My Two Cents
Opinions at the Intersection of Business and Technology
Latest Posts
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Hands-On with Surf: Flipboard’s New App Makes Discovering Content in the Fediverse Easier
It’s safe to say that the social media landscape has transformed dramatically. While Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn once reigned supreme, recent industry turmoil has given rise to new entrants. As users grow increasingly wary of billionaire-owned social networks, they’re gravitating toward decentralized alternatives. Yet despite this evolution, one fundamental challenge persists: effectively discovering relevant…
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Ai2’s ScholarQA Launches to Help Researchers Answer Complex Questions Across Multiple Papers
Artificial intelligence company Ai2 has released a tool to streamline the literature review process for researchers. With Ai2 ScholarQA, users can use AI to parse multiple documents simultaneously to garner a response to scientific questions. Before this automation, researchers would have had to spend countless hours comparing and summarizing numerous papers independently. Now, there’s a…
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Luma Labs Releases Ray2, Its Large-Scale Video Generative Model to Paid Subscribers
Luma Labs, the creator of the popular Dream Machine generative AI platform, has launched Ray2, its new model the company boasts can produce videos using text and images in under ten seconds. The release comes weeks after it was first introduced by Chief Executive Amit Jain at Amazon Web Services’ re:Invent conference. Although Ray2 is…
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CES 2025: Now With More AI
IN THIS ISSUE: Welcome to the final newsletter of 2024. Thank you for subscribing to and reading “The AI Economy.” Next month marks one year since I launched this publication, and I appreciate the reception it has received. In the coming year, expect more stories about AI’s impact on business, work, technology, and society. Regarding…
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Salesforce Unveils Agentforce 2.0, Bringing AI Agents to Slack and Introducing Advanced Atlas Reasoning
As AI agents take center stage in 2024, Salesforce is fully leaning into the trend. In October, the cloud computing company launched Agentforce, a platform that lets anyone quickly build advanced AI bots and connect them to enterprise data. Two months later, it’s introducing its next-generation AI agent offering, which aims to redefine “AI agents across…
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Why Flipboard Looks to the Fediverse for Its Next Big Evolution
Eight years ago, I sat down with Mike McCue to talk about Flipboard. When we spoke at the company’s Palo Alto, Calif. offices, he shared that the company had found its stride and that this would be the last startup he’d ever build. Much has changed since then, and Flipboard faces a transformative moment. After…
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Google’s NotebookLM Adds a Premium Tier, Adaptable UI, and Interactive Audio Overviews
Google is taking its popular NotebookLM app to the next level. No longer just an experiment, the company is unveiling a series of updates on Friday that position the notebook tool as a fully mature product. The first is a premium tier called NotebookLM Plus, designed with enterprise users in mind, followed by a revamped…
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Randi Zuckerberg’s HUG Social Marketplace Acquired by .ART Registry
HUG, a social art community platform that Randi Zuckerberg and Debbie Soon co-founded, has been acquired by the registry behind the .ART domain. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Soon and HUG’s lead engineer will remain with the company post-acquisition, but Zuckerberg will depart, though she tells me she’s still a “passionate member…
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Proto Hologram’s Holographic AI Avatars: ‘A Chatbot in a Fancy Dress, but With a Persona Presence’
I wanted to check out one company in particular while attending Amazon Web Services’ re:Invent conference. It came to my attention days prior while perusing LinkedIn, and I became curious about its technology. However, I ignored where exactly I could find it at the show. It turns out that the company, Proto Hologram, wasn’t hard…
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Lessons From My First AWS re:Invent
IN THIS ISSUE: My conference adventures continue as I journey to Amazon’s re:Invent conference to hear about AWS’ approach to AI. Plus, explore the company’s AI partnership with the NFL and how they use the technology to help support players’ philanthropy. And don’t miss the roundup of AI news you may have missed from the…