Want To Impress Wall Street? Just Add Some AI (hollywoodreporter.com) 42
As media executives look to pop the stock of flagging publicly traded companies, tech advances are becoming the new gimmick to wow (even temporarily) the investing class. From a report: When Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel opened his company's earnings call with prepared remarks Feb. 28, a casual listener hearing him tout the UFC and WME might have missed the most interesting part: Emanuel wasn't speaking at all. Well, he sort of was. The words were his, and the voice was his, but rather than Emanuel speaking into a microphone (opening remarks on earnings calls are often pretaped), the comments were the product of a generative artificial intelligence firm calledâSpeechify. Indeed, artificial intelligence has been hard to avoid for Wall Street watchers this year. And it's easy to understand why: AI news has led to share price surges at companies like BuzzFeed (which uses it and saw its stock price more than double) and Microsoft (whose rise was in the high singleâdigits).
After the public release of OpenAI's large language model (LLM) chatbot ChatGPT (and the stock bounce it gave to Microsoft, which is OpenAI's tech partner), it seems that every company wants a piece of the AI action, or at least wants to send the message that it's thinking about it. Companies with close ties to media and entertainment are no exception. In his first letter to creators as CEO of YouTube, Neal Mohan wrote March 1 that "the power of AI is just beginning to emerge in ways that will reinvent video and make the seemingly impossible possible," and that it will be a priority for him. Spotify, led by CEO Daniel Ek, released on Feb. 22 what it is calling an "AI DJ," powered by technology from OpenAI. The DJ takes the music a Spotify user listens to and combines it with recommendations from music experts and an AI-generated voice to create a totally personalized radio show. Snap, run by Evan Spiegel, released an assistant called "My AI," based on ChatGPT, bringing the capabilities of that LLM to Snapchat+ users.
And at small digital publishers like the Jonah Peretti-led BuzzFeed and Arena Group Holdings (the owner of Sports Illustrated), AI is being touted as a fount of new types of storytelling that "can create enterprise value for our brands and partners," per Arena Group CEO Ross Levinsohn. To be sure, AI's potential for transforming business is real (in a March 2 research report, Morgan Stanley called it a "$6 trillion opportunity"), but it remains just that: an opportunity, rather than today's reality. Wall Street is still very bullish on AI in the long term, with Bank of America's Haim Israel and Martyn Briggs writing in a Feb. 28 thematic report that AI is "at a defining moment -- like the internet in the '90s," but the consensus is that while big tech firms like YouTube owner Alphabet, Amazon and Apple will reap the rewards at some point, what it means for smaller companies in the present is less clear. For entertainment companies, the potential is obvious, even if the business models are not. The Morgan Stanley report noted the logic in AI recommendations on streaming services like Spotify and Netflix (Spotify's DJ is a first step in that direction), and it isn't a stretch to think that content itself can be made faster and at less cost with generative technology (applications could include special effects, which are labor intensive and costly). For companies like Endeavor and CAA, generative voice technology (like that from Speechify) and deepfake tech (like Deep Voodoo, a deepfake company from the creators of South Park that counts the CAA-affiliated Connect Ventures as an investor), could mean new opportunities for old actors (see Robert Zemeckis' upcoming movie Here, which will use AI from Metaphysic to de-age Tom Hanks).
After the public release of OpenAI's large language model (LLM) chatbot ChatGPT (and the stock bounce it gave to Microsoft, which is OpenAI's tech partner), it seems that every company wants a piece of the AI action, or at least wants to send the message that it's thinking about it. Companies with close ties to media and entertainment are no exception. In his first letter to creators as CEO of YouTube, Neal Mohan wrote March 1 that "the power of AI is just beginning to emerge in ways that will reinvent video and make the seemingly impossible possible," and that it will be a priority for him. Spotify, led by CEO Daniel Ek, released on Feb. 22 what it is calling an "AI DJ," powered by technology from OpenAI. The DJ takes the music a Spotify user listens to and combines it with recommendations from music experts and an AI-generated voice to create a totally personalized radio show. Snap, run by Evan Spiegel, released an assistant called "My AI," based on ChatGPT, bringing the capabilities of that LLM to Snapchat+ users.
And at small digital publishers like the Jonah Peretti-led BuzzFeed and Arena Group Holdings (the owner of Sports Illustrated), AI is being touted as a fount of new types of storytelling that "can create enterprise value for our brands and partners," per Arena Group CEO Ross Levinsohn. To be sure, AI's potential for transforming business is real (in a March 2 research report, Morgan Stanley called it a "$6 trillion opportunity"), but it remains just that: an opportunity, rather than today's reality. Wall Street is still very bullish on AI in the long term, with Bank of America's Haim Israel and Martyn Briggs writing in a Feb. 28 thematic report that AI is "at a defining moment -- like the internet in the '90s," but the consensus is that while big tech firms like YouTube owner Alphabet, Amazon and Apple will reap the rewards at some point, what it means for smaller companies in the present is less clear. For entertainment companies, the potential is obvious, even if the business models are not. The Morgan Stanley report noted the logic in AI recommendations on streaming services like Spotify and Netflix (Spotify's DJ is a first step in that direction), and it isn't a stretch to think that content itself can be made faster and at less cost with generative technology (applications could include special effects, which are labor intensive and costly). For companies like Endeavor and CAA, generative voice technology (like that from Speechify) and deepfake tech (like Deep Voodoo, a deepfake company from the creators of South Park that counts the CAA-affiliated Connect Ventures as an investor), could mean new opportunities for old actors (see Robert Zemeckis' upcoming movie Here, which will use AI from Metaphysic to de-age Tom Hanks).
This is not surprising (Score:3)
Seems like my newsfeed has had tons of articles about how ChatGPT is going to take my job, everyone else's job, etc. It is a very impressive product, don't get me wrong. But the hype is insane. Remember when companies could inflate their value by just adding 'BlockChain' to the company name?
AI carumba (Score:2)
It's like the Uber for blockchain AI.
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But the hype is insane. Remember when companies could inflate their value by just adding 'BlockChain' to the company name?
This is at least different than Blockchain because AI actually has real potential benefits. The only question is whether or not AI use cases are possible. Blockchain was the opposite. It was clearly possible to technically build blockchains, we just weren't sure if the results would be worth the trouble.
The level of hype is comparable though. I'd say AI hype is much higher than blockchain ever was; in my opinion because the potential benefits are so much higher. Even detractors of AI hype would mostly admit
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But what if we did an AI blockchain?
Re: This is not surprising (Score:2)
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It's not hard to get a wrong answer from ChatGPT. It is a natural language processor and chat creator; and it is not a fact checker, genius, or advice generator. This is only going to confuse the masses who think that if something is on the internet is must be true.
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I can remember when companies inflated their value by adding "online!!!" to their TV ads. And a big mention of "DOT-COM!!!"
Regardless of the era, marketing BS is amazingly easy to spot, for anyone who is not in business it seems. Much like frauds are easy to spot.
like sheep (Score:5, Insightful)
...they instinctively follow the leader.
Whether that word is (today) "AI", or (yesterday) "crypto" or (day before yesterday) "blockchain" they're just like fucking sidewalk pigeons: if you throw down some breadcrumbs they're so focused on 'being first' that they just FLOCK without really caring about what they're flocking to.
After all, it's not their money anyway. Win, lose, or draw, they get their percentage.
And somehow these people generally make orders of magnitude more $ for what they do that actually produces nothing, than do teachers or most of the rest of us that are gainfully employed. /baffled
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It's an unfortunate consequence of various social and cultural issues afflicting society. I know, I know it sounds corny but there is something legitimately wrong with a culture when it rewards incredibly wasteful and abusive practices like this. It's just depressing seeing it contaminate the STEM field, even though I am aware that a lot of good, talented individuals need the capital. At this point though, nothing short of a collapse in the tech economy will be able to fix this mess.
Now I'm starting to thin
Always the same crap... (Score:3)
Add some current buzzwords and make a ton of money. It is like "investors" are not an intelligent species.
Well, to be fair, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, nuclear fanatics, Trump supporters, the "woke", etc. do not have working minds either and live in their la-la-world instead where their views make sense. My take is that humanity has had it too easy for the last couple of hundred years and necessary pruning of the most extreme examples of stupidity was not done for too long.
Re:Always the same crap... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Always the same crap... (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed. Well said.
And the outcome of that is predictably bad and getting worse, because these people are then easily turned into "useful idiots" by modern manipulation techniques. As long as this goes on we will have to re-think democracy, because it cannot work under these conditions.
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Sure, there's no shortage of stupid / ignorant people BUT:
Modern life is way too complicated to keep up on everything. You must trust others unless you want to live naked in the woods eating berries or whatever.
You trust your mechanic to fix your car so it's safe to drive, you trust the gas station to pump gas into that car, etc. If your particular focus isn't on AI research... you're going to get your information from pop science articles. And if you're not rich, you're going to get your investment news
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That is a cop-out. Yes, you need to trust experts. But you can still be have no opinion on things you do not understand. All it takes is a bit of honesty and self-awareness. The problem are people aggressively pushing things they do not understand and that is just not acceptable.
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Add some current buzzwords and make a ton of money. It is like "investors" are not an intelligent species.
Investors are all looking for their next 100x return on investment to cover their massive losses on most of their startup investments. So they are going to naturally gravitate towards any potentially disruptive technology. AI certainly fits the bill. I cannot off the top of my head think of a more potentially disruptive technology, so it makes sense that many investors would be focusing on companies who can convince them that their company roadmap will be significantly impacted by AI advancements.
We shall s
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>they are going to naturally gravitate towards any potentially disruptive technology. AI certainly fits the bill. I cannot off the top of my head think of a more potentially disruptive technology
The day AI works is the day the entire economic system crashes and we learn the hard way that we should have already implemented an alternative.
True AI can do any job a human can. It won't just be people in a phone center reading from a script who get turfed, it'll be people with decades of education and experie
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The day AI works is the day the entire economic system crashes [...] True AI can do any job a human can.
AI already works. You seem to imply AI cannot add any value until "True AI" (I believe you are referring to Artificial General Intelligence) becomes a reality. I strongly disagree with this belief. Narrow applications of AI have been providing value since the field of AI began in the 50s. All recent advancements such as ChatGPT are still examples of narrow AI. The question is whether the current capabilities of various narrow AI applications will be capable of transforming the workplace at the level our cur
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We can replace the human body with a robot right now. Done. EASY.
What we can't do is replace the mind that intelligently operates it. That's why I'd put AI first on the list of things to worry about crashing our economic system. Everything until then is just baby steps towards that day.
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Indeed. You can automatise some things, but nothing that requires you to think can be automatized today and there is no indication that this will ever be possible. No, really not. Only exception is if a lot of people have done that specific thinking about that specific problem and placed it online and the mindless statistical classifier was trained on it. In that case, a human could have just looked things up as well though. Of course, this approach does not work at all without actually thinking humans in
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AI already works.
AI has been working on the level it does today for decades. All that has happened is that it now sounds good and has a larger training data set. It is still completely bereft of any insight and cannot even do simple logical steps and can do no fact-checking whatsoever. There is no sane reason for the hype to be started now.
True, some people are just as mindlessly stupid on some topics as AI, and there they may get replaced, but anybody that has an actually working mind and is willing to use it cannot be rep
Re: Always the same crap... (Score:2)
Wrong. 35 years ago cutting edge AI was written Prolog and Lisp. Then approx 10 years ago Deepmind solved how to do back propagation properly in ANNs and things took off.
AI is the new blockchain. (Score:2)
AI is 3DTV...it's only pattern matching (Score:1)
New fad, yay! Remember to take your profits and walk away.
You're right. Except, with blockchain, I still don't know why I should care about it. As a person who has written machine learning code and worked on ML/AI projects, I would say I think a slightly better analogy is 3DTV. Remember 10-15 years ago when the manufacturers were tripping over themselves to put 3DTV tech in every new television set? We all love the notion of 3DTV, in theory, but the promise didn't match the reality. You needed glasses, you had to sit in a certain spot and little content actua
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It's novel. It's amusing. Maybe someday it will be useful.
It's already useful: photo/video processing, games... Nvidia's DLSS was released in 2019, postprocess using AI for photos in phones is probably even older. A big chunk of VCs learned about AI 4 months ago probably and have no idea what it is and what it's not...
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Well at least we are trading a fad that was always going to be vaporware with a fad that at worst could be ahead of its time. I feel its nearly guaranteed that AI will transform the economy at the level of the industrial revolution. But whether that will happen in 20 years or 120 is still unknown. AI hype in the 80's was certainly ahead of its time. Time will tell how it goes this time.
If you want to invest wisely... (Score:2)
A) Don't invest in anything promoted with the latest fad word.
B) If you must invest in it, do so by creating a company designed to fleece the idiots throwing money at people who use the latest fad word.
Always, your fave has to be Microsoft (Score:2)
What caught my eye there, out of the whole string of annoucements, was that MS was investing $10B in Chatbots, the same time as laying off 10,000 staff. What a ratio! $1 million "invested" per employee dumped.
Talk about your shift from paying people to paying for equipment!
Putting 10,000 (less expensive) people on MS customer-response desk, I wonder how much more useful, actually helpful conversation that would have made possible.
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If the Chatbots work out, MS can actually expand their CSR 'staff'.
Also keep in mind that MS pays around $70k + benefits to their CSRs. You're easily talking 100k each. So that 1m pays off in 10 years or less.
Their tier-1 is useless anyway, a chatbot will probably be an upgrade as much as I dislike the idea of not having an intelligent human contact I can explain something to.
Want to impress me? (Score:2)
Make AI work.
Re:Want to impress me? Make AI work. (Score:1)
Sure! Mass porn generation is just around the corner...
Buzzwords are ruining IT (Score:2)
Almost every time a buzzword comes along, not only does adding it to stacks take time, training, and troubleshooting; but also draws attention from here-and-now IT concerns.
One example is that everything has to be "responsive" (mobile friendly). But the current techniques for doing that are a royal pain, and killed WYSIWYG, which was a big time-saver. So far it's impossible to make both desktop and mobile happy a the same time without either a lot of programming or a very long learning curve with a convolut
The latest Turbo Encabulator (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
"It's not cheap, but I'm sure the government (or investors) will buy it."
How long until we see (Score:2)
Re: How long until we see (Score:2)
Thanks! Now I'm sure I will "impress Wall Street".
Headline (Score:2)
"Want To Impress Wall Street? Just Add Some buzzwords"
Fixed that for you.
12:00 (Score:2)
This is the result of people in high financial places in charge that has "12:00" forever flashing on their appliances.
AI with synergy from Julia Roberts ftw! (Score:2)
You win a "no prize" if you get the Julia Roberts reference from The Player. Another if you know what a no prize is. :)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... [imdb.com]
During the sessions where movies are pitched, one will always suggest certain actors for certain roles. For the female lead, Julia Roberts is always mentioned, as well as Bruce Willis for the male lead. In the final scene of the in-movie movie, you see Willis saving Roberts.