Drones, Olympics, Open AI Search, CrowdStrike, Grok, and Air Conditioning
Weekly Review of News in Technology, UX and AI
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Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:
🕹️ Drone Revolution
🤾♂️ Olympics
🔍 OpenAI
🍔 CrowdStrike
ℹ️ Grok
🪭 Air Conditioning
Podcast
The Subterranean Drone Revolution: Transforming Grain Storage with Dr. Lorenzo Conti
In this episode of Prodity: Product by Design, Kyle interviews Dr. Lorenzo Conti, founder and managing director of Crover Ltd, a groundbreaking startup based in Scotland. Dr. Conti shares his unique journey from academia to entrepreneurship, detailing the development of the world’s first subterranean drone designed to revolutionize grain storage. They discuss the challenges of creating technology that moves through grain without damaging it, the significant impact of customer feedback on product development, and the importance of resilience in building a successful startup. Dr. Conti also touches on the potential future applications of Crover’s technology, including space exploration, and the exciting expansion plans into the U.S. market. Join us to learn about the innovative advancements in grain storage technology and the inspiring story behind Crover’s success.
News and Useful Reads
At the Olympics, AI Is Watching You
AI isn’t just tracking the athletes, like we talked about last week, but it’s also tracking everyone at the Olympics.
For critics and supporters alike, algorithmic oversight of CCTV footage offers a glimpse of the security systems of the future, where there is simply too much surveillance footage for human operators to physically watch. “The software is an extension of the police,” says Noémie Levain, a member of the activist group La Quadrature du Net, which opposes AI surveillance. “It's the eyes of the police multiplied.”
OpenAI announces SearchGPT, its AI-powered search engine
AI has been coming for search for a long time. And we’re just beginning to see what it will look like.
The search engine starts with a large textbox that asks the user “What are you looking for?” But rather than returning a plain list of links, SearchGPT tries to organize and make sense of them. In one example from OpenAI, the search engine summarizes its findings on music festivals and then presents short descriptions of the events followed by an attribution link.
CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage
If you are an IT professional who had to deal with the CrowdStrike issues, they want to tell you they’re sorry by sending you a $10 gift card. You just won’t be able to use it…
On Wednesday, some of the people who posted about the gift card said that when they went to redeem the offer, they got an error message saying the voucher had been canceled. When TechCrunch checked the voucher, the Uber Eats page provided an error message that said the gift card “has been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid.”
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X's Grok chatbot is misleading voters about the presidential election
We’re in the age of AI and a new age of misinformation. It’s one thing when AI tells you to put glue on pizza, it’s another when Elon Musk’s company feeds misinformation to potential voters ahead of an election where he’s pledged massive support to one of the candidates.
The US is in the middle of another hotly contested and seemingly close presidential election. This election is also happening in this new age of widespread access to artificial intelligence and easily disseminated misinformation. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon says his office tracked the source of one key piece of election misinformation back to X’s Grok chatbot.
Other Interesting Finds
Six Innovative Ways Humans Have Kept Cool Throughout History
As I was walking outside yesterday, I was thinking about the fact that air conditioning is such a recent invention. For most of history, humanity didn’t have the luxury of keeping their homes cooled to a nice 74 degrees during the summer. Many people still don’t. Those of us who do are quite fortunate.
As it turns out, prior to the rise of home air-conditioning units in the mid-20th century, humans were quite resourceful when it came to keeping cool.