyday work, so there is no realistic choice but to encourage employees to experiment and develop uses on their own - a bottom-up, grassroots approach, rather than the traditional IT top-down approach. In these early days of AI adoption, he argues, everyone in the organization is in research and development.

Wharton AI expert: “Now everyone is in R&D”

Swallow this AI powered robot for your next endoscopy

Medical mini-robotics startup Endiatx is developing a pill-sized robot that can be swallowed. Armed with cameras, sensors, and wireless communication, the PillBot aims to be a less invasive means for physicians to examine the gastrointestinal tract. PillBot is scheduled for clinical trials later this year, and the company hopes for FDA approval in 2026. The company’s vision includes a consumer version of the PillBot which could be sold over the counter at pharmacies for $50. (?!?)

Swallow this AI-powered robot for 21st century endoscopy

Atom Limbs is developing a mind-controlled prosthetic arm

Prosthetic manufacturer Atom Limbs has raised several million dollars through an online crowdfunding site to develop the next generation of prosthetic arms. The chief breakthrough is that the arm decodes the neural impulses sent by the brain down the remaining nerves in the severed limb, using AI to translate the patterns of nerve activation into instructions for movement for the robotic limb. Each limb will need to be fitted to the individual user to make sure that nerve activations are detected, and programmed by AI to reliably translate the patient’s intentions, as evidenced by the nerve activations, into the desired actions. This approach bypasses all the brainwave helmets or brain implants used by other mind-activation projects.

Atom Limbs is developing a mind-controlled prosthetic arm

Abridge and Nuance lead in the hot field of AI patient notes

The hottest field for commercial AI in clinical medicine is the quotidian task of documenting a physician’s interaction with a patient. In most EMRs, this is a tedious task, often taking 2 hours or more per day outside the workday. AI can listen in on the interaction, produce a real-time transcript, then summarize the transcript into an EMR-ready note that can be edited and signed by the physician. The ROI is obvious, both in provider satisfaction and in billing revenue. There are several contenders in this sector, but the two top competitors appear to be a medical AI startup known as Abridge, and a rebooted voice transcription dinosaur, Nuance. Nuance was acquired by Microsoft, who has put some of the billions of dollars it has spent on AI in the past few years into updating Nuance’s technology to state of the art. With Nuance’s deep customer relationships in the health care field, the reboot has gone well, and Nuance’s DAX Express “ambient intelligence” has made a number of prestige sales. Meanwhile, Abridge has the agility and street smarts of a hungry tech startup, and is also rolling up prestige institutional health care customers. It seems likely that both companies will survive, and that ambient dictation will become the standard of care.

Startup Abridge and venerable Nuance lead in AI patient notes

Forbes: AI in biotech will revolutionize health care

Health care is being transformed by at least 2 simultaneous revolutions, AI and biotech. The interplay between these 2 technologies is likely to be synergistic, and advances previously thought to be decades or more away may start showing up in the clinic within years. AI + biotech will enable smarter, faster drug discovery, personalized precision medicine, synthetic biology, regenerative medicine, anti-aging interventions, and more.

AI in biotech will revolutionize health care