Eye on AI: Meta doubles down on AI, Softbank to invest $1 billion and more

Meta to invest more in AI | Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has announced that it will be investing more in artificial intelligence (AI) research and development. The company believes that AI is a key technology that will drive future growth. Meta has already made significant investments in AI, and it is now planning to increase its spending in this area.

Duolingo reports AI as cause for layoffs | Language learning app Duolingo has laid off a number of employees, and the company has cited AI as a reason for the job cuts. Duolingo says that it is using AI to automate some of its tasks, and this has led to a reduction in the number of employees needed.

TCS CEO says AI will ‘kill call centres’ | The head of IT giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) believes that the growth of artificial intelligence will soon kill India’s call centre industry. In an interview with the Financial Times, TCS CEO K Krithivasan said that there will be a “minimal” need for call centres across Asia in as soon as a year. Krithivasan highlighted that while no job cuts have happened yet, the widespread adoption of generative AI among multinational clients is poised to revolutionise traditional call centre operations.

NVIDIA CEO hand-delivers new GPU to Sam Altiman | NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang personally delivered the first-ever NVIDIA DGX H200 system to OpenAI. OpenAI President Greg Brockman shared a photo of Huang, Chief Sam Altman, and the DGX H200 system with the caption, “First @NVIDIA DGX H200 in the world, hand-delivered to OpenAI and dedicated by Jensen ‘to advance AI, computing, and humanity.'” This powerful new GPU will bolster OpenAI’s efforts as they work on GPT-5 and the planned public release of Sora this year.

Survey says global tech leaders are not prepared for AI |A recent survey conducted by Lenovo has found that global tech leaders are not prepared for the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI). The survey found that many tech leaders are not sure how to implement AI in their businesses, and they are also concerned about the potential negative impacts of AI.

Apple introduces Gen AI model | Apple introduced a family of small open-source language models named OpenELM, designed to run efficiently on devices like iPhones and Macs. Apple claims these models outperform other publicly trained models due to a layer-wise scaling strategy that allocates parameters within the transformer model for better accuracy. OpenELM consists of eight models with varying parameter sizes ranging from 270 million to 3 billion, all trained on public datasets.

SoftBank to pump $1 billion into AI | Japanese tech giant SoftBank aims to create a top-tier, Japanese-language generative AI model. To achieve this, they plan a $960 million investment over the next two years to enhance their computing infrastructure. This includes purchasing advanced graphics processing units from Nvidia, essential for training large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This investment builds upon a previous $129.2 million (20 billion yen) spent on computing infrastructure last year.