Artificial Intelligence is one of the most critical technologies of this century.

The development and application of AI technology change daily. To be ahead of the curve, I spend a lot of time analysing, filtering and distilling the latest insights for all my clients.

Here are just a few interesting AI, ML, Big data, analytics, business, and technology news and articles that caught my eye this month. This news will focus more on business than technology.

Please feel free to share with others.

AI in business  – May 2022

• Baidu reports a 45% jump – Baidu has earned $4.48 billion in its first quarter – Baidu has said to have made $4.48 billion in its first quarter with a 45% year-on-year increase in its AI cloud.
• BT deploys AI platform – BT has consolidated 56 legacy systems to create a single system.  This is said to give more significant insights and reduce costs by £25million by 2027.
• Google manufacturing solutions – Google launched two new technologies to help manufacturers connect assets, processes and data for the factory floor.
• AI simulation is an important way of recreating possible future scenarios. Brief insights – There has been a massive rise in ‘digital twins’ to help try different approaches, speed up advancement and reduce risk.
• British Telecom and AWS – BT and AWS partner up to reduce costs and improve AI capability.
  Brief insights – Infrastructure is crucial to the success of your AI project. In the past, most big companies had their own IT departments. Today, these are being outsourced to reduce costs and improve technology and efficiency. It is estimated this will help towards BT’s £2bn savings.
• BT launched a new business charter – BT is reforming and is set to invest $100M in the next three years.
• Autonomous cars in China – Baidu and Pony AI have been given the green light for driverless taxis in Beijing.
• AI boosts semiconductor sales – AI is helping fuel the growth in semiconductors. The industry is reputed to be worth nearly 1Trillion dollars.
  Brief insights – We have only scratched the opportunity with semiconductors and AI-edge technology. Along with 5G and remote processing, this will increase demand further.
• Future of AI, cloud etc. – Interesting WSJ discussion with Arvind Krishna (CEO of IBM).
• five rules for fixing AI in business – Article by BCG to help make sure your AI is delivering your objectives.

AI in business use cases – May 2022

• Mars AI ingredient discovery – Mars group have teamed up with PIPA to discover new plant-based ingredients for human, animal and supplementary markets.
  Brief insight – Partnerships are a good move in AI development. Some companies are leaders in the field and allow a quick route to market.
• Stronger and greener concrete – Meta AI with the University of Illinois have developed a new formula for concrete that uses 40% less carbon.
• AI improves complex supply chain management – Supply chains are getting increasingly complex. With global buying, it is prone to many potential issues. Brief insights – With all logistics companies, there are tons of information to process. AI can handle all of this dynamically and in real-time. Tasks can also be automated as requested.
• Ericsson using AI to help with sustainability – Every company has their part to play in environmental sustainability. In this use case, Ericsson look at using AI to help reduce their CO2 emissions.

AI in retail – May 2022

• AI in retail – Some trends and ensuring AI for monitoring stock conditions.
• Talk to Linda Leopold – Linda is the head of responsible AI & data at H&M Group. Interview looking at the importance of responsible AI in retail. Interview by Mark Minevich.

AI fintech – May 2022

• Fidelity AI software launch – Fidelity has launched AI financial planning software.
• Copyleaks raises $6m – Copyleaks AI platform checks the text’s authenticity.
• SiMa ai raises $30M – SiMa AI edge chip manufacture has secured a Series B round to invest in scaling its engineering.
• Flying fish raises $70 – Flying fish raises $70M funds to invest in AI/ML startups
• Nextbillion.ai raises $21M – Nextbillion raises £21M in their Series B funding round with their geospatial data ecosystem.
• Heartex raises $25M – AI data labelling platform raises $25M in their series A round.
• ZMO.ai raises $8M – ZUMO has raised $8M in their round A financing. ZUMO team are led by ex-Google, Apple, and Facebook members. They produce virtual clothing on virtual models for in-demand fashion.
• Motilent raises $1.2M – Motilent uses AI to assess digestive diseases using AI medical image analysis.
• Rockflow.ai raises $10M – AI-assisted one-stop investment platform.
• Fashinza raises $100M – Fashinza is an AI-driven B2B marketplace platform for the fashion industry.
• Mutiny raises $50 – Mutiny creates AI-assisted personalisation for websites.
• SpearTifin raises $109M – Tiffin uses AI to personalise investor experience. This series D has helped raise the valuation to $842M.
• AI investment reaches $93.5B – In 2021, private investment in AI reached nearly $100B in 2021. This is a massive increase from 2017 at an annual rate of 38%.
• Mylerz raises $9.6M – Cairo-based Mylerz will use the investment to build an AI-enabled automated fulfilment centre.
• Tignis raises $7.2M – Tignes has designed AI-assisted process control for semiconductor manufacturing.
• Dusty robotics raises $45M – Dusty Robotics raised $45 from the series B round for developing and supplying robots for the construction industry.
• Orient raises $11M – Indoor AI-assisted GPS technology.
• Brightsee raises $68M – Brightsee uses AI to find molecules in plants that could be used for good health and nutrition.
• Keelvar raises $24M – Cork-based supply chain analytics firm use AI to minimise disruption.
• Tidio raises $25M – Tidio creates AI-assisted live chatbots with real-time analytics.
• Inflection raises $225M – Develop ways of leveraging AI to help humans. This is a massive valuation for Mustafa Suleyman (Deepmind founder) and Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn co-founder).
• ONCOHOST raises $35M – OncoHost develops personalised strategies to maximise the success of cancer therapy using AI.
• Therapixel raises $15M – Therapixel has raised $15M in a Series B funding round. The technology helps read mammogram 2D and 3D scans for diagnosing cancers.
• Laing.AI raise $10M – Laing has raised $10M in their series A round. Laing uses large datasets and labelling to help companies benefit from AI.
• Synergies raises $12M – AI analytics firm helps industrial companies become more efficient. Their technology uses ML to help companies discover insights and make decisions.
• Salience Labs raises $11.5M – Oxford-based AI firm has raised investment for its ultra-high-speed multi-chip processors. This help computes AI technology with speed and ease.
• Route Konnect raises $1M – Cardiff-based AI firm develops ways of monitoring vehicles and people in physical spaces using AI.
• Firmus raises $4.5M – Firmus has developed computer vision technology that analyses blueprints and detects design errors.
  Brief insight – More companies will use computer vision to analyse and spot issues. This may also be a standard in architectural drawing software too. The quicker you can spot errors, the less cost to the developers and investors.
• Imagine raises $21.5M – Imagine has developed deep learning algorithms to pick up biomarkers for treatments.
• Quin AI raises $582K – Quin is a user prediction AI service for various business sizes.
  Brief insight – Traffic to websites is a valuable resource. Most traffic comes and goes without fully understanding why. Using AI can help process across many data points and recommend changes to increase revenue.
• Synthesis AI raises $17M – Pioneer in synthetic data technology.
  Brief insight – AI depends on data; sometimes, existing data is insufficient. Synthetic data is key to the growth of AI in the future.
• Kinetix raises $11M – Paris-based Kinetix has raised $11 for their AI 3d animation platform.
• Galileo raises $5.1M – Galileo jumps out of stealth mode for funding. Galileo is exciting as you can add a few lines of code to your AI project, and Galileo checks AI code for issues.
  Brief insight – As more companies implement AI many models, this will save lots of time and money in development.
• Traceable AI raises $60M – Traceable AI, an API security and observability company, announced it had raised $60 million in Series B funding.
  Brief insight – Using AI as surveillance to monitor patterns of use or misuse is an excellent application. The volumes of data and methods can be highly complex. AI  can silently monitor and flag issues quickly. This is a growth area as compliance and security are increasingly more important today.
• Accern raises $20M – Accern raises 20m for its No Code NLP from documents.
  Brief insights – Legacy companies have a vast wealth of data they can tap into from paper documents. Having AI technology with bolt-on NLP capability has enormous potential with unstructured data.
• Hirelogic raises $4 – AI-powered human resource technology software.

AI technology – May 2022

• Google Imagen released – Google’s exciting new model has been removed. Great explainer by Louis Bouchard.
• NVIDIA Launchpad – NVIDIA open up their enterprise AI testing area to help speed up AI creation. This is free for a short time.
• Google I/O ’22 – 12 min summary of the latest Google AI technology.
• Bosch AI sensor – Bosch commercially released an innovative learning AI sensor which can be used for sports, navigation, ML analytics etc.
  Brief insights – This is the future of sensing technology. A sensor that can learn and interface
• Intel AI processor – Intel shows off a new processor, “Ponte Vecchio”, designed for AI and HPC (High-Performance Computing) applications. It has 100 billion transistors and competes with NVIDIA, AMD and Google.
• NVIDIA AI processor – Nvidia released their new chip/processor H100 “Hopper” designed for AI applications. It has 80 billion transistors and competes with Intel, Google and AMD technology.
• MIT AI – MIT team have developed AI that can understand concepts from video, audio and text.
  Brief insights – This is exciting as it opens possibilities for deeper understanding.
• Neuro-symbolic AI –  More interest has been given to Neuro-symbolic AI.
  Brief insight – Most AI is focused on outcomes rather than causality. Neuro-symbolic AI helps understand the why or cause of action. ANNs are perfect for complexity. If both techniques were combined, they would give a powerful way to get accuracy and understanding. This would then lead to better decisions, technology and outcomes.
• Meta release 175 billion transformer – Meta release Open Pretrained Transformer (OPT-175B), which has been trained on publicly available data sets.
• AI heart monitor – researchers at the Mayo clinic develop an app for Apple Watch to monitor heart disease.
  Brief insight – Health AI has enormous opportunities to monitor and flag health issues. This can be combined with other metrics to give a powerful global picture of health.
• Dal-e 2 released – Dal-e 2 is officially released with access to the public.

AI learning – May 2022

• How does UBER AI work? Great video from Louis Bouchard.
• Difference between Data science and data analytics – Interesting article defines each discipline and how you can get the best out of each.
• Yannic discusses a new paper on integrating robots with NLP. It demonstrates the vast possibilities of this technology.

AI in government – May 2022

• Brussels effect on AI – Article on new EU legislation and how this will influence worldwide.
• Pentagon AI ethical implementation – Pentagon is finalising its ethical AI initiatives.
• US justice department – US justice department and EEOC warn against disability discrimination using AI.
• Australian AI investment the Australian Government is not investing enough in AI research.
• Pentagon invests more in AI – Most countries invest more in AI defence. The Pentagon is looking to invest $377billion in new AI research.
• DRCF UK gov looking into algorithms – The Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum is busy looking into the safety of algorithms.
• EU is slipping behind in AI – Interesting article on MEPs says how EU AI is slipping behind due to underinvestment.
• AI cybersecurity in Government – Article by Microsoft on the areas of AI cybersecurity within the US government.
• Threats and opportunities of AI – EU document from reports.
• Nato to embrace AI – Interesting understanding of how a large org embraces AI for security.

Tech stories/articles

• Q1 cloud wars – Great article by Bob Evans on the size and growth of the prominent cloud vendors in this first quarter this year.
• Robots and jobs – Interesting article on ‘The robots aren’t coming for your jobs.
• Why billions are pouring into robots – In 2021, funding globally on robotics has grown to $14.9 billion. The demand for factory automation fuels this.
• PayPal migration to Google Cloud. Great conversations with Bruno Aziza (Google) and Bala (PayPal)

AI Surveys and Research – May 2022

• Artificial Intelligence ethics – Over 75% of companies have not implemented an AI ethics policy.
  Brief insight – This is a critical step in the development of society. Every company should do this as it not only strengthens AI development but the future proves it. As legislation comes, those who do not have a policy will have to implement one at extra cost to the company.

Technology, cloud, digital transformation news

• Intel’s supercomputer – Intel’s Habana Labs has fired up its new supercomputer. Spec looks amazing.
• Capgemini selected by Airbus – Capgemini has been selected by Airbus to deliver a cloud-first transformation program.