Welcome to the AI Trailblazers Newsletter. Our approach diverges from standard newsletters. Instead of just summarizing AI news, we delve into its takeaways for your business, career, and society, while also sharing specific AI Trailblazer highlights.

Our community survey responses were overwhelmingly clear - you value what we’re doing and want to hear from us more frequently. This marks the first step towards fulfilling that request. If you find this valuable, please share it with your peers. We welcome your feedback, too. Please reply or reach out directly.

CFOs wonder if Gen AI has a strong ROI

The Wall Street Journal discussed the thorny ROI calculus on Gen AI for CFOs . Here are highlights:

• Businesses are exploring generative AI to enhance productivity, customer interaction, and financial forecasting, with an eye on non-traditional ROI metrics like employee satisfaction alongside revenue growth.

• Finance chiefs are prioritizing investments in generative AI, aiming to ensure these ventures yield significant returns amidst growing competition and the high stakes of technological advancement.

• The investment in generative AI technologies is substantial, with 43% of U.S. companies planning to spend at least $100 million in the next year, despite the challenges of assessing comprehensive benefits.

• Options for incorporating generative AI range from utilizing proprietary models like OpenAI's to developing applications with open-source models, balancing between upfront costs and potential operational efficiencies.

• Companies like Motorola Solutions and Airbnb are actively exploring generative AI applications, from streamlining contract summarization and coding to improving customer service and listing accuracy, underscoring the technology's diverse potential benefits across industries.

AI Trailblazer Takeaways: Now is the optimal time to work closely with your CFOs on AI investments. The more CFOs understand the potential benefits, risks, and trade-offs, the higher the likelihood of securing funding for essential projects. However, remember that this is the year of ROI, so don't expect projects to receive funding merely because they are associated with AI.

The GPT-4 barrier has finally been broken

Technologist Simon Willson analyzed how the new LLMs being released put GPT-4 on notice. It may no longer be best in class and that could be a problem for Microsoft.

• Four new AI language models released in the last four weeks - Google Gemini 1.5, Mistral Large, Claude 3 Opus, and Inflection-2.5 - are benchmarking near or above the capabilities of GPT-4, previously the undisputed champion.

• Claude 3 Opus, released on March 4th by Anthropic, is seen by many as the first clear "GPT-4 beater," outperforming GPT-4 on tasks like code generation and receiving strong reviews for its performance.

• A disappointment is that none of these new top models are open-source or have publicly available weights, despite major advances in open-source AI models in the past year.

• Another letdown is the lack of transparency from any of the models' creators about the training data used, amid growing legal concerns and public scrutiny over potentially using unlicensed copyrighted material.

• The author hopes for a powerful "vegan" model trained only on public domain or licensed data to emerge soon, but doubts it's currently possible to compete with GPT-4 without using some unlicensed training content.

AI Trailblazer Takeaways: Competition is beneficial, and it's even more advantageous when it's open source. Expect to see a significant increase in this trend in the future. In the meantime, don't hesitate to explore each of the new Large Language Models (LLMs) and discover how their APIs can be utilized in your business.

White House announces policy to mitigate AI risks

Today Vice President Kamala Harris announced the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has issued the first government-wide policy to mitigate the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) and harness its benefits, following President Biden's Executive Order on AI

• Increased AI Transparency: Federal agencies are mandated to disclose AI use cases annually, ensuring public awareness and accountability.

• Responsible AI Innovation Support: The policy supports ethical AI development within federal sectors, highlighted by the recruitment of 100 AI professionals by Summer 2024.

• Making the Policy Feel Real: Three use cases highlighted in the policy announcement go a long way to make it feel real.

  1. At airports, travelers can opt out of TSA facial recognition without delays or losing their place in line.

  2. In the Federal healthcare system, human oversight ensures AI supports critical diagnostic decisions and maintains equitable access.

  3. For AI in fraud detection within government services, human oversight reviews significant decisions, allowing individuals to address AI-related issues.

• Enhanced AI Governance: The introduction of Chief AI Officers and AI Governance Boards across agencies ensures robust oversight and strategic AI utilization.

• Safeguard Implementation Deadline: By December 2024, federal agencies must enact specific safeguards for AI use impacting rights or safety, including rigorous testing and transparency measures.

AI Trailblazer Takeaways: It is rare to see the Federal Government leading when it comes to technology. Yet, this government policy significantly shapes the guidelines for the nation's largest employer. Review the government policy to ensure nothing is overlooked in your AI strategy. This is well done.What is AI Trailblazers?

What is AI Trailblazers?

AI Trailblazers is a vibrant platform dedicated to uniting marketers, technologists, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI). We launched at CES in partnership with The New York Times and hosted our members for an evening of AI programming at SXSW.

This platform is designed to fuel growth, innovation, and career development among its members, who all want to be at the forefront of incorporating artificial intelligence into their businesses and their lives for strategic advantage. More information here.

Links of the week

Amazon Adds $2.75 Billion to Its Stake in the A.I. Start-Up Anthropic (NYT)

Sora: first impressions, updates from OpenAI (OpenAI Blog)

Brands Add AI Restrictions to Agency Contracts - Behind the Growing Trend (Ad Age)

Apple announces its big annual conference, where it may reveal its AI strategy (CNBC)

Behind the plot to break Nvidia's grip on AI by targeting software (Reuters)

LLMs have special intelligence, not general, and that's plenty (Strange Loop Canon)

AI SaaS Companies Will Be More Profitable (Venture Capitalist at Theory)

11