Good Morning!
Here are today’s highlights.
YouTube wants your business, regardless of how big or small it is.
An expert on local economies says the way to rebuild American manufacturing is not by focusing on big manufacturers.
What will the new “visa integrity fee” mean for the U.S. tourist industry?
Kevin Plank, CEO of Under Armour, says micromanaging is the way to “get it right.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Gene Marks wants to know why a product that works as poorly as AI is getting so much hype: “AI is a wonderful thing, right? Well it certainly is for the big technology companies making and supporting it. The stock prices of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, and other companies that are in the middle of the AI boom have skyrocketed over the past few years. Billions are being plowed into data centers, infrastructure, and hardware to support the new technology’s hungry needs. Indirect companies from U.S. Steel to HP to local utilities and countless obscure startups are benefiting from the construction, energy consumption, and compute demands created by this industry. And yet, the public is not convinced. For most, AI is fun and can even be productive. But AI applications — with their hallucinations, inaccuracies, and misinformation — remain unreliable.”
“How can any product that works so poorly be hyped so much? Blame big tech. Since OpenAI released ChatGPT three years ago, software companies, in an effort to keep up, have been rolling out their AI offerings that have not been ready for prime time. And yet these companies keep pushing their customers to buy their AI applications and use their AI agents to increase productivity, when in many cases the exact opposite is happening.”
“It’s easy to blame big tech companies for the failure of their software to actually work. And they deserve a lot of the blame. But so do the companies — particularly large companies — who are throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at this stuff without properly thinking it through. The New York Times recently reported that of the 80 percent of companies using generative AI, just as many say they’ve seen no significant bottom-line impact, with as many as 42 percent of companies reporting they they abandoned most of their AI pilot projects by the end of 2024, up sharply from 17 percent a year earlier.”
“‘In April 2024, it seemed like agentic AI was going to be the next big thing,’ writes Steven Newman, an AI expert. ‘The ensuing 16 months have brought enormous progress on many fronts, but very little progress on real-world agency.’” READ MORE
THE 21 HATS SOUNDING BOARD
Is AI too unreliable to take seriously? Or are these just the growing pains you’d expect from a transformative technology. Or, more to the point, are AI’s flaws a reason for business owners to hold back, or do those who wait and see risk getting left behind?
What do you think? JOIN THE CONVERSATION
