Economist: “The four largest sellers of ads—Google, Meta, ByteDance and Amazon—accounted for more than half the global market last year, up from just over a third in 2019. Eight of the ten largest sellers of ads are tech firms. In Cannes, the digital overlords established a tent city along the beach, spilling onto the Croisette like a smart-casual invasion force. AI seems to be strengthening their grip. Machine learning improves ads’ targeting: Meta’s AI-powered Advantage+ system claims to increase brands’ return on ad spending by 22%, while Google’s Performance Max product raises sales by over 10%. Google has begun experimenting with ads in its AI-powered search mode, which it says could be still more effective. Users’ AI queries are two to three times longer than ordinary search queries, meaning the firm knows not just what people are looking for, but why. For brands placing ads, “AI has the most potential to improve business outcomes that they’ve seen in the last 20 years,” believes Sean Downey, president for the Americas at Google.”
FT: “Eye-watering payments show how hard it is for tech companies to build a competitive moat…The [AI] talent wars show no sign of slowing down. The chieftains of AI have staked their reputations on being the first to AGI. As long as greed, fear and the dream of superintelligence are maintained, vast riches for top talent will keep on flowing.”
WSJ: “Researchers and companies working on hyperlocal forecasts hope to tap a number of sources beyond traditional satellite and radar data. One is the Internet of Things—the billions of internet-connected devices that gather data, from barometric pressure sensors built into cellphones to webcam video feeds. Across the country, states have been building networks of weather stations called mesonets that can supplement the National Weather Service monitors typically found at airports. LIDAR technology, which can measure wind speed by bouncing lasers off particles in the air, is able to gather information with a small box on the ground instead of a weather tower. Nearly every kind of weather forecasting relies on a mix of public and private data sources, but in the hyperlocal realm private companies are growing more prominent, in part because business customers have the most to gain from tailored forecasts.”
Wired: “Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a way for large language models to keep learning on the fly—a step toward building AI that continually improves itself..The MIT scheme, called Self Adapting Language Models (SEAL), involves having an LLM learn to generate its own synthetic training data and update procedure based on the input it receives.”
The Wrap: ” YouTube Shorts is now averaging 200 billion daily views…Wiewers are watching over 1 billion hours of YouTube on their TVs daily.”
