Good morning. Wishing you all a very happy Thanksgiving, full of good food and better company.

We will be off tomorrow, but we’ll be back on Friday with a special cybersecurity breakdown of digital footprints.

— Ian Krietzberg, Editor-in-Chief, The Deep View

In today’s newsletter:

• 🌳 AI for Good: Plant-based meats

• 🤖 Elon Musk’s robotic arm 

• 🖥️ Anthropic launches new method to connect LLMs with data sources 

• 🛜 Zoom is becoming an ‘AI-first’ company

AI for Good: Plant-based meats

Moving away from meat-based diets could have a significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions, reducing carbon and helping spare some of the resources that are currently expended on maintaining flocks of animals. 

But the plant-based alternatives tend to not taste great. 

What happened: So, some researchers at Stanford are applying machine learning and generative AI to a series of tests and experiments designed to find the closest (plant-based) textural alternative. 

• The team tested eight different animal and plant-based products, placing each food item in a machine that conducted tension, compression and shear tests (representative of what we do when we chew). 

• Then, they designed a neural network that parses the resulting data and produces equations that explain the behavior of each piece of meat. 

The team then affirmed those equations with a series of human taste tests, which largely supported the conclusions derived by the algorithm. 

Why it matters: Though the team has plenty more work to do, here, the goal now is empirically-tested, AI-generated recipe development:

“Instead of using a trial-and-error approach to improve the texture of plant-based meat, we could envision using generative artificial intelligence to scientifically generate recipes for plant-based meat products with precisely desired properties,” the researchers wrote in a paper that was published in Nature.

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Elon Musk’s robotic arm 

One of the big promises of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) centers around Star Wars-esque prosthetics. Though we’re not there yet, these systems today use sensors and artificial intelligence to decode and process brain activity, which is then read by computers; some, like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, involve highly invasive surgeries. Other BCI systems simply sit, either on top of the brain, or on the exterior of a patient’s head. 

What happened: Neuralink, which is still in the midst of its initial human trial, says it has received approval to launch a second human trial, this one focused on testing the link between its BCI system and robotic arms. 

• The company didn’t provide much detail, adding just that this marks an “important first step” toward “restoring … physical freedom.” The new study, nicknamed “Convoy,” will enable cross-enrolling participants from the ongoing Prime study. 

• Musk’s Neuralink has thus far successfully implanted its brain chip into the minds of two patients, each of which is now able to control a computer cursor with their minds. 

The idea is that, if the chip can read and process brain activity enough to control a computer cursor, it could also be applied to controlling prosthetic arm and finger movements. 

But, as Dr. Nicholas Vachicouras, the CEO of brain implant firm Neurosoft, has told me: “the reason why this is not widespread today is a hardware problem.” The wet environment of the brain makes for an incredibly complex engineering challenge, even if the software component is perfect. 

Some context: Neuralink has also faced plenty of scrutiny, due both to its approach and its alleged practices. The company has been accused — and, later, cleared — of animal welfare violations. 

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine said last year: “It seems obvious to everyone but Elon Musk that Neuralink’s device is unsafe and dangerous.” 

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• AI is making Philippine call center work more efficient, for better and worse (Rest of World).

• Intel awarded $7.9 billion from the Chips Act (Business Insider).

• FTC takes action against Evolv Technologies for deceiving users about its AI-powered security screening system (FTC).

• Over half of LinkedIn posts are AI-generated (Wired).

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• Manager, Product Management: Capital One, New York, NY

• VP, Product AI Solutions: NBC Universal, Englewood Cliffs, NJ

• A group of artists who received early access to OpenAI’s Sora apparently leaked the model on Hugging Face, saying: “We are sharing this to the world in the hopes that OpenAI becomes more open, more artist-friendly and supports the arts beyond PR stunts.”

• Spain has proposed a draft Royal Decree that aims to grant collective copyright licenses “in the context of technological development of AI.” This attempt to address the copyright question of AI comes, as, according to the Decree, “obtaining intellectual property rights holders' authorization on an individual basis is so onerous and difficult that it makes the required operation improbable.”

Anthropic launches new method to connect LLMs with data sources 

Anthropic this week unveiled and open-sourced a new standard for connecting Large Language Models (LLMs) with data sources: the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

The problem: As Alex Albert, Anthropic’s head of Claude relations, wrote, “getting LLMs to interact with external systems isn't usually that easy.”

• It’s a process that requires developers to write custom code to connect their given LLM app with data sources. Albert called it “messy, repetitive work.” 

• This data isolation, according to Anthropic, makes it difficult to scale “truly connected systems.” 

The solution: MCP acts as a universal, open standard for this connection, allowing developers to ”build secure, two-way connections between their data sources and AI-powered tools.” It follows a client-server architecture, according to Anthropic, enabling developers to “expose their data through MCP servers or build AI applications (MCP clients) that connect to these servers.”

Dhanji R. Prasanna, CTO at Block, an early adopter of the MCP, likened the protocol to the “bridges that connect AI to real-world applications, ensuring innovation is accessible, transparent, and rooted in collaboration.”

Zoom is becoming an ‘AI-first’ company 

Zoom Video Communications Inc. — that pandemic-era stalwart of digital connection — announced this week that it is dropping the “video” from its legal name as an aesthetic part of its effort to become an “AI-first company.” 

The details: In a blog post, Zoom CEO and founder Eric Yuan said that, “from day one, our mission has been to deliver happiness to our customers.”

• In order to deliver on this mission, he said the company must “stay ahead of trends, innovate rapidly and develop solutions that reflect our customers’ biggest needs ​​— which we see as going far beyond video in the future of work.”

• Yuan said that the company’s Zoom AI companion is the “heartbeat of our evolution into an AI-first company and is critical in helping our customers uncover new opportunities for greater productivity.”

The AI companion sits at the center of the Zoom Workplace, a new product offering that starts at $13 per user per month. 

The vision: In the blog post, Yuan said that, by summarizing meetings, drafting emails and helping with meeting prep, Zoom’s AI assistant will decrease workloads to the point that a four-day workweek will become possible. 

The longer-term vision remains the same as it was in June, when Yuan fantasized about a near-term future full of AI-generated digital clones that users can send out into the ether to take the bulk of their meetings and handle the bulk of their work. 

Neither the training data nor the energy costs of Zoom’s generative model are known. 

Reporting third-quarter earnings recently, Zoom detailed a 3.6% year-over-year increase in revenue to $1.18 billion, something a JP Morgan analyst called a “muted” recovery. Shares of the company, up 15% for the year, fell around 7% on Tuesday. 

I’d love to see generative AI leveraged to usher in a 4-day workweek, I just don’t really see that happening. What seems more likely — and what, in certain cases, is already happening — is that employees will become required to use generative AI to handle larger workloads as employers reduce staff. Unless this all was paired with specific regulations, which seems unlikely, I don’t really see the bridge to a shorter workweek here.  

And on the digital clones front, while we’re starting to see some progress in that general vicinity with the ever-increasing push toward “agents,” the tech isn’t ready for something like that, yet. And, if it does get there, there are a lot of questions that ought to be addressed first, spanning everything from security and privacy guarantees to guardrails around AI actions and decisions and a lack of clarity around the liability and accountability for the people using these systems if things were to go wrong. 

Then, you’ve got a kind of central issue with this idea of digital clones — if the bulk of work is being done by AI clones, why would any company employ any people at all? Why not just reduce staff down to a handful of executives, and hundreds of their digital clones? And if that’s the case, the impact on the economy — with or without some version of a universal basic income, which is dubious in and of itself — would be enormous, simply by removing purchasing power from the bulk of consumers. 

This wouldn’t be good. 

All that to say, there’s been a trend — and I think Zoom seems anxious to participate in it — of tech CEOs painting futuristic portraits filled with seemingly high-impact buzzwords. “Agents,” “digital clones” and “superintelligence” all sound, at the very least, intriguing, but they’re unserious and uncritical terms and phrases — the tech isn’t there, the science isn’t there … and if it was, there are too many unanswered questions and unresolved obstacles to call these visions legitimate. 

Instead, what we have is a healthy dose of hype.

🤔 Your thought process:

Selected Image 2 (Left):

• “The turkey in Image 1 is freakishly small, as small as the plates.”

💭 A poll before you go

Thanks for reading today’s edition of The Deep View!

We’ll see you in the next one.

Here’s your view on AI-generated music:

40% of you said: ‘pay the human artists, then it’s fine.’ 25% of you said it’s never fine; the rest were pretty evenly split between loving it and not really caring too much.

Something else:

• “Just a modern synthesizer...”