Good morning, it’s Friday! The post-Thanksgiving haze might still be lingering, but the AI world? It ain’t slowing down. From quantum breakthroughs to the military rewriting its tech playbook, today’s newsletter is jam-packed—more crowded than a Black Friday checkout line.
And speaking of transitions, have you noticed how Gen Z is putting their trust in AI to guide their decisions? Spoiler alert: They’re leading the charge. Don’t miss today’s Friday Facts for the full scoop. Let’s dive in.
Top Stories 🗞️
AI and Quantum Unite to Give Machines a Sense of Touch 🫳🏻
FF Original The Services Hare and the Goods Tortoise?👾
AI Companies Pivot to Lucrative Military Contracts 🤑
Research AI Spurs Innovation, Exposes R&D Productivity Gaps 🔬
Tools Transforming Marketing, Agreements, Transparency 🧰
🤔 FRIDAY FACTS
How Much Does Gen Z Trust AI To Guide Their Decisions?
As AI continues to transform our daily lives, Gen Z is leading the charge—embracing generative AI for everything from tasks to decision-making. But just how many Gen Zers are hopping on the AI train?
🗞️ YOUR DAILY ROLLUP
Top Stories of the Day
💭 Alibaba's Marco-o1: Breakthrough in AI Reasoning
Alibaba’s Marco-o1 redefines AI reasoning with its ability to tackle complex, open-ended problems using advanced techniques like chain-of-thought fine-tuning and Monte Carlo Tree Search. Its unique self-reflection mechanism allows the model to critique decisions dynamically. Excelling in multilingual tasks and nuanced problem-solving, Marco-o1 positions itself as a powerful tool for innovation in product design, strategy, and beyond.
🎥 Amazon's Olympus: AI Video Processing Revolution
Amazon’s Olympus AI model combines video, image, and text processing, offering innovative capabilities like text-based searches for specific video moments. This marks a shift away from dependence on Anthropic's Claude chatbot, despite Amazon's recent $4 billion investment in Anthropic. Positioned to challenge rivals like Google and Microsoft, Olympus may debut at AWS re:Invent, underscoring Amazon’s push in generative AI.
🔗 Linkup: AI Meets Trusted Content Licensing
French startup Linkup is revolutionizing AI content sourcing with an API that connects language models to licensed, reliable web content, addressing ethical concerns around unlicensed scraping. Publishers are compensated via usage-based payments, ensuring fair collaboration. Backed by a €3 million seed round, Linkup is positioning itself as a leader in retrieval-augmented generation tools for businesses.
🧠 AI Beats Experts in Neuroscience Predictions
University College London’s study reveals AI outperforms human neuroscientists in predicting study outcomes, with LLMs achieving 81% accuracy versus experts' 63%. Leveraging tools like BrainBench and BrainGPT, specialized for neuroscience, AI's predictive power soared to 86%. This breakthrough suggests AI could revolutionize scientific research, paving the way for faster, smarter discoveries.
🫳🏻 QUANTUM TOUCH
AI Meets Quantum: The Dawn of Touch-Sensitive AI Technology
The Recap: A groundbreaking fusion of AI and quantum technology has enabled machines to "feel" surfaces, unlocking unprecedented potential in tactile analysis. Using photon-firing lasers and AI, researchers can now measure surface textures with micrometer-level accuracy, paving the way for applications in medicine, manufacturing, and more.
The system integrates AI with quantum-science-based light pulses to discern surface textures by analyzing back-scattered photon noise.
The technology accurately measured textures using 31 types of industrial sandpaper, achieving error margins as low as 4 micrometers.
The method excelled in analyzing fine surfaces like diamond lapping film and aluminum oxide, used in precision tools.
The system could detect mole roughness too minute for human eyes, aiding in early skin cancer detection.
Utilizing lidar with picosecond laser pulses, the system processes surface information through a single-photon detector.
Achieving precision similar to industry-standard profilometers, it offers a potential alternative with quantum benefits.
Beyond medicine, this innovation could revolutionize quality control in manufacturing and enhance material testing processes.
Forward Future Takeaways:
The ability to combine quantum mechanics and AI for tactile precision marks a new era in sensing technology, where machines might soon outperform human sensory limits. This breakthrough is poised to enhance sectors like healthcare and industry, offering faster, more detailed surface analysis. As quantum-AI systems evolve, expect them to redefine texture measurement and expand into more real-world applications. → Read the full article here.
👾 FORWARD FUTURE ORIGINAL
Econ 05 | The Services Hare and the Goods Tortoise?
In the last article I touched upon the fact that the historical expectation was for manufacturing to be automated first and cognitive areas such as professions like doctors and lawyers coming only much later; but it has turned out to be the reverse so far. Let’s explore this further to identify why this might be so.
It’s perhaps easy to, at least in hindsight, speculate why this made sense. Manufacturing is a physical phenomenon, it’s tangible, it’s visible. Thus it’s easy to spot functions that get automated. But there are many challenges when it comes to manufacturing.
Any change to the physical setup, say of a manufacturing plant, will have to be tested in the real world before it can be assessed as viable, despite any amount of computer-aided simulation. In any case, there is the inevitable matter of high capital investment. If certain materials purchased as part of trying out such a setup don’t fit or work, they might have to be discarded as scrap, which imposes a cost and inhibits free experimentation.
A related concern, when it comes to industrial environments, especially the more complex ones, is safety - primarily safety of the human operators working amid such setups. Our current set of human values and ethics do not permit us to, and we can agree rightly so, experiment with human life and limb before concluding that a newly devised industrial production setup is not safe enough. → Continue reading here.
🎖️ MILITARY AI
Silicon Valley’s New Ally: AI Companies Are Embracing U.S. Military Contracts
The Recap: As generative AI evolves, leading tech companies are shedding earlier hesitations and partnering with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to tap into lucrative military contracts. This shift reflects changing industry norms, financial pressures, and geopolitical dynamics, with AI now a critical technology for defense applications.
Once resistant to defense collaborations, companies like Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic have relaxed internal policies to pursue military projects.
The DoD’s vast budget and long-term contracts appeal to AI firms facing mounting R&D costs. Contracts often provide substantial and stable revenues.
DoD uses AI for tasks like data analysis, cybersecurity, robotic tools, and secure chatbots, steering clear of direct “kill chain” uses in some cases.
Tech firms, like Google during Project Maven, previously faced employee protests over military work. However, post-pandemic layoffs and changing norms have diminished resistance.
Major cloud providers like Microsoft and Amazon, backers of OpenAI and Anthropic, respectively, benefit from integrating AI services into their existing DoD contracts.
AI is among the DoD’s 14 critical technologies, fueling billions in investments in AI chips, robotics, and domestic semiconductor manufacturing.
Like ARPANET and GPS before it, AI could achieve broader utility through defense applications, despite many current models still needing refinement.
Forward Future Takeaways:
The growing bond between AI companies and the U.S. military signals a redefined tech landscape where defense collaboration is no longer taboo but rather a strategic opportunity. With AI deemed critical for national security, this partnership could accelerate technological advancements while reshaping ethical debates about AI's role in society. As the DoD's investments surge, the implications for innovation, workforce dynamics, and global AI supremacy will be profound. → Read the full article here.
🛰️ NEWS
Looking Forward
♟️ Google’s AI-Powered Chess Creativity: GenChess lets players design chess pieces using Gemini Imagen 3’s text-to-image tool. From sushi kings to taco queens, your imagination sets the board.
🏃♂️ Who’s Leading the AI Race?: OpenAI dominates with ChatGPT, but rivals like Anthropic, Google, and Meta are closing in with innovative models, diverse strategies, and vast resources.
🔬 RESEARCH PAPERS
AI Boosts Innovation but Highlights Productivity Disparities in R&D
A randomized study of AI tools in materials discovery shows a 44% increase in new materials found, a 39% rise in patent filings, and a 17% boost in product innovation, with top scientists doubling their productivity while others see minimal gains. Though AI automates idea-generation tasks and enhances the prioritization of discoveries, it also reduces job satisfaction for 82% of researchers due to diminished creativity and underutilization of skills. → Read the full paper here.
🤔 FRIDAY FACTS
How Much Does Gen Z Trust AI To Guide Their Decisions?
A whopping 70% of Gen Z uses generative AI, and 52% trust it to guide their decisions, according to Salesforce. In stark contrast, 68% of Gen X and Baby Boomers avoid generative AI entirely, illustrating a clear generational divide in tech adoption. While younger users are quick to embrace and integrate AI into daily life, this gap highlights an opportunity for older generations to stay competitive and relevant in an increasingly AI-driven world.
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