🧱 Wall Street’s AI Affair

PLUS: AI-dobe is AI-dope

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI

Fantastic Friday, fellow AI adventurers! Let's wrap up the week with a hyperspace jump into the weekend.

In today’s Tracker:

  • 🧪 Research highlights: Tripping Over Safety: A New Spin on Machine Learning

  • 🚨 Industry news: AI-dobe: Tech Giant's Earnings Illustrate the Art of AI Integration

  • ⚖️ Policy and regulation: A Call for Congressional Watchdogs

  • 🌐 AI and society: Black Mirror's New Season Grapples with AI Anxiety

  • 🧰 Tool of the day: IACrea: Home Design on the Fly

💻 Tripping Over Safety: A New Spin on Machine Learning

A study published in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control proposes a new technique for ensuring safer machine learning processes in complex, safety-critical autonomous systems, such as self-driving vehicles and power grids.

The research, conducted under the direction of Juan Andres Bazerque of the University of Pittsburgh and Enrique Mallada of Johns Hopkins University, refutes the notion that machines require infinite trials to acquire safe behavior in unfamiliar environments.

Instead, the team proposes a method that ensures safe action learning by striking a balance between being optimal, encountering hazardous situations, and rapidly recognizing unsafe acts.

Their method employs an algorithm that identifies all hazardous actions within a finite number of rounds, emphasizing a tradeoff between the time required to detect unsafe acts and the likelihood of encountering perilous events.

Simulations conducted by the researchers validated these tradeoffs and suggested that incorporating safety constraints could accelerate the learning process.

This development may have significant implications for robotics, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence.

🎨 AI-dobe: Tech Giant's Earnings Illustrate the Art of AI Integration

Market Analysis

Adobe Inc. exceeded Wall Street estimates for quarterly results and forecasts, attributing its success to incorporating generative artificial intelligence (AI) into its products, which has increased demand.

Following the announcement, shares of the San Jose-based company rose by over 5%. Incorporating AI features into Acrobat, Express, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro reflects Adobe's investment in artificial intelligence.

This month, Adobe introduced its artificial intelligence (AI) tool, Firefly, to its large enterprise clients, offering financial protection against copyright disputes involving content created with the tools.

Adobe's CFO, Dan Durn, stated that users had created over 500 million assets on the Firefly website and in Photoshop, making these two beta releases the most successful in the company's history.

Analysts view generative AI as a significant driver of short-term and long-term revenue growth. Adobe projected a revenue range of $4.83 billion to $4.87 billion for the current quarter and increased its revenue forecast for the fiscal year 2023 to between $19.25 billion and $19.35 billion.

The focus remains on the impact of generative AI and the imminent closing of the Figma deal. This $20 billion acquisition would give Adobe ownership of a popular web-based collaborative platform among tech companies.

The revenue for the quarter was $4.82 billion, exceeding the estimate of $4.77 billion, and the adjusted profit per share was $3.91, exceeding the forecast of $3.79 per share.

⚠️ A Call for Congressional Watchdogs

Wall Street's increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) has prompted cries for heightened congressional oversight due to AI's potential risks to the U.S. financial system.

Maxine Waters, the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, has expressed concern that financial institutions' application of this technology may exacerbate lending discrimination.

She has urged the committee chairman, Patrick McHenry, to quickly hold a hearing on generative AI, which can generate content such as images and text in response to user input.

Waters cautions that such tools may result in data breaches and the spread of false information.

📺 Black Mirror's New Season Grapples with AI Anxiety

The premiere episode of the most recent season of "Black Mirror" on Netflix examines the anxiety actors experience due to advances in artificial intelligence (AI).

A character in the episode discovers that a streaming service is recreating her life using an avatar of Salma Hayek, who has sold her digital visage to Hollywood for AI-generated content.

Annie Murphy, who portrays the character, hopes the episode will shed light on the genuine concerns actors and writers have about AI replacing them in their professions.

This contentious issue led to a Writers Guild of America strike. The proliferation of realistic 'deepfakes' featuring actors such as Tom Cruise and Keanu Reeves has exacerbated these fears, prompting actors to negotiate with studios to safeguard their images.

Murphy also hopes the episode will inspire widespread conversations about the potential adverse effects of unchecked AI.

🏠 IACrea: Home Design on the Fly

IACrea is an innovative AI-powered tool designed for home staging, which allows you to create brand-new home designs in just a few seconds. This tool revolutionizes the way you plan and visualize your living space, offering a new perspective on home design with the aid of artificial intelligence.

Learn more about the tool here.

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—Arlan Hamilton

We don’t just sit around and wait for other people. We just make, and we do.

  • 🛠️ Quadency - an AI-powered trading platform, offers intelligent tools to help traders increase their profits.

  • 📊 ChartAI - is an AI-powered diagramming application that assists professionals in quickly and efficiently creating diagrams and charts.

  • ✈️ Roamaround - is an AI-powered itinerary construction tool that seeks to simplify arranging a trip by automating the effort of producing a personalized travel itinerary.

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