Conversational AI customer service agents are here

Welcome back to another Daily Update — Here’s today’s lineup:

🗞️ The Latest in AI: Actors join Hollywood strike against AI

🤖 AI Tool of the Day: Meta releases new AI image generator

📸 Business Spotlight: Conversational AI customer service agents are here

Read time: 3 minutes

🗞️ The Latest in AI: Actors join Hollywood strike against AI

Last week Hollywood actors confirmed that they were going on strike. There are now more than 170,000 actors and writers on strike demanding that AI will not replace jobs, as well as increased pay and work guarantees.

Actors say that Hollywood studios want to use their AI replicas for free. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) says that claim by SAG-AFTRA leadership is false.

The AMPTP says its current proposal only permits a company to use the digital replica of a background actor in the motion picture for which the actor is employed. The use of generative AI is a major point of conflict in the ongoing negotiations between the two sides.

The strike is already impacting major studios like Disney, Netflix, Amazon and Sony. High-profile actors such as George Clooney, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr. and Margot Robbie are showing support for the strikes. Experts warn that a long-term strike could significantly impact the entire industry.

Click here to learn more.

🤖 AI Tool of the Day: Meta releases new AI image generator

Today’s tool of the day isn’t available to the public yet, but will be worth keeping an eye on as Meta made yet another huge AI announcement. On Friday the company introduced CM3leon (pronounced like “chameleon”), a new text-to-image model that Meta claims is best-in-class.

Most modern image generators use a process called diffusion to create art. In diffusion, a model learns how to gradually subtract “noise” from a starting image — moving it closer step by step to the target prompt. Although the results are impressive, real-time applications are impractical as diffusion is an expensive and slow process.

CM3leon is a transformer model that uses “attention,” a mechanism that weighs the relevance of input data such as text or images. Meta claims that CM3leon is even more efficient than most transformers, requiring five times less computation and a smaller training dataset than previous methods.

Click here to learn more.

📸 Business Spotlight: Conversational AI customer service agents are here

Caleb Maddix just introduced Air AI on Twitter, a conversational AI that can perform 5-40 minute long sales and customer service calls that sound replicable to humans.

Air can autonomously perform actions across 5,000 unique applications. It’s adaptable to various roles such as sales development representative, customer service agent, account executive and more depending on creative input.

Companies can request beta access to deploy an AI sales or customer service team. Maddix says that over 50,000 businesses are already on the list to beta test Air. He added that Air is already being utilized on live calls, serving real people and businesses daily.

Maddix tweeted a demo of Air in action:

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Jack

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