 |
|
|
|||||
This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here. Hundreds of AI tools emerge every week. Ive picked five new ones worth exploring. Theyre free to try, easy to use, and signal new directions for useful AI. 1. Sesame: Talk with a surprisingly lifelike AI Of all the AI bots Ive communicated with, this one sounds the most lifelike. Pick either Maya or Miles to talk with for free in Sesames conversational demo. Try one of these topics. You can download your conversation afterwards. Its deleted from the companys servers within 30 days to protect your privacy. Ill keep an eye on this company: Sesame aims to build an ever-present brilliant friend and conversationalist, keeping you informed and organized, helping you be a better version of yourself. Another intriguing new AI conversationalist: Im also intrigued by my experiments with Natura Umanas AI people. Rather than one AI bot that covers everything, the NatureOS ecosystem hosts multiple conversational bots, each with a different focus. Ive talked with Hector about well-being and Athena about fitness. The NatureOS interestingly includes hardware, so you can summon these lifelike AI characters with a quick tap of special earbuds. (See a video demo.) 2. Convergence: Assign tasks to an AI agent Ask Convergences AI agent to buy groceries for you, find a gift on Amazon, get you a restaurant reservation, research what people say about your company, or do any number of other tasks. This is just one of many new AI agents trained to use a Web browser for you, and none are yet fully reliable. When I tasked Convergence with making a list of LinkedIn profiles of speakers at the upcoming Perugia International Journalism festival, it got some right and many wrong. With simpler tasks your odds of success are higher. You can request up to five tasks for free per day, or pay $20/month for an unlimited number of tasks. 3. Scribe: Transcribe super accurately Until April 9, Scribea remarkably accurate new transcription model from ElevenLabsis completely free. In my tests it got the names of websites right, whereas most transcription tools get those wrong. It also captured tiny speech nuances so well that Id recommend this over other tools for anything requiring top accuracy. It works in 99 languages. 4. Google Career Dreamer: Imagine a new job Dream up potential new directions for your career with this simple, well-designed free site. You dont have to log in, enter your name, or share any personal info. Just type in the kind of work you do and confirm whether you have certain skills and interests. Add your education if you want. The AI immediately gives you a career identity statement and shows you a map of jobs that might interest you. Hover over any to learn more about them. You can even open up nearby job openings in that field. You can then jump to Gemini, Googles alternative to ChatGPT, to work on a cover letter or continue your career ideation. Gems are now free You can now create a free Gemini Gem, which is an AI tool customized with your specific instructions and up to 10 documents you upload. Its Googles answer to ChatGPTs Custom GPTs. Try this: Create a new Career Gem by uploading your resume, past cover letters, career planning docs, and any other relevant materials. Provide instructions if you have a particular style, language, or approach in mind. This new trained AI assistant youve customized can then help you anytime you return to it to refine a cover letter, update your resume, practice for an interview, or even brainstorm career ideas. Alternative: You can use Googles default Career Guide gem without uploading anything, but its not personalized. 5. Adobe Enhance Speech: Improve audio Adobe recently upgraded its audio cleanup tool. Upload any audio recording with background noise and immediately get a clean version to download. There are new sliders for adjusting the enhancement and background noise. You can then use Adobe Podcast to edit the cleaned audio by trimming the transcript just as you would in a Google Doc. It now works for recordings in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and English. If youre making a podcast, you can choose from royalty-free sound collections with intros, outros, transition sounds, and background music. Its free to try for a month and included with existing Adobe subscriptions. This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.
Category:
E-Commerce
The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. When I was 12 years old, my parents enrolled me in a kids coding class at the YMCA. This was 1983before the internettyping code from magazines like Compute! into a computer with a green-on-black screen and seeing what it did. And the experience would go on to shape the course of my life. Ive been in software for more than 30 years, most of them at Intuit. I started there as a software engineer in 1999 and today am its chief technology officer. In that time, so much has changed about this professionfrom the way we mentor to the way we code. Today, agentic AI technology can take high-level directions, look at an existing code base, pull in the right set of data, do a web search to look at the current ecosystem, and then plan out and perform a sequence of actions normally expected from a junior engineer. This provides a true end-to-end done-for-you experience. Put simply, I can see why people might feel like everything is changing for software engineers. But even in this fast-changing field, there are throughlines. I may not be working in BASIC on the same Apple 2E from coding camp, but the foundational skills that help me break down complex problems, ask the right questions, and code durable solutions are as important as they’ve always been. No one needs me to describe how this industry has changed. Instead, here are three things that havent. 1. The why is as important as the how Strategic thinking has long been part of a software engineers job, to go beyond coding to building. Working in service of a larger purpose helps engineers develop more impactful solutions than simply coding to a set of specifications. With the rise in AI-assisted codingand, thus, the ability to code and build much fasterthe why remains at the forefront. We drive business impact by delivering measurable customer benefits. And you have to understand a problem before you can solve it with code. As machines tackle the parts of the job that deliver relatively standard pieces of a solution, the other part of an engineers rolethat of a cognitive architecttakes on new weight. The key differentiator lies in the ability to effectively use AI to augment human capabilities. Time previously spent on routine coding tasks can now be devoted to strategic decisions, allowing engineers who are just starting out to practice critical thinking skills earlier in their careers and offering seasoned engineers more opportunities to leverage their expertise for competitive advantage. 2. Curiosity is key The best engineers are inherently curious, with an eye for detail and a desire to learn. Through the decades, that hasn’t really changed; a learning mindset continues to be important for technologists at every level. Ive always been curious about what makes things tick. As a child, I remember taking things apart to see how they worked. I knew I wanted to be an engineer when I was able to put them back together again. The continuous advancement of technology makes it impossible for the day-to-day work of a junior engineer to look the same year over year. In the 1980s, an entry-level coder might have been tasked with writing simple programs in assembly language, but by the 90s this was made nearly obsolete by higher-level languages like C++. Similarly, in the early 2000s, we needed humans to manually parse and clean large files, and by the 2010s we could automate data cleaning with scripting and ETL tools. AI may be exponentially accelerating the pace of change in our day-to-day work, but those who enter the field with curiosity and a hunger to make things more efficient, effective, and intuitive will continue to find success, even as the way they apply that curiosity continues to shift. 3. Leadership skills arent just for managers Not every great coder aspires to be a people leader; I certainly didnt. I was introverted growing up. But as I worked my way up at Intuit, I saw firsthand how the right leadership skills could deepen my impact, even when I wasnt charged with leading anybody. I’ve seen how quick decision making, holistic problem solving, and efficient delegation can drive impact at every level of an organization. And these assets only become more important as we fold AI into the process. Communication skills, for example, have taken on new significance. When we convey all the relevant information needed for a counterpart to provide an adequate responsewhether it’s a colleague, a customer, or AIwe reach better outcomes faster. It’s always been critical to understand the context around a problem in order to choose and code the right solution. But engineers now need to be able to adequately explain that context to AI in a clear, direct way to efficiently delegate portions of their work, in order to leverage AI to operate more efficiently and increase productivity internally. At Intuit, we see up to 40 percent faster coding using generative AI code assistants. Communication skills are key in getting these outcomesand, as a resultdriving faster innovation for customers. AI is changing the trajectory of software engineering. And as long as we continue to practice the foundational skills our industry was built on, it will be as rewarding and exciting a career in the future as it was for me 30 years ago. Alex Balazs is CTO at Intuit.
Category:
E-Commerce
CoreWeave plans to reduce the size of its U.S. initial public offering and price its shares below the indicated range, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday, dampening expectations that the listing would boost investor appetite for IPOs. The Nvidia-backed cloud services provider is now looking to sell 37.5 million shares, 23.5% less than originally planned, and price them at $40 apiece, well below even the low end of the indicated range, the source added, requesting anonymity discussing confidential information. Nvidia will anchor the CoreWeave IPO at the price with a $250 million order, the source said. The sale would raise about $1.5 billion and value CoreWeave at about $23 billion on a fully diluted basis, according to Reuters’ calculations. The company did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment. It is expected to price the IPO later on Thursday. CoreWeaves roadshow, which began last week, received a weaker-than-expected reception as risk-averse investors in a volatile market weighed concerns over the companys long-term growth, financial risks and capital intensity, according to four sources familiar with the matter. Among the concerns is CoreWeaves heavy reliance on Microsoft, whose shifting AI datacenter strategy could impact long-term demand for chips known as graphics processing units, or GPUs. While investors appear comfortable with the companys high leverage since it has strong free cash flow, the risk of commitments not being fulfilled remains a worry. Additionally, CoreWeave’s capital-intensive business model raises questions about sustainability, adding to broader market uncertainty. CoreWeave has been a significant customer for Nvidia, deploying over 250,000 of Nvidia’s GPUs by the end of 2024. Investors’ lukewarm reception to the CoreWeave IPO could signal reduced confidence in the AI infrastructure market, as the scaling of GPU assets in AI training slows down. “The business model doesn’t appear fundamentally flawed, but this suggests investors are recalibrating AI infrastructure valuations,” said Lukas Muehlbauer, research analyst at IPOX. CoreWeave and some existing investors had initially aimed to sell 49 million shares in the offering priced between $47 and $55 each to raise as much as $2.7 billion. That would have valued the company at up to $32 billion on a fully diluted basis. Mounting concerns CoreWeave’s stock market debut has been closely watched as a test of the strength of a recovery in the U.S. IPO market and whether investor enthusiasm for AI newcomers remains strong or has started to wane. The number of U.S.-listed equity capital markets deals, including both IPOs and block trades of shares, fell to 187 in the first three months of this year, down from 243 during the same period last year, according to Dealogic data through Wednesday. The total value of these transactions also dipped, falling from $74.02 billion to $63.48 billion. Despite the AI boom, there are growing concerns that data center spending will be uneven, with investments concentrated among a few giants while others struggle to keep pace. DeepSeek, China’s low-cost AI rival, has also emerged as a growing threat, fueling concerns about pressure on data center spending. CoreWeave had debt of about $8 billion as of last year. It also leases its 32 data centers and some equipment, instead of owning them, resulting in operating lease liabilities of $2.6 billion. In its offering filing, the company had said about $1 billion of the IPO proceeds would be used to pay down debt. The company has said it would continue to borrow. CoreWeave has yet to turn a profit, and IPO investors in the last few years have been wary of backing companies with no history of profitability. Ahead of its IPO, CoreWeave secured partnerships with major AI players, including Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Earlier this month, it signed an $11.9 billion infrastructure deal with the ChatGPT maker. The cloud services provider, which offers access to data centers and high-powered Nvidia chips for AI workloads, will also issue $350 million in shares to OpenAI through a private placement as part of the offering. Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs are the lead underwriters of the IPO. The downsizing was first reported by Semafor on Thursday. Echo Wang, Krystal Hu, Milana Vinn, Manya Saini, Niket Nishant, and Ateev Bhandari, Reuters
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||