The Innovator

Augmented Industries’ #GenAI co-pilot transforms #factory knowledge into micro-learning modules, delivering a personalized, intelligent feed to workers on the factory floor. “Right now, 70% of EU manufacturers fear their investments are at risk because of the skills gap,” says Dr. Elisa Roth, the CEO of the Germany-based startup. In the U.S., $2.5 trillion could negatively impacted by the lack of talented people in manufacturing by 2028 according to Deloitte. “Training is more relevant than ever, but the problem is all the options are not fast enough to keep up with sustainable and digital transformations,” says Roth. “We use GenAI to help manufacturers solve the skills gap at scale with action-oriented learning in the flow of work.” By using Augmented Industries’, customers decrease their factory training costs by up to 84%; increase factory learning effectiveness by up to 26%; drive the implementation of continuous improvement, according to a study conducted by the company. https://lnkd.in/ex8RzvJE

Anne-Delphine Beaulieu is Chief Digital Officer (CDO) and Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) at LISI GROUP, a 247-year-old French company in the #aerospace, #automotive and #medical sectors that employs 10,000 people and had a 2023 turnover of €1.6 billion euros. It operates 42 #factories in 13 countries. It is currently working with 10 #startups. One startup's technologies has been adopted in 37 of the company's 42 factories. The secret to its success in scaling up the use of startup technology is a four-step methodology. Read The Innovator's interview with Beaulieu to find out more. https://lnkd.in/ewizJsp2

Last week the U.N.'s secretary general gave an impassioned speech in New York that urged world leaders to swiftly take control of the spiraling climate crisis or face dangerous tipping points. “We are playing Russian roulette with our planet,” he said. “We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell.”The next day, the World Economic Forum provided some potential escape routes. Among the 2024 cohort of Technology Pioneers announced on June 6 were 14 companies working on both established and emerging #greentechnologies in areas such as #carbonnegative and #circularmaterials, #carboncapture, #regenerativeagriculture, #alternativeproteins, #nuclearfusion as well as #carbonnegative and #circularmaterials. https://lnkd.in/e85mCHQA

On June 6 #India's Pixxel was named a 2024 Tech Pioneer by The World Economic Forum; one of nine #space companies in this year’s cohort of 100. The space pioneers, which include space data companies, satellite makers and in-space manufacturers, reflect the promise of this burgeoning sector. Pixxel, for example, illustrates how space technology can help tackle some of earth’s toughest challenges and how new players, including private sector companies and countries who were not present when the space race began in the 1960s, are now taking part in the #spaceeconomy. No country and no company want to be left behind because the space industry is also a booming business that is expected to grow to $1.8 trillion by 2035, up from $630 billion in 2023, according to an April Forum report. Space will not only create new business it looks set to benefit existing ones. Five industries – supply chain and transportation, food and beverage; retail, consumer goods and lifestyle and digital communications as well as state-sponsored defense, will generate more than 60% of the increase in the space economy by 2035, according to the report. In addition, nine other industries will see space-related revenues reach several billion dollars- creating opportunities for traditional and non- traditional players alike. So how can both public and private industry players best position themselves as leaders in the space economy? For starters, “every industry should be asking what #spacedata can do for me today and tomorrow,” says Nikolai Khlystov, the Forum’s lead, space technologies. https://lnkd.in/esT9RwsQ

AI21 Labs, an Israeli scale-up, builds foundation models and #AI systems for the enterprise that accelerate the use of #GenAI in production. The company, which counts Fortune 500 companies as customers, counts Nvidia, Intel and Google among its backers. “For AI to be transformative for the enterprise it has to be more reliable and efficient than it is today,” says AI21 co-founder Yoav Shoham, a professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University. Ai21 is aiming to provide a better experience for corporates. It combines two different approaches to language models: a #Transformer, the key technology on which most language models, including OpenAI’s #GPT-4, are based, and a second neural network called a “#StateSpaceModel,” or SSM. Academics at Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University improved the SSM to make a more efficient solution called “#Mamba.” AI21’s team has combined Mamba with the Transformer to produce “Joint Attention and Mamba,” or Jamba. While transformer architecture is very good at providing good answers, it is expensive to train and run. SSM-based solutions are quicker and cheaper to run, but the answers are not as good. Jamba combines the best of both, says Shoham, and the result is models that are more reliable and efficient, have lower latency and a smaller footprint. https://lnkd.in/edvnKTcJ

How will #AI transform the future of #ecommerce? "How we #shop and access #financialservices will fundamentally change, and truly personalized services will be available," says Rajat Taneja, President,Technology at Visa. " #Hyperpersonalization will allow sellers and buyers to tailor their interactions down to a segment of one. It has been a dream for a long time. Now, we have the capability to understand consumers deeply thanks to AI models, moving from an era of “hunt and peck” to a highly curated experience. Think of it as moving from a concierge model asking for help, whether it’s on a search engine or a shopping site, to an agent model where a personal assistant powered by AI will know what you want." https://lnkd.in/esBBYF9k

probabl, a spin-off of French research center Inria, is overseeing a global #opensource data science library called scikit-learn, an approach widely used for performing complex #AI and #machinelearning tasks. If it succeeds, Probabl’s library could end up helping Europe achieve its goal of technology sovereignty and pave the way for an alternative to the offerings of #U.S. and #Chinese#AI giants. Only two other such libraries exist in the world, at that scale: one created by Google, called #Tensorflow and another called #PyTorch created by Meta, which powers, among other things, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Tesla’s autopilot. While not covering the same machine learning techniques, the open source scikit-learn library is ahead of both in popularity and usage. According to independent measurement by Pypistats.org the open source scikit-learn library backed by Inria, supported by a global community of contributors, and now overseen by Probabl, has been downloaded 1.5 billion times, averaging 65 million per month (22% from the U.S., 25% from China and 3% from France). It creates more dependencies than PyTorch and Tensorflow combined. Dependencies are the number of projects and packages that depend on scikit-learn, i.e. where scikit-learn is a core component that helps build additional value. Since it’s middleware and popular, it is foundational to nearly a million projects and 15,000 “packages” (i.e. projects that are more structured and significant). “We need to take advantage of open source to minimize dependencies on monolithic, proprietary and captive technologies,” says serial entrepreneur and Probabl CEO Yann Lechelle. “The U.S. enjoys near supremacy when it comes to #chips, #Cloud and #software. This isn’t great for #Europe or any other nation for that matter. If you don’t control your technological infrastructure, you have no sovereignty.” https://lnkd.in/ebbQqtQZ

Pasqal develops #quantum hardware and software technology for real-world #computing applications. Customers include Saudi Arabia gas and oil company aramco, global aerospace-and-defense company Thales, French energy company EDF, U.S. healthcare company Johnson & Johnson, French bank Groupe Crédit Agricole and GNC, a group that includes most of the French and foreign hotel chains operating in France. The French scale-up, which focuses on #neutralatoms, was founded by physics Nobel Prize winner Alain Aspect and is named after Blaise Pascal, the inventor of the world’s first mechanical calculator.. “We expect to see a quantum computer in each data center within two years and our long-term vision is to build the quantum Nvidia,” says CEO Georges-Olivier REYMOND, a speaker on a panel about #quantumcryptography at the Paris Viva Technology conference on May 22 moderated by The Innovator’s Editor-in-Chief. https://lnkd.in/eF9UzHFf

"Europe doesn’t have a choice," says McKinsey's Eric Hazan, The Innovator's Interview of the Week. " If it wants to reap the #productivity growth benefits of #AI and #GenAI, it needs to deploy the technology as fast as the U.S. while investing and improving human capital and raising the #skills of its workforce. If it doesn’t do that it will experience much less growth and social turmoil."

It is no surprise that this year’s Viva Technology conference, which attracted 165,000 visitors, had an “AI Mile” to display the latest developments in artificial intelligence. Some 88% of business leaders surveyed by the conference plan to invest in #AI in 2024. They, along investors and 13,500 startups, converged at Europe’s large tech conference May 22-25 to learn about how to best leverage the technology, avoid its pitfalls, and navigate an uncertain future. Conference goers from around the globe heard how AI was transforming everything from e-commerce and luxury goods to waste management, cosmetics, and cars. But high profile speakers such as Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind SpaceX, Tesla and xAI, and Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal AI, an encrypted messaging service, reminded conference goers about the darker side of AI including turbo-charged #cyberattacks, #deepfakes, #discrimination, #surveillance, #electioninterference, negative impact on children, impact on the #work force and #socialunrest. Read on to get the key takeaways from the conference. https://lnkd.in/eArWD4qk