In today’s news:

• On this day
• 2 AI Truths and a Lie
• Anthropic’s Claude AI can Digest The Great Gatsby in seconds
• Who is Twitter's New CEO Linda Yaccarino?
• LinkedIn Turns 20, Moves to AI
• More Stories on NextTech
• NextTech Mergers, Funding, and Acquisitions
• The Latest NextTech reads from LXA

This week's NextTech newsletter wants you to look into my eyes, not around my eyes, into my eyes.  ⏱️👀

The OpenAI CEO wants to scan your eyeballs with a sci-fi orb. Bet that’s not a story you thought you’d read this week.

Sam Altman is in advanced talks to get a whopping $100M for his newest venture, Worldcoin. 

Now, the idea behind Worldcoin is not exactly defined, but it involves scanning your eyeballs and giving you crypto in return. The project promises this is the future, and will act as a "path to AI-funded UBI (universal basic income)"

Play along at home. Out of these three wacky AI projects, two are fake, and one is real. So, which of these new AI projects is unreal, and which is ugh, for real?! (Check at the bottom of the newsletter for the reveal!)

Having a laugh.

JokeAI is a system that generates jokes based on a given topic, and the results have been impressive. In one test, JokeAI generated a joke about Brexit that was deemed funnier than those written by human comedians.

Do you meme it?

An AI has been developed that can create personalised memes for you based on your interests. Select your political leaning, hobbies, country, and more, and the AI will create you five well-suited memes.

Singing in tune. 

AI that can generate your own personal theme song, based on your job, family, and personality type. It’ll write the lyrics, tune, and even create a sit-com style video.

📰Anthropic’s Claude AI Can Digest the Great Gatsby In Seconds

AI is always said to have the potential to succeed beyond its human counterparts. And now it has. Well, at least human counterparts in high school. AI can now even finish The Great Gatsby in time for that pesky book report.

Dall.e Prompt: 1920s robots in flapper dresses, in an art deco style

Anthropic has announced that its AI language model, Claude, similar to OpenAI's GPT-4, can now analyze an entire book's worth of material in under a minute by expanding its context window to 100,000 tokens.

Tokens are fragments of words that simplify AI data processing, and a larger context window means the model can consider larger works like books or participate in very long conversations.

Anthropic loaded the entire text of The Great Gatsby into Claude, modified one line, and asked the model to spot what was different, to which it responded correctly in 22 seconds.

While this may not seem impressive, after feeding Claude the text of a book, the AI model can interactively answer questions or analyse their meaning. OpenAI's GPT-4 LLM, in comparison, boasts a context window length of 4,096 tokens.

📰Who is Twitter's New CEO Linda Yaccarino?

 In December Elon Musk vowed to name a replacement “as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” Now, it seems like he’s found that exact person. But are they an idiot or ingenious? Innovative or an ingenue? 

Elon Musk has announced that Linda Yaccarino, a prominent media executive, will be the new CEO of Twitter, months after he promised to step back from the role. In a tweet on Friday, Musk welcomed Yaccarino, stating that she would focus primarily on business operations, while he would focus on product design and new technology.

Yaccarino has been with NBCUniversal for over 11 years, returning to the company where she started as a college intern.

Before that, she served as the executive vice president and COO of advertising sales, marketing, and acquisitions at Turner Broadcasting, which included CNN at that time. 

At NBCUniversal, Yaccarino's most significant achievement was creating unified ad sales teams rather than having multiple sales teams approach the same advertisers.

Her profile indicates that her ad sales team generated $100 billion in ad sales since she joined in 2011 and forged partnerships with many new media companies, including Twitter, Apple News, Buzzfeed, Snapchat, and YouTube.

Last month, Yaccarino appeared with Musk at an industry conference for a session entitled "Twitter 2.0: From Conversations to Partnerships," indicating a growing relationship between the two business leaders.

With Yaccarino's extensive experience in the media industry and her success in generating ad sales, her appointment as Twitter's new CEO is expected to have a significant impact on the social media platform.

📰 LinkedIn Turns 20, Goes AI-mad

On May 5, 2003, LinkedIn was launched, becoming the first among a group of social media giants born in the aftermath of the early 2000s tech crash to enter its twenties. Ah, your twenties. Time to get a job, travel the world, pay taxes- wait, maybe not that one.

Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter are set to join LinkedIn in turning 20 over the next three years.

The concept of LinkedIn was born out of a group of Silicon Valley product managers and engineers, led by founding CEO Reid Hoffman.

Their aim was to create a platform that would help them track their connections in the startup community and identify promising places to work while also inviting their friends to join.

LinkedIn quickly distinguished itself as one of the earliest big tech companies to invest in the machine learning revolution.

It launched its signature “People You May Know” feature in 2007, which recommended new connections.

The company has maintained a strong interest in AI, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stating his belief that every application should be powered by AI, including LinkedIn's features.

LinkedIn's product engineering executive, Berger, envisions a future where users can describe their job preferences, desired workplace culture, and compensation criteria to an AI-powered copilot.

This conversational AI could show users matching job opportunities and guide them through crafting applications and preparing for interviews.

To bring this ambitious vision to life, Berger says LinkedIn has assembled a team of engineers to start from scratch, as they have done before in the company's history.

📰 Buzzfeed Says Its AI Is Outperforming Its Human Employees

According to a report by Bloomberg, BuzzFeed, a media company that recently shut down its Pulitzer Prize-winning news division and laid off around 120 of its employees, informed investors this week of its AI 'success'

So, what's the result? Well, it's that its readers spend 40% more time with its AI-assisted quizzes than with traditional ones.

Despite facing financial challenges, BuzzFeed is doubling down on AI and attempting to demonstrate that its experiment is yielding positive results.

📰 The AI Revolution in Google Search

Instead of embracing chatbots or redesigning its homepage, Google is prioritizing AI in its search results, the most valuable real estate on the internet.

Google's search results will now include an AI-generated summary consisting of a few paragraphs that provide an answer to the user's query.

To the right of the summary, three links to relevant websites with corroborating information will be displayed, referred to as the "AI snapshot."

This feature is powered by Google's most advanced LLM work to date, which includes PaLM 2, a new general-purpose model, and the Multitask Unified Model (MUM) for understanding multiple types of media.

The AI snapshot will only appear when Google's algorithms deem it more useful than standard results and sensitive topics such as health and finances are currently excluded from AI interference.

While AI is not completely replacing the traditional "10 blue links," it is certainly pushing them further down the search results page.

Dall.e Prompt: a confused robot on a computer, in an art deco style

📰 What is Prompt Injection?

Currently, there is a surge in the development of complex applications based on LLMs (Large Language Models), including GPT-3/4/ChatGPT, and the momentum is growing exponentially.

However, the risk of prompt injection is a concern that may not be receiving the necessary attention.

Prompt injection refers to the hijacking of a language model's output, allowing an attacker to manipulate the model to generate any desired text. This vulnerability arises when unreliable text is incorporated into the prompt, which can result in situations such as the following:

📰 The First Purchase Made with Has Been Bitcoin Rediscovered

Did people just discover one of the earliest NFT purchases?

A tweet by independent developer Udi Wertheimer has sparked excitement among Crypto Twitter fans as it suggests that the first-ever real-world purchase made by Bitcoin may have been for a JPEG instead of pizza.

The shared screenshot shows a user named Sabunir attempting to sell a picture for 500 Bitcoin on the Bitcoin forum Bitcointalk.

The screenshot is dated January 24, 2010, four months before Bitcoin Pizza Day, when developer Laszlo Hanyecz famously bought two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoin, considered the first-ever real-world purchase using Bitcoin.

The possibility of the first-ever purchase being a JPEG instead of pizza has raised eyebrows in the crypto community.

Have a gander at the post below!

 

This Week in Numbers 

$1M 

Currently, investors in Hong Kong with portfolios under $1 million face restrictions in trading. Hong Kong is set to launch a crypto licensing regime next month, aiming to become a leading crypto hub.

4

Swiss startup Destinus imagines its hydrogen-powered hypersonic planes flying from Europe to Australia in ~4 hours

9

Approximately 9 in 10 large enterprises use multi-cloud architecture and 60% of corporations store data in the cloud.

💰Graph Of The Week

Cloud Market share has shown tremendous growth in recent years. The market of cloud computing has boomed exceptionally and has started growing covering a large area of complex technologies, Engineering, products, and customer services.

As a result, it gives birth to a multi-billion-dollar industry where many cloud computing companies compete with each other for expanding their cloud market share.

✍️ NextTech Mergers, Funding, and Acquisitions

Who's making dough, who's laying low, and who's in a constant state of "Oh, God, no"? It's time to find out, with LXA's NextTech News Round. 

You're kidding me. The 'having a laugh' AI is real!

✒️ The Latest NextTech Reads from LXA