Assessing the AI Bubble - Digital Explorers' Diary #43
Welcome to the Digital Explorers' Diary #43!
A curated collection of thought-provoking topics about interactive technologies, AI, web3, sense-making, entrepreneurship, and psychology.
Executive summary:
- News of the AI front - how is the bubble holding up?
- LVMH and Epic Games are entering a partnership.
- A research paper speculates that the Metaverse will be a net benefit for global warming.
- And Google showcase an AI that could disrupt the fashion try-on.
What’s up in the AI world?
After a couple of weeks focused on Virtual Reality, ahem, sorry, it’s called «Spatial Computing» now; thanks to Apple’s announcement of their Vision Pro headset, I thought it would be great to make an assessment of where we are in the Artificial Intelligence bubble. And it’s growing!
First, regulations are starting to take place: the EU AI Act was voted with an overwhelming majority. The procedure is not completed, and with the 2-year grace period, it’s not likely to be in application before 2026. Still, if you’re in the tech world, I’d advise you to prepare - if things unfold similarly to GDPR, there will be implications for many businesses - especially if you are managing and using personal user data.
Here is one example that the AI Act is trying to prevent. Let’s say an insurance company knows that you have sickness “A” and that you are doing a certain hobby “H”. Using AI; a prediction might arise, saying if A and H, then the likelihood of sickness B is very high. That might be great if it was only predictive medicine, but they might preemptively increase your bill… And the AI might be wrong; remember, it’s only a prediction. To dive deeper, read this eye-opening article.
Then, another sign that a bubble is coming up: Mistral AI, a 4-week-old company, received a $133 million seed fundraise. They don’t even have a product, just promises from ex-employees from Google and Meta… Does that ring a bell? Oh, and by the way, in another bubble, an NFT was sold at Sotheby's Auction for $6.2M last Friday after being seized during the bankruptcy of the crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital.
Speaking of Meta: they want companies to freely use and profit from their next generation of open-source AIs. Of course, they will benefit from it, drawing customers from Google and OpenAI/Microsoft and gaining lots of data, metrics, and experiences from it. If you’re in the advertisement business, soon, Meta AI will be there to assist you in building ads that reach more people with higher target precision.
Far from the millions, standard jobs are starting to be affected and transformed. IKEA has trained their call-center employees to become interior-design consultants, thanks to their AI named “Billie”. It’s a paid service, of course, and IKEA says that it didn’t lead to headcount reduction. A positive outcome, for now, of empowering employees to do more with AI assistants?
Related, but a bit more concerning: so far, AI (mainly ChatGPT, but soon the AI in Google Workspace) has greatly increased individual productivity but not that much overall enterprise productivity. Many office workers are using ChaptGPT secretly without telling their employers, mainly because of security and trust concerns. How should employers handle that? I agree with the article here: encourage publicity. Employees need to feel safe and supported so that the whole company can benefit from the productivity gains, in all meanings of the term: more time for employee-driven initiatives, more efficient processes, more time off, etc.
This Week's News:
- Epic Games, the creators of the blockbuster game Fortnite and the game engine Unreal Engine are entering a partnership with LVMH.
The luxury needs indeed to embrace the digital world to seduce the new, younger generations with metaverse events, digital products, and all sorts of digital experiences.
Epic Games is a smart choice, given its extended suite of tools to capture, transform and create digital versions of products, realistic avatars, and life-like environments.
LVMH - Somewhat related - a new research paper is out, claiming that the switch to virtual conferences, events, and meetings could help reduce global warming by up to 0.02 degrees C by 2050.
Even by taking into account the increase in goods production, servers infrastructure, and all, the authors estimate the impact of travel reduction and other efficiencies to be higher.
In another «I told you so» moment, I guessed that last September ;)
Generated on Midjourney - Again in research, Google is showcasing its work in fashion. This new AI takes two inputs: an original garment and a picture of a user. It then creates a new image of that user with the new garment.
Fashion people out there, keep this in mind: the world of product photography and try-on is going to be disrupted in the next few years thanks to this type of technology. Get ready!
Google
From the Podcast
Every week, I’m teaming up with Guillaume Brincin and Sébastien Spas on the Lost In Immersion podcast. This week:
- As a break from the Apple Vision Pro discussions, we look at the new Lenovo ThinkReality XR headset. It’s the marketing opposite of Apple: enterprise-focused, device management solutions, meetings cloud services, etc. Will it succeed? It’s a bit pricy, but the industry might like and trust Lenovo better than the other manufacturers.
Lenovo - And we continue our talk on the Apple Vision Pro. Here’s the main takeaway: Apple has put the bar so high in terms of user interaction and quality that it might force the other players to level up, with an overall net benefit for the users.
Apple Vision Pro
Tune in at 10 am UTC on Tuesdays on Twitch, and listen to the replays on Youtube!
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