AI: Weekly Summary. RTZ #850

Michael Parekh AI: Reset to Zero

7 days ago

4 MIN READ

Meta leans into AI Smart Glasses: Meta and Founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg held a product-filled Meta Connect event introducing several AI Smart Glasses with and without displays. Although technically impressive with good designs from partners like Ray-Ban, Oakley and others, the glasses will still take several years to get to mainstream volumes in the tens of millions. The initiative augments Meta’s massive investments in AI Superintelligence with the top AI Researchers globally, and its ongoing investment in VR/AR Quest devices for its ‘Metaverse’. Meta is convinced that smart glasses are the next big distribution platform beyond smartphones and computers. This perspective was highlighted by Zuckerberg on a number of podcasts post Meta Connect, like this one. More here.

OpenAI & Anthropic’s new Data on Global AI Usage and Users: The two top LLM AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic, both provided new insights into AI Usage and AI Users globally via separate reports respectively. OpenAI’s data showed a greater proportion of women using ChatGPT vs men of their 700 million weekly users, along with a higher percentage of younger folks. And the ChatGPT usage was more pronounced on personal applications than work focused. Anthropic’s data highlighted the primacy of the US and Asian markets, with the US, Israel, Singapore, and others showing a more population adjusted usage of its Claude family of products. Both studies are notable for their detail and provide a good snapshot on the current AI usage/user makeup in these early AI Tech Wave days. More here.

Google’s new AI Payments Initiative: Google announced its AI Agents Payments Protocol (AP2).and initiative with dozens of global tech and payments companies. This along with other AI industry software framework initiatives like Model Control Protocol (MCP) and others, starts to address a payment technology deficiency of the original internet from over three decades ago. Google’s initiative has dozens of tech and fintech partners globally. The approach also builds in security technologies, and provides an early set of pathways for AI Agents to be more productive for end users. It’s important to note that it’s still early days for this and other protocols, with a lot more changes to come. More here.

Microsoft & Salesforce battle for AI in Enterprises: Both Microsoft and Salesforce are running into some headwinds with their AI offerings in the enterprise space. This is a key issue for both CEOs, Satya Nadella and Marc Benioff, given the big product and investor focus by both around AI initiatives over the last year in particular. For Microsoft, the headwinds are around ramping up mainstream Enterprise traction of its AI Copilot subscriptions around its Office 365 applications which are an almost $90 billion annual business. For Salesforce, the head winds are around the complexity of rolling out its Agentforce technologies, and its different pricing by usage approach vs per seat pricing. Both CEOs are adjusting their approaches to the challenges. But this area continues to be a work in progress for most enterprise software vendors. More here.

The Commercial vs Academia War for AI Researchers: The AI Talent War amongst big tech companies is spilling over in its impact on Universities and their AI Research programs. With both companies and investors paying top dollars for AI Research talent, and offering them AI Compute in volume, the universities are hard pressed increasingly to compete. This raises the prospects of the AI industry ‘eating its seed corn’, and important issue for the industry especially in the eyes of regulators focused on the US/China AI race. This is especially acute given that half the AI research talent it sourced from China, and China remains the second largest AI market globally. The US AI industry in particular will need to come up with new solutions for these challenges. More here.

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