The SEC Newgate AI Weekly

Welcome back to our weekly AI briefing, where we bring you the latest developments in the world of artificial intelligence. AI is rapidly transforming the way we live, work, and interact with the world around us. Every Thursday, we'll bring you a curated selection of interesting stories from the world of AI.

ZOOMING AHEAD

Zoom unveiled AI Companion, its generative AI assistant which promises to catch you up on meetings, answer questions on what has been discussed and divide recordings of meetings into chapters, highlighting important information and creating action lists.

This may all sound familiar – Google’s Duet and Microsoft’s CoPilot will offer these features – but the main difference is that AI Companion will be available to all premium users now and at no additional cost. At present, Duet offers the option to apply for a trial and CoPilot will be an additional paid bolt-on to Office365 once it has been made available to all Microsoft users.

SPRECHEN SIE DEUTSCH? OUI, UN PEU

Video AI platform HeyGen blew up the internet this week when X (formerly Twitter) user Jon Finger went viral showing off its new Video Translate tool. The feature, currently in beta, allows users to upload video in one language and create versions in another language in the speaker’s own voice and (this is the impressive part) lip-synced to fit the converted audio. The SEC Newgate digital team have been keeping an eye on HeyGen for a while as a promising video content generation tool but this appears to be a game changer in, for example, providing internal comms in multiple languages or communicating to investors across multiple countries in their native tongues. At present, they are struggling to keep up with the huge surge in demand – we’ve had a video queued for processing for 24 hours now – but it’s likely that they are frantically trying to increase their processing power and hopefully this will be resolved soon. It’s not perfect – German users, for example, have commented that their version of Finger’s video sounds a bit robotic – but it’s the most impressive language AI tool we’ve seen so far.

AI GOES MAINSTREAM

The conversation around AI has already started to move from the tech press into the wider media, so it was no surprise to see Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI, on Robert Peston’s ITV show this week alongside the usual assortment of political guests. In a fascinating discussion, Suleyman talked about his belief that AI is the first technology to ‘enable smaller groups of people to have an outsized impact on the world’. Those of us who have spent time in politics would argue that social media was the first technology to have this effect, but AI will allow, for example, activist groups to have a major impact on organisations (or indeed, on elections) in ways that weren’t possible until now with the limited resources they tend to possess. Either way, Suleyman’s new book ‘The Coming Wave’ is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the ways in which our lives will change in the years ahead as a result of artificial intelligence.

“AI THINKS I’M A LOT POLITER THAN I AM!”

Quote of the week is from Jess Phillips MP. Appearing on Sophy Ridge’s Sky News show, Phillips was played the answers given by ChatGPT when asked to respond as the Birmingham MP, known for speaking her mind.