Today’s Story

Best Buy Bets Big on AI:

The retailer has trained 30,000 employees to sell and support Microsoft’s new AI-powered laptops, marking the store’s most significant product launch training effort in a decade.

Microsoft’s new product “Copilot+ PCs are the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built. With…access to the most advanced AI models, Copilot+ PCs will enable you to do things you can’t on any other PC” - MS. In other words, Microsoft is embedding AI tooling into their devices' OS, similar to the Apple-OpenAI partnership.

Best Buy has exclusive sales rights to more than 40% of the Copilot+ PC models, including the OLED Surface Pro, highlighting the importance of their partnership and them as a distribution partner for advanced devices.

AI represents a new frontier for many consumers, requiring more comprehensive employee training compared to other product launches. The sheer scale of Best Buy’s PC launch with Microsoft signals that AI may usher in a new era for consumer electronics more broadly, with perhaps a new Iphone upgrade cycle also on the horizon.

Headlines

• California Grapples with Regulating AI (COAI) - Roughly 50 AI-related bills are circulating in the California Legislature…

• The AI Boom Divides VC Landscape (COAI) - AI startups now account for nearly a quarter of all venture funding while Non-AI tech startups face a funding drought in many cases.

• AI’s Power Surge Strains Grid (COAI) - Goldman Sachs projects that by 2030, data centers will account for 8% of total U.S. electricity use, with natural gas expected to meet a significant portion of this demand.

Research

AI Is the New Coder

At the intersection of AI and software development, generating logically correct code remains a complex challenge.

Previous approaches, such as DeepMind’s AlphaCode, have relied on generating a multitude of solutions to find accurate code, a computationally expensive method.

A new study by CodiumAI introduces AlphaCodium, a test-based, iterative framework that significantly enhances the efficiency and accuracy of code generation by language models. This advancement is not just a technical leap; it’s a game-changer.

Tool Spotlight

AI Creations

Each Day we Highlight Gen AI Art and Projects!