AI-HOI AInauts,

Welcome to a slightly different edition today.

Although there is currently a bunch of exciting news from OpenAI, Google and Claude (we will of course work through everything in more detail, below are a few initial highlights), today we want to report live from the Rise of AI conference in Berlin.

It is one of the most important and definitely most exciting AI conferences in Germany. From deep technology to politics and general trends, there was incredibly exciting stuff.

Here are the highlights:

• 🇪🇺 Europe's biggest problem for the (AI) future

• 🔥 The most important AI trends & developments for 2024

• 👨‍🏫 Everyone gets their personal employee, teacher, consultant, …

Let's go!

🇪🇺 Europe's biggest problem for the (AI) future

A super exciting panel discussed the AI situation in Europe. As you may know, Europe is not necessarily characterized by large AI companies.

Instead, the EU has decided it wants to be a leader in another area: regulation 😉

And the EU AI Act has achieved this.

In fact, the thinking was as follows (if we have understood the EU policymaker correctly):

• Nobody cares about regulation yet.

• We take an extremely professional approach.

• At some point, other countries will also deal with regulation.

• And then they will adopt a lot of things from us, because they have already been tried and tested.

• Our EU AI companies will then have an advantage because they are already implementing all of this.

Don't get us wrong. We have nothing against regulation, we even think it's important. But we should set our priorities elsewhere first.

The positive thing is that this is slowly taking hold at both EU and German level. The focus is moving away from regulation and towards application.

Ideas for this include, after the Green Deal, also pushing for a tech/AI deal at European level and thus merging two large areas.

The biggest problem in Europe is ...

But what is the main problem that we seem to have in Europe?

We have excellent research and technology in terms of AI, be it the Fraunhofer Institute, UnternehmerTUM - Center for Innovation & Business Creation etc. - extremely important work is being done here.

There is still too little capital and willingness to invest, but this is also changing, as can be seen from the example of the Schwarz Group.

According to one panel member, however, Europe has a different problem:

Our quality of life is simply so high that we often lack the hunger for success! We have not enough people who want to become entrepreneurs. We need more people who are able to turn technology into a sustainable business model and sell services and products successfully.

The big opportunity (also for non-technical people)

This was one of the biggest personal learnings from the conference. Especially because we are not hardcore tech heads.

We have great technology here in Europe and also more and more financial capital. But what we need are courageous generalists who have an understanding of products and marketing - and can understand and apply what is possible with AI.

If you are such a person, find technology partners, develop products with them and market them!

Let’s MEGA!

(Make Europe Great Again 😉)

🔥 The most important AI trends & developments for 2024

In this section, we would like to summarize a few very cool insights about current trends and the status quo.

They come predominantly from a presentation by the creators of the AI Index Report at Stanford University. It really is an ingenious report that measures and analyzes the trends in AI every year and draws conclusions from them.

You can read the full 300+ pages of the report here for free.

Here are a few important learnings:

AI is improving at an incredible speed

Above, you can see the result of a Midjourney prompt to create a Harry Potter image. On the left with the first model in February 2022 and then again in December 2023.

Crazy.

That's why we always recommend that you don’t invest too much into developing something yourself, and ideally build your AI applications in such a way that the underlying foundation model can be changed. Depending on which one is improving faster, you are very flexible this way.

It's crazy how much the new models cost to develop

The cost estimate above shows that the playing field for these foundation models will only be dominated by large players with virtually unlimited money.

The first Transformer Large Language Model had training costs of less than 1 million euros.

GPT-4 is already just under 80 million. And the current Google Gemini Ultra is almost 200 million US dollars. And that's just the training costs!

It will be very difficult for providers with little capital to keep up in the long term.

AI is already making us much more productive

As the saying goes: It's not AI that will replace us immediately, but people who use AI will replace those who don't.

This is also visualized by the results of a study among management consultants.

Accordingly, the use of GPT-4 alone increases productivity by 12%, speed by 25% and the quality of work by 40%.

Extremely impressive figures, which are perhaps another motivation to learn AI and figure out how to use it best. Others are already doing it very successfully!

The following chart impressively illustrates the impact of this at company level:

In summary, it shows: AI is already reducing costs and increasing sales in almost every area.

You don't need a business degree to see that this is a good combination. 😉 

👨‍🏫 Everyone gets their personal employee, teacher, consultant, …

We have saved the best trend for last.

OpenAI has just introduced their newest GPT-4o model. A model that is multimodal. In other words: it can speak, hear, see, read and understand!

This means that in the very near future, we will always have our smart little helper with us to see what we are doing, to talk to and to help us directly.

Watch the video here:

In general, AI will fundamentally change the way we interact with our phones and computers.

It's really worth taking a look at the entire GPT-4o product launch:

Or the one from Google. Here too, some super exciting innovations have just been announced. Check out the most important ones in this summary in under 10 minutes:

We will delve go into everything in more detail in the near future and look at individual cases.

That's enough for today.

So, that was our special edition on the Rise of AI.

It really is an extremely exciting conference whose organizers are extremely passionate.

Exciting people, and we are super inspired on the plane back home.

We are living in incredibly exciting times.

Back next week with the usual program!

Reto & Fabian from the AInauten

P.S.: Follow us on social media - that motivates us to keep going 😁!
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