😱 CEO Shocks Industry - Cuts 90% of Staff as AI Chatbot Takes Over

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(Total read time: 4 minutes)

Welcome to WhatAi, your #1 source for the latest in Ai & Tech.

It’s Thursday, July 13, and today we’re covering the story of a CEO that cut 90% of his support staff as a Chatbot ‘outperformed’ them, Elon Musk who launches his xAi company, Google that gets hit with a lawsuit, 4 AI Tools that will increase your productivity, and much more.

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Character.ai is a neural language model chatbot web & mobile application that can generate human-like text responses and participate in contextual conversation.

Character.ai can be used for imagination, brainstorming, and language learning. It allows users to create and interact with bots designed to mimic public figures, fictional characters, certain professionals, and more.

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🚀 BIG TECH & STARTUPS

Anthropic — the $4.1 billion OpenAI rival — debuts new A.I. chatbot and opens it to public (2.5 min read)

There’s a new contestant in the AI arms race. As Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google race to develop the most advanced AI chatbots, Anthropic is investing heavily to keep up. Just a few months after raising $750 million over two financing rounds, the startup is debuting a new AI chatbot: Claude 2. Anthropic is opening up its chatbot technology to consumers for the first time. Claude 2 has the ability to summarize up to about 75,000 words, which could be the length of a book. Users can input large data sets, and ask for summaries in the form of a memo, letter or story. ChatGPT, by contrast, can handle about 3,000 words. In May, Anthropic was one of four companies invited to a meeting at the White House to discuss responsible AI development.

CEO lays off 90% of support staff, after AI Chatbot outperformed them (2 min read)

An Indian CEO is being criticised after he said that his firm had replaced 90% of its support staff with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. Suumit Shah, founder of Dukaan, said on Twitter that the chatbot had drastically improved first response and resolution time of customers' queries.

The tweet sparked outrage online.

In recent years, generative AI tools like ChatGPT have become more accessible. There have been reports of organisations using AI tools to increase productivity while cutting costs. This has made workers fearful about losing their jobs to technology.

🧑‍🚀 SCIENCE & FUTURISTIC TECHNOLOGY

Elon Musk launches his new company, xAI (2 min read)

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and owner of Twitter, on Wednesday announced the debut of a new AI company, xAI, with the goal to “understand the true nature of the universe.” According to the company’s website, Musk and his team will share more information in a live Twitter Spaces chat on Friday 14 July. Team members behind xAI are alumni of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Twitter and Tesla, and have worked on projects including DeepMind’s AlphaCode and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chatbots.

Maersk deploys AI enabled robotic solution in UK warehouse (2 min read)

Maersk, a leading worldwide logistics company, is implementing an AI-enabled robotic solution in its latest UK warehouse in East Midlands. The state-of-the-art Robotic Shuttle Put Wall System by the US based company Berkshire Grey will automate and enhance and accelerate the warehouse operations in the 685,000 sq ft facility significantly. The systems can sort orders three times faster than conventional, manual systems, improve upstream batch inventory picking by up to 33%, and handle 100% of the typical stock keeping unit (SKU) assortments, order profiles and packages.

Maersk today offers its customers integrated logistics solutions in 473 warehouses with a total capacity of more than 80 million sq ft (7.5 million sqm) across all continents (as of 31 March 2023).

🧠 MISCELLANEOUS

Google hit with lawsuit over new AI data scraping privacy policy (1 min read)

A week after Google updated its privacy policy to allow data scraping for AI training purposes, the company faces a class-action lawsuit. The class-action lawsuit was filed on July 11 by eight individuals who claim to represent “millions of class members” — internet users and copyright holders. They accuse the tech giant of misusing large amounts of data, including copyrighted material, in artificial intelligence (AI) training. According to the lawsuit, Google could potentially owe upward of $5 billion in damages.

Tech Giants Are Slashing Jobs in the Bay Area (3 min read)

Technology has played an essential role in the region’s economy for many years. However, the sector’s difficulties persist, with many businesses resorting to layoffs to survive.

There will be over 25,900 job losses in the Bay Area’s technology sector between 2022 and 2023, as reported by the California Employment Development Department (EDD). In a little over half a year, nearly 15,500 of these layoffs were announced. In 2022, tech companies in the Bay Area announced plans to lay off 10,400 people. The layoffs planned for 2023 are significantly higher.

Chip wars: The escalating battle between EU, US, and China for tech supremacy (6 min read)

Semiconductor chips have emerged as the hottest commodity in the global race for technological supremacy. That’s because they constitute a fundamental component of electronic devices, critical for advances in a vast array of industries: from telecoms, AI, and computing, to healthcare, clean energy, and military applications.

Historically, the EU and the US have relied heavily on East Asian countries for chip imports and supply of the necessary chipmaking materials. But following the invasion of Ukraine, increasing geopolitical tensions, especially with China, have intensified the demand for self-sufficiency in the West.

Signs of an escalating chip trade war were evident already in October last year. Now, a set of new strategic measures have further ignited the conflict, raising fears over the stability of the global supply chain, and even threatening to derail the EU’s green transition.