OpenAI named the former president of Amazon Web Services's Japan arm to spearhead its push to woo enterprise clients in the world's fourth-largest economy. The artificial intelligence darling is opening an office in Tokyo as it releases a custom GPT-4 model catering to Japanese language users. OpenAI said it has 2 million weekly active users in the country, while its enterprise clients include Daikin Industries, Rakuten Group and an affiliate of Toyota Motor. "We want to build a track record through repeated dialogue with companies in Japan," said Tadao Nagasaki, the newly named Japan president for OpenAI, during a news conference Monday. The Tokyo office -- OpenAI's third overseas outpost following offices in London and Dublin -- will grow to about 10 to 20 workers this year, he said.

Join us on November 9 to learn how to successfully innovate and achieve efficiency by upskilling and scaling citizen developers at the Low-Code/No-Code Summit. "Deepfake implies unauthorized use of synthetic media and generative artificial intelligence -- we are authorized from the get-go," she told VentureBeat. She described the Tel Aviv- and New York-based Hour One as an AI company that has also "built a legal and ethical framework for how to engage with real people to generate their likeness in digital form." It's an important delineation in an era when deepfakes, or synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness, has gotten a boatload of bad press -- not surprisingly, given deepfakes' longstanding connection to revenge porn and fake news. The term "deepfake" can be traced to a Reddit user in 2017 named "deepfakes" who, along with others in the community, shared videos, many involving celebrity faces swapped onto the bodies of actresses in pornographic videos.

Two years ago I spoke at the Women of Silicon Roundabout Conference about machine learning (ML) startups and why they were a trend to watch. It occurred to me recently that I never got to share with the wider world the interesting cases we discussed, and, alas, I am not allowed to share the full recording of the talk. It also sounds like I've been remembered more for the yellow platforms I stomped around the stage with (evidence here), rather than the actual content. So I've decided to revisit the topic, re-examining some of the original cases alongside newer startups that have since come out of the woodwork. I also work at an ML startup, meaning that we sell predictions from ML models (specifically, predictions about which customers are committing fraud).

Modern day enterprise security is like guarding a fortress that is being attacked on all fronts, from digital infrastructure to applications to network endpoints. That complexity is why AI technologies such as deep learning and machine learning have emerged as game-changing defensive weapons in the enterprise's arsenal over the past three years. There is no other technology that can keep up. It has the ability to rapidly analyze billions of data points, and glean patterns to help a company act intelligently and instantaneously to neutralize many potential threats. Beginning about five years ago, investors started pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into a wave of new security startups that leverage AI, including CrowdStrike, Darktrace, Vectra AI, and Vade Secure, among others.

Accenture has launched a new immersive engagement and investment program targeting emerging technology software startups to help fill strategic innovation gaps for the Global 2000. Called Project Spotlight, the exclusive Accenture Ventures program represents a new approach to engaging with the global software startup community. Beyond making capital investments, Project Spotlight will offer unprecedented access to Accenture's technology domain expertise and its enterprise clients. Startups will co-innovate with Accenture at its Innovation Hubs, Labs and Liquid Studios, working with subject matter experts to adapt their solutions to the enterprise market and scale faster and more effectively. Created by six-time Silicon Valley entrepreneur and CEO, Tom Lounibos, Project Spotlight seeks to transform the transactional nature of venture capital into an immersive engagement model. "For many startups, the most challenging part of bringing a solution to market isn't having a powerful idea or securing funding," said Lounibos, who is the managing director, Accenture Ventures and Project Spotlight lead.

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 31, 2019 -- Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and IBM announced today at the Samsung Developer Conference, a new joint platform leveraging IBM Cloud and AI capabilities, and Samsung's mobile offerings. The collaboration between the two companies brings together IBM's capabilities with the Samsung Galaxy ecosystem for today's enterprise customers. "The mobile industry is undergoing a dramatic transformation and opening up new ways of business by bringing innovative technologies like 5G, AI and IoT to enterprises," said DJ Koh, President and CEO of IT & Mobile Communications Division, Samsung Electronics. "We believe open collaboration is central to unlocking these opportunities and look forward to driving digital transformation for our enterprise clients in the 5G era with IBM and Samsung's mobile devices and connected services." Today's announcement is designed to bring together IBM's cloud innovations and Samsung's Galaxy devices ecosystems, including Galaxy Tabs, Galaxy smartphones, and Galaxy Watches.

Robotic process automation and artificial intelligence are changing the way digital business transformation vendors across the Americas are delivering services to their enterprise clients, according to a new report published today by Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a leading global technology research and advisory firm. The ISG Provider Lens Digital Business Transformation Report for Pan America finds enterprise clients looking for digital business transformation providers to help them automate IT functions. Many vendors are providing a high degree of automation while also delivering specialized services, including efficiency prioritization, dynamic response and provisioning, and security, based on a customer's needs, the report said. Many digital business transformation providers are developing intellectual property, including tools and as-a-service offerings, using analytics, automation, AI and cognitive computing, the report adds. These new services are disrupting providers that previously relied on offering low prices for labor-intensive services to remain competitive.

While Google quietly removed the "don't do evil" clause from its mission statement, apparently work on this project has moved at a snail's pace due to ethical concerns stemming from Duplex's debut at I/O in May. Namely, that it wasn't clear if the hair salon or Chinese restaurant employees were aware that they were speaking to a synthesized human voice rather than a warm-blooded homo sapiens. Google later clarified that Duplex would disclose itself as an AI when making calls. Plenty of call centers are automated at this point, it's just that none of those robo-operators could pass the Turing test. While Duplex sounds like it absolutely did, Google says it isn't actively testing the tech with potential enterprise clients.

Google's voice-calling "Duplex"- which lets Artificial Intelligence (AI) mimic a human voice to make appointments and book tables through phone calls- may soon enter call centres assisting humans with customer queries. According to a report in The Information late on Thursday, an unnamed insurance company has shown interest in "Duplex" which could "handle simple and repetitive customer calls" before taking help from a human if the conversation gets complicated. Google, however, said in a statement that the company is not testing "Duplex" with any enterprise clients. "We're currently focused on consumer use cases for the'Duplex' technology and we aren't testing'Duplex' with any enterprise clients," a Google spokesperson told Engadget in a statement. "'Duplex is designed to operate in very specific use cases, and currently we're focused on testing with restaurant reservations, hair salon booking and holiday hours with a limited set of trusted testers," the company added. At its annual developer conference in May, Google CEO Sundar Pichai introduced "Duplex" and demonstrated how the AI system could book an appointment at a salon and a table at a restaurant.

With over $4B in funding, WeWork is expanding aggressively at home and abroad and pursuing diverse investments that have raised eyebrows. But its real-estate-as-a-service offering and trove of data on optimal office design could make the company's value prop far more than a marketing ploy. WeWork is a real estate company valued like a tech company. At least, that's the rap on WeWork from critics who think it can't support its $20B valuation in private markets. Backed by Japanese tech and telecom giant SoftBank Group, WeWork specializes in rent arbitrage -- leasing and developing properties at one price, then turning around and renting them out at much higher prices. Its recent run-up in funding -- raising some $4B in 2017 alone -- has given the company the firepower to expand quickly without worrying too much about fundamentals. Companies traded in public markets that follow the same business model trade at much lower sales multiples than WeWork. Detractors say WeWork has earned its valuation by putting hipster touches on formerly drab spaces and positioning itself as a startup incubator, then charging sky-high rent. On top of that, critics point to WeWork's investments in seeming distractions -- like its upcoming WeGrow elementary school and a wave pool company -- as more examples of a tech company with overreaching ambitions. But WeWork's recent shift to safer real estate commitments and its emphasis on longer-term renters and enterprise clients suggest the company could have legs. WeWork claims it's amassing a trove of data on ideal office locations and layouts, and using software to determine everything from ideal desk layout to optimal conference room size. The company is leveraging this data not only to improve its own locations, but also to become an outsourced facilities manager, at a time when big enterprises are trying to shed real estate management from their portfolios.