Africa Leveraging AI for Growth, Automation Anywhere, AWS Boost AI Capabilities and more

Pivot 5: 5 stories. 5 minutes a day. 5 days a week.

1. Africa's Digital Dawn: Harnessing AI and Data for a New Era of Opportunity

Africa stands on the brink of a tech revolution as artificial intelligence (AI) investment rapidly expands.

The continent's young population, combined with the rise in AI spending predicted to reach $6.4bn by 2026, signifies a promising future. The potential transformative power of AI can be seen in agriculture, with AI initiatives enhancing Ghanaian cashew farmers' disease detection and prediction of crop yields. These projects contribute to regional food security and income stability for farmers. Moreover, data and AI education are growing, notably with Ghana’s Academic City University College launching the first African AI degree in 2021. This burgeoning data-savvy workforce is key to regional progress and economic transformation. AI can also assist with policy decisions, as demonstrated during the pandemic when anonymised mobile data helped determine lockdown effectiveness.

In-country expertise and global commitment to funding and skills development are essential to unlock AI's potential.

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2. Automation Anywhere Forms Strategic Partnership with AWS to Enhance Generative AI Capabilities

Automation Anywhere, a cloud-native automation solutions company, has formed a strategic alliance with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver intelligent automation combined with generative AI to enterprises.

This partnership will leverage AWS tools, namely Amazon SageMaker JumpStart and Amazon Bedrock, to enhance the AI capabilities offered to Automation Anywhere's clients. The collaboration aims to provide customers with more flexibility and reliability in deploying automation solutions. The integration with generative AI-driven solutions across areas such as customer experience and document processing is expected to solidify their go-to-market relationship.

Furthermore, partnerships with Google Cloud and AWS have allowed the integration of generative AI across Automation Anywhere’s entire success platform, marking the anticipated role of generative AI in future human-automation interaction.

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3. Global AI Luminaries Call for AI Risk Mitigation as China Tightens Security

Prominent AI researchers and leaders, including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Sam Altman, and Bill Gates, signed an open letter from the Center for AI Safety emphasizing the urgent need for AI risk mitigation.

The letter declared AI-related extinction risks as global priorities, similar to pandemics and nuclear war. Concurrently, China's President, Xi Jinping, is pushing for accelerated modernization of China’s national security, including stricter regulation of AI and online data use. This comes as China faces more complex national security challenges. No officials from Meta signed the open letter. This follows a similar initiative in March when the same signatories endorsed an open letter from the Future of Life Institute, warning about the existential risks of advanced AI.

Additionally, U.S. authorities have urged public evaluation of AI models from major tech companies.

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4. Squint Raises $6M to Optimize Factory Procedures Using AR

Squint, an augmented reality (AR) technology platform for optimizing factory procedures, announced a successful seed and pre-seed funding round, securing $6 million.

Squint's AR platform delivers an engaging, context-aware mobile experience for factory operators, improving learning speed and knowledge retention. The platform is favored by large enterprises such as Siemens and Volvo. Squint leverages mobile AR, computer vision, and machine learning to replace traditional training methods and transform factory procedures. It allows organizations to digitize standard operating procedures, enhancing efficiency and safety. Squint's CEO, Devin Bhushan, highlighted the platform's unique open-world approach, which requires neither QR codes nor 3D models for object detection and alignment. Early customers reported an 86% reduction in operator training time with Squint.

The fresh capital will be used to advance Squint's computer vision, AR, and AI projects.

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5. Mixed Reality: A Journey Towards an Augmented Future amidst Concerns

On June 5, 2023, Apple is anticipated to unveil its much-awaited mixed reality headset, rumored to be named the "Reality Pro".

This marks a significant move towards a future where boundaries between the real and the digital world blur. Despite initial devices being costly and bulky, the expectation is that Apple's introduction will lead to smaller, more affordable consumer devices. Google, Samsung, and Qualcomm have already announced a partnership to create an Android-based mixed reality platform. However, the excitement around the mixed reality future is also shadowed by concerns about potential abuses of technology, such as privacy violations and AI-powered manipulation. There is a call for regulations to protect emotional privacy and ban real-time manipulation through conversational influence.

Despite the risks, mixed reality could reshape human interaction with technology, potentially replacing mobile phones as the primary digital access tool by 2030.

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