AI Leadership Weekly

Top Stories

Nvidia Pushing Further into AI Space with Acquisition
Nvidia is pushing further into the AI space with its $700M acquisition of Run:ai.

Run:ai's software helps users to orchestrate AI tasks across GPUs, and Nvidia has pledged to make this open-source going forward. The official purchase price also wasn't formally disclosed, but is an educated guess from previous reporting on the matter.

Currently, Run:AI's software only works on Nvidia GPUs, but the plan is to quickly expand this to other companies' hardware, hence the motivation to open-source it.

AI Teachers in Arizona
A new charter school is coming to the US state of Arizona, where AI "teachers" will deliver core lessons.

Currently, these lessons will be for two hours per day, and will target students in grades 4 through 8. The other major detail is that the AIs will tailor their lessons from existing learning platforms such as IXL and Khan Academy, and will personalise the difficulty and progression of a subject depending on a student's success and responses.

LG Adds SLMs To Laptops
LG's newest series of Gram laptops will come with a Small Language Model (as opposed to a Large Language Model) built right into it.

These laptops come speced with Intel's Lunar Lake series of CPUs, which contain a built-in GPU as well as a Neural Processing Unit (NPU). The included SLM is LG's own EXAONE 3.5 series of language models, which they claim compare favourably to other open-source LLMs such as Llama 3.2 2B and Gemma 2 2B.

In Brief

• AIs scanning medical records for early signs of heart issues.

• Netflix’s use of AI and machine learning for recommendations

• The “financial” definition of AGI, according to OpenAI/Microsoft

Market Trends

AI-Related Jobs on the Rise
ZoomInfo is reporting an over 200% increase in job-title changes to something specifically involving AI. This increase has occurred over the past two years, and shows the speed at which companies are attempting to adopt various aspects of AI into their operations.

AI Not Taking Developers’ Jobs
A LinkedIn post has responded to a GitHub report on the impact of AIs, especially in the area of software developers losing their jobs.

A very real fear of AI is that many people (in every industry) will lose their jobs, but the GitHub report seems to suggest the opposite (at least in the software development space), and that AI tools are, in fact, both boosting the productivity of existing developers, while assisting new devs to learn new skills and push through roadblocks in their knowledge.

Alibaba Cloud Slashing AI Prices
Alibaba Cloud (which is akin to AWS for Amazon) has announced that they are reducing the costs of their visual language model Qwen-VL by up to 85%.

Many of their Chinese competitors (including Tencent, Baidu, and the like) have their own competing LLMs and AI ecosystems, and are all in a race to gain market share and relevance (which feels akin to television companies releasing their own video streaming platforms). This price cut is seen as the latest attempt for Alibaba Cloud to gain more of that market share.

Tools and Resources

MyLens Language Learning
Upload or point the AI to online media, and it will create a bite-sized lesson plan to help you learn a new language!

Legal Check Pro
This AI claims to review your uploaded documents and contracts, and try to identify any potential risks or areas of improvement. (You may still want to retain your own flesh-and-blood lawyer, though!)

Git Diagram
Turn your GitHub repo into an interactive diagram.

Recommended Reading

TED Talk: Don’t fear intelligent machines
Kasparov offers valuable insights for leaders grappling with AI. As the chess champion who faced IBM's Deep Blue, he articulates how humans and AI can complement each other rather than compete.

Learning to Work with Intelligent Machines
Matt Beane writes how AI and robots are changing how people learn on the job, making it harder to gain hands-on experience, a challenge for us leaders is the need to find new ways to balance technology with real-world training and mentorship.

Hit reply to let us know which of these stories you found the most important or surprising! And, if you’ve stumbled across an interesting link/tweet/news story of your own, send it our way at [email protected] It might just end up in the next issue!

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