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Tuesday’s top story: Following a major strike at the NYT, Perplexity has offered its AI support, and faced a huge backlash.

📖 "IRREPLACEABLE: the Three Competencies of the Future” by Pascal Bornet is a must-read if you want to become indispensable with AI.

🌤️ This Morning on AI Tool Report

1. 💥 NYT staff walk out, Perplexity steps in?

2. 🧠 How to use Social Signal Intelligence to secure B2B deals

3. ⚖️ Regulators thwart Amazon and Meta’s nuclear plans

4. 🔐 How to secure your devices when you travel

5. 💻 How to understand ML concepts using ChatGPT

6. 🪖 US Military using Meta’s AI?

7. 🔥 OpenAI snags Meta’s AR lead

Read Time: 5 minutes

FACT OF THE DAY

🤔 According to Forbes, multinational food corporation, Danone, has reduced its forecasting errors by 20% and product obsolescence by 30% by using AI to predict and plan the demand for its packaged food products.

STOCK MARKETS

☁️ Tech and AI stocks saw declines across the board with NVIDIA being the out-performer on the day. According to recent reports Microsoft is set to invest $10B in CoreWeave for AI cloud infrastructure. Learn more.

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STRIKES

💥 NYT staff walk out, Perplexity steps in?

Our Report: Just ahead of the US presidential election (a critical time for news coverage), over 600 New York Times (NYT) technical, software, and data analysis employees have walked out, accusing the NYT of “unfair labor practices,” which prompted Aravind Srinivas—the CEO of AI search start-up Perplexity—to post, on social media, that Perplexity was “on standby” to ensure “essential coverage is available to all, through the election,” which has triggered a huge backlash.

🔑 Key Points:

• Many have seen Srinivas’s support—offering AI services to replace workers—as an attempt to undermine the strike, calling him a “scab” (someone who takes the jobs of striking workers, undermining their bargaining efforts).

• Although, Srinivas did later correct his post to clarify that he didn’t want his Perplexity services to “replace” the workers with AI, but rather provide additional “technical infra support on a high-traffic day."

• But this has done little to appease the backlash and criticism, with many still believing that Perplexity’s pledge of more technical support, replaces those that were providing technical support and services to NYT.

🤔 Why you should care: This comes right after Perplexity revealed its AI-powered election information hub, and although the Times hasn’t responded to Srinivas’s post, it’s unlikely they will accept his help as just last month, they issued Perplexity with a cease and desist letter, asking them to stop unlawfully scraping their content to feed its AI models, but this is a difficult time for the NYT, as the strike marks the first time in 60 years that this has happened during a presidential election.

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TOGETHER WITH SUBSTRATA

How to Use Social Signal Intelligence to Land B2B Deals 3X Faster

Complex deals are often affected by office politics, hierarchies, egos, emotions, attitudes, and power dynamics.

Using Substrata can significantly increase the chances of securing B2B deals across many industries and categories.

Substrata has developed dozens of specialized AI models to help dealmakers navigate the subtle "social dance" between sellers and prospects:

• Analyze any prospect's LinkedIn profile to extract their natural personality structure and tendencies

• Monitor your prospects' fluctuating levels of interest (Signals)

• Analyze any thread or message to determine real sentiment and the relative balance of power

• Simulate message drafts before sending them to eliminate potential risks or issues

• Optimize responses, follow-ups, and more

• Track your and your team's ongoing performance

Substrata uses Social Signal Processing (SSP), which is a specialized AI domain that deals with the detection, analysis, and synthesis of behavioral data from digitally mediated human-human interactions, such as B2B dealmaking, business development, and HR interviews. It encompasses both verbal and nonverbal data.

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2. AI Magicx delivers AI-enhanced content, code, and e-commerce optimization

3. InstaDish turns ingredients into recipes using AI

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POWER

⚖️ Regulators thwart Amazon and Meta’s nuclear plans 

Our Report: Amazon and Meta’s plans to secure electricity for their data centers from nuclear power centers—to serve their ever-increasing AI and cloud computing needs—have been thwarted by federal and environmental regulations.

🔑 Key Points: 

• Meta was due to build an AI data center, situated next to an operational nuclear power plant so it could tap into its power, but a rare species of bees has been found on-site, so they’ve been forced to scrap the project.

• Amazon signed a $650M deal with nuclear power company, Talen Energy, to expand the plant and directly connect to its power, but the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has rejected the proposal.

• They felt that consumers would suffer from lower electricity reliability, blackouts, and higher bills as a significant portion of power would be diverted from the region's electricity grid to Amazon’s data centers.

🤔 Why you should care: Advancements in AI are driving a huge surge in demand for power—studies show that a single AI query uses 10x more energy than a Google search—so big tech companies like Meta and Amazon, and also Google and Microsoft, are increasingly turning to nuclear power to tap into carbon-free power sources that can run 24/7, but, although Microsoft’s plans to revive a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island are still going ahead, it's likely the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (who have eight other, similar proposals to review) will step in and impose restrictions, which could significantly slow US AI advancement.

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TOGETHER WITH SURFSHARK

Surfshark: The industry’s best value, fastest, most secure VPN

Surfshark is an all-in-one VPN provider and security toolkit that hides your identity from websites and secures all your devices when you travel, allowing you to surf the web, in any location, safely.

Surfshark is the industry-leading, affordable VPN that gives you:

• One-click VPN security on all your devices, in over 100 countries so you can use the internet safely, on any device, wherever you are

• Best-in-class, 24/7 privacy features including built-in ad-blockers, data breach alerts, AES-256 encryption, and malware protection, so your data remains secure

• Consistently quick connection speeds so you can game or stream your sports, TV shows, and movies without any limitations

And, at just $1.99p/m, Surfshark is 87% less when compared with other VPN providers.

(Plus AI Tool Report readers get an additional 4 months if they purchase a 2-year subscription).

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Tuesday’s Prompt: How to understand ML concepts using ChatGPT

Type this prompt into ChatGPT:

Results: After typing this prompt, you will get easy-to-understand explanations of ML concepts that you can utilize without needing an ML engineer.

P.S. Use the Prompt Engineer GPT by AI Tool report to 10x your prompts.

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MILITARY

🪖 US Military using Meta’s AI?

• Meta is working with Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Deloitte, and others to make its open-source Llama AI models available to the US military and its defense contractors to build “national security applications.”

• Its usage policy forbids its AI models to be used for “military, warfare, or espionage missions,” but it’s making an exception for this, and other government agencies in the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

• The exception to its usage policy will allow the military to use Llama for things like “streamlining complicated logistics and planning, tracking terrorist financing or strengthening our cyber defenses.”

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HIRING

🔥 OpenAI snags Meta’s AR lead

• Following the announcement that the former co-founder of Pebble—Gabor Cselle—was joining the team for a ‘secret project’, OpenAI has revealed that it’s hiring Meta’s head of AR hardware.

• Caitlin Kalinowski—who oversaw the development of Meta’s recently revealed ‘Orion’ AR glasses and led the VR glasses team for 9 years—will lead OpenAI’s robotics and consumer hardware division.

• In her new role, she’ll “initially focus on robotics work and partnerships” but rumors are circulating that she could be working on the top-secret hardware product with ex-Apple exec, Jony Ive.

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