Weekend Musings: Brief Brilliance for Your Saturday (August 3)
Here is a quick run down of some stories that I found interesting during the week.
Amazon’s cloud unit reports 19% revenue growth, topping estimates
Amazon said in May that Matt Garman would be taking over as CEO of AWS, replacing Adam Selipsky, who was promoted to the position when Andy Jassy was named Amazon CEO in 2021. Garman previously ran sales, marketing and global services, and before that, was vice president in charge of compute services, including EC2, which provides raw computing resources for software developers.
Will spatial intelligence be the next big AI breakthrough?
Spatial intelligence is, as AI expert and entrepreneur Rotem Farkash explains, a form of artificial intelligence that allows computers to observe, map, and interact dynamically with physical space. Given the potentially limitless use cases of such a technology, ‘spatial intelligence could be the key that unlocks AI’s immense productivity promise’, explained Farkash.
How Scotiabank Built an Ethical, Engaged AI Culture
What does it take to produce an award-winning AI initiative? Scotiabank — officially the Bank of Nova Scotia, and one of Canada’s largest banks — recently won two awards for AI at one event. DataIQ gave the bank a Most Innovative Use of AI award for its chatbot and recognized its overall data and AI ethics program as the Best Responsible AI Program, calling it “a pioneering initiative in the financial industry.”
Can an AI make a data-driven, visual story?
With LLMs (henceforth, AI) in the spotlight – blowing minds, raking in venture capital, and prompting existential crises – we at The Pudding were curious: Will this make our jobs obsolete? How scared should we be that someone else could replicate what we do without the time, training, and expertise we have?
FLUX: This new AI image generator is eerily good at creating human hands
The launch of FLUX.1 comes about seven weeks after Stability AI's troubled release of Stable Diffusion 3 Medium in mid-June. Stability AI's offering faced widespread criticism among image-synthesis hobbyists for its poor performance in generating human anatomy, with users sharing examples of distorted limbs and bodies across social media. That problematic launch followed the earlier departure of three key engineers from Stability AI—Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Dominik Lorenz—who went on to found Black Forest Labs along with latent diffusion co-developer Patrick Esser and others.
Have a wonderful weekend!