Happy Tuesday!

In Today’s Email:

• Snapchat AI raising concerns 👻

• How is Walmart using AI? 🏪

• Google’s AI updates 🗞️

Snapchat AI raising concerns 👻

Is Snapchat’s new AI chatbot, My AI, harmful to children?

Snapchat’s newest feature “My AI” has been out for a few weeks, and the reviews haven’t been great. The app has seen a spike in negative reviews since the AI’s release. Last week, Snapchat’s average U.S. app store review was 1.67, with 75% of reviews being one-star.

The placement of the AI chatbot is of concern, the AI is pinned to the top of the users’ feed and it can’t be removed. Users can design a custom Bitmoji avatar for it, customize the chatbot’s name, and add it to conversations with other users. This creates a less transactional tool that makes it harder to tell whether you’re talking to a computer or not.

“I don’t think I’m prepared to know how to teach my kid how to emotionally separate humans and machines when they essentially look the same from her point of view,” stated Lyndsi Lee, a mother interviewed by CNN. Democratic Senator Michael Bennet recently wrote, “Although Snap concedes My AI is ‘experimental,’ it has nevertheless rushed to enroll American kids and adolescents in its social experiment.”

How is Walmart using AI? 🏪

Walmart’s massive data sets and infrastructure puts them in a unique position to utilize AI.

Companies are no longer wondering if they should implement AI, they’re asking how they should implement AI. Walmart has been deploying AI in ways to improve the customer and employee experience. There are roughly 4,700 Walmart stores and 600 Sam’s Clubs in the U.S. that employ roughly 1.6 million workers.

Anshu Bhardwaj, senior VP of tech strategy at Walmart, recently said “[Customers at Sam’s Club] are generating all these breadcrumbs about what they like and want and that’s allowing us to make the shopping experience better.” Sam’s is utilizing autonomous floor scrubbers, called Auto-Cs, to capture inventory intelligence throughout the day. Bhardwaj said the company has trained its algorithms to discern different brands and their inventory positions, how much light there is, and how deep the shelf is, with more than 95% accuracy.

Walmart is also using AI to power its shopping app. The app’s AI models find better ways to figure out what customers want and how to best get them. “AI is a way to make those decisions super easy for us,” Bhardwaj said. “We want to make the shopping experience for everyday items a no-brainer for customers.”

Google’s AI updates 🗞️

Google is planning to unveil recent investments in AI at its annual developer conference this week.

Many generative AI updates are expected to be unveiled at the conference, including their newest LLM, PaLM 2. The new model is Google’s most powerful LLM, it includes 100 languages and has been operating under the codename “Unified Langauge Model.” Creative writing tasks and analysis as well as coding and math tests have already been performed by the model.

According to documents about the event viewed by CNBC, Google will announce themes of how AI is “helping people reach their full potential,” which includes “generative experiences” for Bard and Search. Expected advancements of Bard include the model being used for coding, math, and “logic”.

This comes as the generative AI landscape continues to evolve rapidly. Microsoft’s Bing search engine, powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is Google’s largest competitor. Bard’s initial launch was shaky, however, with recent improvements we expect to see a better product showcase at tomorrow’s event.

Do you think Microsoft or Google is winning the AI race?

That’s it for today, we’ll see you back here tomorrow!