T-Mobile has recently announced a multi-year partnership with artificial intelligence giant OpenAI, aiming to completely reshape user experience by developing a new AI-driven customer service platform. This remarkable collaboration not only showcases the immense potential of AI in business applications but also heralds the future direction of telecommunications services. In today's business landscape, generative AI has become a significant application in the customer service sector, second only to programming and marketing. The IntentCX platform launched by T-Mobile will fully leverage OpenAI.

Recently, the online sales industry has undergone a revolutionary change! A startup named Rep.ai has just announced the completion of a $7.5 million funding round, aiming to launch a brand new AI digital clone technology. This technology will help businesses create virtual sales representatives capable of conducting real-time video and audio conversations, truly providing 24/7 services and transforming our traditional shopping experience. Rep.ai was formerly known as ServiceBell, and they have rebranded to focus on developing these lifelike AI clones.

Kingsoft Office recently announced a significant update: the number of annual paid users for its AI and premium memberships has surpassed one million. This milestone achievement highlights the deep integration of WPS AI within Kingsoft Office's products and demonstrates the immense potential and user recognition of artificial intelligence in the modern office landscape. In terms of product innovation, Kingsoft Office has engaged in a strategic partnership with Huawei to launch the HarmonyOS version of WPS, which has performed excellently across various platforms, earning praise for its smoothness. Its core advantage lies in achieving unified multi-platform accounts and cross-device compatibility.

Amazon's cloud computing division - Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced that they will invest $10 billion over the next five years to build, operate, and maintain data centers in the UK. Image source note: The image is AI generated and authorized by the provider Midjourney. This decision marks Amazon's further expansion in the UK, where the company established its first AWS region back in 2016, which includes centralized data centers. Additionally, AWS has three availability zones and two Waves in the UK.

Ding Jian, the president of Xianyu, announced at the '2024 E-commerce Conference' during the 2024 China International Fair for Trade in Services that Xianyu will launch two new AI products this year, namely 'Smart Publishing' and 'Smart Hosting'. These products are currently undergoing small-scale gray testing within the Xianyu app and are expected to officially launch this year. 'Smart Publishing' allows users to upload just one product image, and the system will use image recognition and natural language generation technology to automatically create a product description that fits the Xianyu style.

Recently, Google was sued by a company named Gemini Data for its newly launched AI service 'Gemini'. Gemini Data is a company that offers an enterprise-level AI platform and believes that Google used their registered trademark without legal authorization. The sequence of events is as follows: in February 2023, Google changed the name of its generative AI service from 'Bard' to 'Gemini', and prior to this, in December 2023,

At the 2024 Inclusion · Bund Conference, Ant Group shared its latest progress in building knowledge-enhanced professional intelligent agents and launched the research and development achievement of combining knowledge graphs with large models—the Knowledge-Enhanced Large Model Service Framework KAG. This framework, introduced by Liang Lei, head of the knowledge graph at Ant Group, aims to guide decision-making and retrieval through graph logical symbols, significantly improving the precision and logical rigor of decisions in vertical domains.

Apple has quietly introduced an intriguing new feature in the latest iPhone 16 series – the camera control key. This innovation is not only designed to simplify the user's photography experience but also reflects Apple's ambitious vision in the smart services arena. This brand-new camera control key is far from an ordinary button; it serves as a multifunctional operational hub. Users can quickly launch the camera by long-pressing, take instant shots with a light touch, and even swipe to adjust the shooting focal length. This diverse range of operation methods will undoubtedly enhance the photography experience, especially for photography enthusiasts.

Salesforce has acquired the AI voice assistant startup Tenyx to enhance the interactivity of its customer service system and meet user needs through a natural and smooth conversational experience. Tenyx's technology has been applied in various fields such as e-commerce, healthcare, and hospitality, and will become an essential part of Salesforce's customer service system. The transaction is expected to be completed by October 31, 2024, with the Tenyx team joining Salesforce to continue product development. The acquisition aims to leverage AI fully.

On September 4, 2024, the Beijing ZhiYuan Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (BAAI) announced the launch of the world's first model combat evaluation service featuring text-to-video, called FlagEval Large Model Arena. This service is open to users and covers approximately 40 large models from both domestic and international sources, supporting customizable online or offline evaluations for four major tasks: language Q&A, multimodal image and text understanding, text-to-image, and text-to-video.

With the arrival of the new school season, DingTalk has launched an upgraded 'New Student Enrollment Plan' aimed at reducing management burdens and increasing efficiency in schools through intelligent solutions, creating a smart and harmonious educational environment. This plan covers key aspects such as new student enrollment, class division, and graduation information management, providing a one-stop service to facilitate seamless connections between schools and families.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a new High Performance Computing (HPC) management service - AWS Parallel Computing Service, aimed at simplifying the process for businesses to access and utilize supercomputing resources, lowering the barrier to entry. This service utilizes the open-source tool Slurm to manage clusters, allowing users to easily set up and manage clusters of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances on AWS without complex system administrator support. Businesses only need one AWS account to experiment and test the advantages of their workloads in large-scale computing.

Bland AI, an artificial intelligence company focused on phone customer service, recently announced that it has completed a $16 million Series A funding round, bringing its total funding to $22 million. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, PayPal founder Max Levchin, Eleven Labs CTO Piotr Dąbkowski, and Twilio founder Jeff Lawson.

Bland AI, a startup founded in 2023, is revolutionizing business phone support through AI technology and recently completed a Series A funding round of $16 million, bringing its total funding to $22 million. Supporters include Scale Venture Partners, Y Combinator, Max Levchin, Piotr Dąbkowski, and Jeff Lawson. Its mission is to enhance the efficiency of business phone communication, with AI agents capable of providing 24/7 service.

Cerebras Systems Inc. announced the launch of what it claims to be the 'world's fastest' AI inference service, challenging Nvidia Corp. The service aims to perform AI tasks at greater speed and lower cost. It is based on the WSE-3 processor, which has over 900,000 computing cores and 44GB of memory, with a core count 52 times that of Nvidia's H100. It claims an inference speed of up to 1,000 tokens per second, which is 20 times faster than Nvidia's comparable service, and offers a price-performance ratio 100 times better. The service is offered for free.

Cerebras Systems has launched Cerebras Inference, claiming it to be the fastest AI inference service in the world, achieving performance that surpasses traditional GPU-based systems by 20 times with significantly improved cost-effectiveness, particularly suitable for processing large language models (LLMs). Its 8B version processes 1800 tokens per second, while the 70B version processes 450 tokens, with speed and cost-performance far exceeding NVIDIA GPU solutions.

Huawei has launched the 'AI Hundred Schools Program' aimed at supporting domestic universities in AI research and innovation by providing AI computing resources through Ascend Cloud Services. This initiative seeks to eliminate computing power bottlenecks and promote scientific research and talent development. The program is targeted at university teams with significant research achievements or far-reaching influence, covering a wide range of areas including AI operators, algorithms, model inference, and large model training. Applicant teams are required to submit project details, and Huawei will comprehensively evaluate project goals, value, innovation, and impact on the industry and ecosystem. Approved projects can receive between 50,000 to 1 million annually.

AI companions are quietly entering human lives with high levels of personalization and endless patience, triggering new forms of emotional connections and even potential 'intellectual addiction.' MIT research reveals that people are inclined to interact with AIs that meet their expectations. The experience of a software engineer demonstrates how AI companions can provoke questions about self-awareness through emotional connections, along with philosophical reflections stemming from interactions with AI. As AI companions raise moral questions like rights to freedom, humans are beginning to reconsider their dependency on AI, realizing that it is not just a technological issue, but also a matter of ethics.

In 2023, China's AI public cloud service market showed strong growth, reaching a scale of 12.61 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 58.2%. Large models play a key role in driving innovation in generative AI applications and the implementation of traditional AI applications. Baidu Intelligent Cloud and Alibaba Cloud rank first in the market, with Tencent Cloud following closely behind, and Huawei Cloud in third place, indicating fierce market competition. The report pays special attention to market services such as computer vision, conversational AI, and intelligent voice, in which Tencent Cloud, Baidu Intelligent Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud dominate. In addition, natural language...

Uber has formed a strategic partnership with the autonomous taxi company Cruise, planning to offer autonomous ride services through the Uber app next year, potentially covering cities like Phoenix, Dallas, and Houston. Cruise, which paused its service last year due to safety incidents, has now resumed operations under the supervision of safety drivers. This marks an important move for Uber in the self-driving sector, also collaborating with Waymo and Aurora. The partnership with Cruise aims not only to expand autonomous...