A little more conversation: Company executives can't stop talking about AI

8/12/23 8:00PM

A little more conversation

‍Interestingly, executives at top companies seem to be doing the exact opposite — they can’t stop talking about AI, perhaps hoping that if they position their companies as “AI forward” they may be more attractive to investors (see Nvidia becoming the latest company to join the $1 trillion club).

Data collated by Goldman Sachs reveals that artificial intelligence has been cropping up more and more in the quarterly earnings calls of Russell 3000 companies, as businesses like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta line up to explain to investors how AI will play a pivotal role in the wider world and within their organizations… in the future at least.

‍Tried and tested

‍That’s a lot of corporate chatter, but how much are companies actually using AI? The answer depends somewhat on your perspective.

‍McKinsey’s latest report into AI, published in early August, reveals that 79% of people surveyed have had at least some exposure to the tools, although only 22% of respondents say that they personally are regularly using it in their own work. For tools that (mostly) haven’t even celebrated a first birthday yet, that feels like quite a lot.

The people using it most are your pals in marketing and sales, with 14% of respondents reporting that their organizations were regularly using generative AI in that function, more than any other.

The most common uses cited in the survey were for creating first drafts of text, personalizing marketing materials, identifying trends or communicating with customers with chatbots. AI isn't quite doing iRobot stuff yet, but taking the sting out of some of the more "boring" corporate tasks will always have its place.

‍We aren’t in Kansas anymore

‍Clearly, the answer to the question “have we had peak AI?” is a resounding, definitive “no”. The buzz around ChatGPT specifically may have slightly diminished, but that’s only because its mind boggling initial success has birthed — literally — thousands of competitors.

One website, accurately called theresanaiforthat.com, currently tracks more than 6,900 different tools. There’s AI to summarize your emails, edit your videos, build your website, design your house, write your dating profile, plan your vacation, edit your code, test new hairstyles on you, create personalized stories for children, be your personal assistant… or even just be your friend who is “always on your side”. There’s even one that creates a chatbot so you can "talk" to a PDF document(?), and there's quite a few to make charts and analyze data. Luckily for us, they aren’t very good... yet.

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Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5